(09 Sep 2013, 4:42 pm)Daniel wrote The percentage of passengers that don't care about additional features such as Wi-Fi and power sockets for mobile phones/laptops is not relevant in my opinion - it is the percentage that do care.
Without sounding boring, I completely agree with this point too. The percentage that do care about additional features do matter. Some may have eschewed the train or the 685 in order to take advantage and that's why I've said GNE should deliver upon the promises made to passengers in the run up to the launch irrespective of projected daily loadings or operational functionality.
The consultation results Aureolin provided a link to proves that customers do care about having these additional features. A total of 260 completed questionnaires were returned to Go North East. 54% of those customers were in favour of the new "Tyne Tees Xpress" vehicles to have free Wi-Fi, which is 140 people - but apparently only 1% care about having these features? A further 32% were in favour of adding power sockets to the new buses. Again, a massive difference between the official number and the earlier number given (although it was likely to be under-exaggerated anyway, providing that is a word?)
For me, and I may be old fashioned here, the purpose of public transport is to get from A to B in a cost effective, comfortable and timely manner. Anything else on top of cost, comfort and time is a gimmick (or a draw) to attract people to use your service instead of your competitors.
When presented with the choice of adding things like WiFi or power-sockets then of course that's going to strike a positive chord with some people, but I bet the consultation results would show other things to be important to the customer if they were presented in lieu of the things currently offered. For example: If the Tyne-Tees express were to offer tea and toast to all passengers travelling before 10 am, then I'd expect the result of 'those in favour' would be higher than 32%. But does that mean that passengers care about being offered tea and toast? Before hand, probably not. But now that option has been introduced a false positive has been created stating that passengers do care about this facility whereas they didn't before.