There were temporary stand signs on display, about the height of the temporary Nexus signs, with route number and destination, but these also became useless when most buses were forced to use different stands to keep people moving.
Airshow staff had large handheld signs with "End of Q" written on them. End of "Q" for what? If these signs could be adapted to show the route number of the bus in the stand that would be an improvement.
Go North East did a fantastic job at the Park and Rides. However, the A* services could see some improvement, the A2 saw large queues and the poor frequency saw people waiting for upto half an hour.
Stagecoach ran the 510 rather well until the end, the use of single deck gas buses wasn't suitable. The Tridents were leaving full and standing and there were regularly large gaps in service, presumably due to Airshow traffic. I think Stagecoach would have been getting their usual customers, along with the users of multi-operator tickets who would have been unable to use the GNE shuttles.
I didn't use the shuttles to get back into Sunderland, as I really didn't want to queue. I also gather that queues for Metro were over 30 minutes long and the queue for that extended down to the bottom of a residential street. When I used Metro the trains were running very frequently, the 'Sunderland' trains were running dead quiet.
That's my views on the Airshow transport anyway. I think that the best possible service was offered, but the traffic and the bus stopping arrangements, and the large amount of people leaving after the Red Arrows affected the service. Had the Red Arrows been one of the first few displays then I'd think that the services would have handled the loadings better, as more people would be staying behind longer for the rest of the Airshow.
Sorry for the long post, but I had to get my views across
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