(15 Feb 2015, 6:46 pm)Robert wrote Not even the best depots can maintain a 100% allocation. It should be appreciated that Blyth does have the ability to get buses straight out of the depot and into service to replace a late journey even if it isn't the right type/branded vehicle. Customer confusion can be caused as you have pointed out but that is what the destination is for. Before branding was introduced, all GNE buses looked exactly the same and customers had to rely on the destination displays. Why should branding withdraw the need for passengers to do this? The Sapphire and MAX is an issue but i think it would be wrong to say that they allocate the wrong vehicle types on these services on purpose and is probably down the fact that a bus is VOR. What is wrong is the fact that MAX and Sapphire vehicles get cross-allocated like yesterday for example.

Depots probably could maintain the correct allocation for their services if they had enough spare resources - but let's face it, as they're businesses, senior management are always going to be looking to cut costs. They achieve this by having a smaller spare vehicle allocation.

Some customers are visually impaired. Whilst I do appreciate that, once upon a time, all buses carried a corporate livery and that was that, this is something which is in the past for a lot of bus operators now. A large number of vehicles up and down the UK - operated by Arriva, First, Go-Ahead and Stagecoach - have now received branding. Customers can and do rely on branding to tell if the bus approaching them is their bus. Although this is a pretty poor example based on the fact there's only two main daytime services which use this stop, I was on Norham Road yesterday, at the stop just before the Coast Road turn-off. I was able to identify that my bus (a 310 service) was coming when it was on Verne Road. You can't even see that junction when looking on Google Maps. If I had been paying a bus fare, I would have been able to able to get my wallet out, get the correct fare out of my change, and have it at the ready before I even got on the bus. This would have sped up my boarding time, and as a result, the bus is more likely to be on-time. I'm not visually impaired, but vehicle branding assisted me in identifying that my bus was coming a good two minutes before it arrived.

Operators cannot accidentally allocate a bus to a specific service. An allocation is done purposefully. Whether the allocator's hands were tied and it was a case of losing mileage vs allocating the wrong vehicle type is another matter - and I'd imagine that the latter would always be selected in this instance. Branding can and does work, but allocators cannot be in the mindset of, "a bus is a bus". Quite frankly, that is no longer true.