I intended to keep quiet on this one until users had the opportunity to have a bit more of a debate, but it seems to have quite quickly died down, so I'll give my thoughts...

Bus operators are seeing patronage and usage go down. There are a small number of exceptions, and this mainly applies to services which have seen significant investment by the operator (either new or refurbished vehicles). There are a number of reasons for this, but one in my opinion, is that travelling by bus is not simple.

I have just had a quick look on Arriva's website, and in total there are 49 Route Savers available for me to buy on-bus. A number of these are very similarly named: to give an example, there's a Durham City ticket, a Durham County ticket, a Durham District ticket, a Durham UNI City ticket, and a Durham UNI City +NCL ticket. Without clicking on each one of these tickets individually to see the zone map, I would not know the difference between all of them. With so many tickets available, it's difficult to tell which one offers the best value to me, as someone who presumably does not travel by bus that often (if I did, I'd be buying a more longer-term ticket offering travel for a week, month or year). As well as this, discounts may be available to me if I'm Under 16, Under 18, a student at college or University, etc.

In my opinion; operators need to be working towards making their ticketing structure simpler and easier to understand, which may encourage the occasional customer to travel by bus more regularly. If this means rationalising the amount of tickets which are available for customers to buy, this may be a better long-term strategy to see growth (which could then see tickets frozen in price or even reduced, rather than constantly being increased on an almost annual basis). With the technology available to operators these days; customers should be able to plan their journeys online or on a mobile app, being offered the ticket which offers the best value to cover that person's journey.

To make this post more relevant to the original point of discussion regarding Go North East's withdrawal of several Route Savers across the region - whilst some customers will lose out, others will actually see better value for money. Perhaps this message hasn't been communicated to customers as well as it could have been, as certainly not every customer will need to buy a one-zone BuzzFare to complete their journey. These RouteSavers were historically introduced to provide a cheaper alternative for customers only making a return journey, whilst also benefiting those who previously had to buy a BuzzFare day ticket. Go North East's fare structure has changed since then, and return tickets are now available to buy on every service (at the same price, or even cheaper, than the equivalent Route Saver). The ticket machines Go North East introduced 6-7 months ago provide the company with a lot more data on passenger trends and use, thanks to the QR codes on the tickets. Notably; a message was added to the bottom of each Route Saver ticket in the lead up to the ticket's withdrawal, not only advising of the withdrawal of the ticket, but telling passengers if they only "travel there and back", then they can buy a return ticket instead. Perhaps Go North East's more detailed ticket data/analysis proves that, of the very small number of these tickets being issued, a high percentage of these tickets were only scanned once (which therefore means that the ticket has only been used as a return, or the customer has not scanned their ticket on boarding the bus, on all journeys, as they're supposed to).

I do not think the uproar on Social Media is representative of the amount of tickets which were actually being sold. I've noticed several enthusiasts commenting on Social Media about this, yet they've probably never bought one of these tickets! It won't just be enthusiasts of course. Most of the areas where these Route Savers were available were smaller communities (such as Consett and Peterlee as mentioned previously). These areas have community groups on Facebook, and as I'm in a number of them myself, I know from experience that everyone tends to club together and create a mountain out of a molehill. Of course this is the downside of Social Media, which gives everyone a platform to vent with little to no moderation.