(02 Nov 2017, 10:47 pm)Jimmi wrote Thing that really frustrates me with the constant issues with the X1 StreetLite's at Darlington is the fact that they have to allocate Pulsar's in their place on the X1 which means other buses have to be allocated to other services in these instances, really growing tired of 29 seater Solo's on the busiest 5/5A runs now.

This is an issue regardless of which vehicle type has been ordered, though.

I've said this many times before, but there are umpteen amount of reasons why buses can be off the road and they're not all necessarily something to get worried about. I don't know specific reasons for Darlington's Streetlites to be off the road, but the fact they've ordered more suggests that it can't be anything too bad.

The issue you're highlighting here is that there's a need for operators to buy more spare buses, even for smaller orders. Go North East has a tendency to buy one spare bus for every 8 in a batch of new vehicles - on services with higher PVRs, this works well, but we see the downsides to buses with smaller PVRs not having spare buses to the same specification bought with that batch all the time (look at recent allocations to the X21, X9/X10, etc). It proves how important buying more higher quality spare vehicles is, to maintain customer expectations when premium features are advertised on that bus.