(27 Feb 2025, 4:30 pm)Superman wrote This point around reliability, punctuality etc always makes me laugh.
Various politicians argue that a franchised world will deliver big improvements to reliability (amongst other things) but in reality, will it?
Whether commercial or franchised, buses in the North East lack any significant levels of bus priority in most of our main towns and city centres. Certainly nothing that makes big impact. The two solutions are either :- more capital spend on bus priority infrastructure, which local authorities are clearly against (Newcastle City for example declaration that they will never put a bus lane on the Coast Road), or a massively increased cost to the authority to 'tender' services with 25% more resource requirement, which increases journey time and pushes people into cars.
The system needs a rethink, but franchising is an expensive assumed solution, but it won't deliver.
Operators will build in penalty payments into their bid for a standard London style approach. Ultimately costing the public purse more money, whilst. Equally, no operator will be bidding big money to run a traunch the opposite way around either (i.e. run a set of routes with revenue risk), as the revenue will need to be declared at the bid stage, which will show it doesn't stack up - who is responsible if it doesn't? Either the authority needs to underwrite it, or the operator reduces the payments to assume a margin. I'm not sure this way is even legal within the framework to be honest.
Not disregarding the various points made, but franchising only works if you ignore the balance sheet behind it. Someone is picking up that bill and it won't be the private operators.
You make some interesting points, but in places like Gateshead, there are plenty of bus priority measures.
In theory, certain routes shouldn't be impacted by traffic at all as the vast majority of the route, can be and is on dedicated bus lanes or benefit from numerous priority measures.
The short 21's for example, run in bus lanes at various points of the route between Chester and Gateshead.
I've made this point numerous times and will make it again.
You can make all the bus lanes and priority measures in the world. But if the buses aren't going to and from where the people want them to, the buses won't make any money and people will continue to use the car en-masse.
But to get back to the main point, the status quo can't continue.
The taxpayer can't keep picking up the (ever growing) slack and the operators can't keep up with their best Oliver Twist impressions.
Change needs to happen and it's up to the legal eagles to create a water tight agreement which ensures the taxpayer doesn't continue losing out.
Like they continue to do in Ben Houchens SNE love-in.
