(04 May 2018, 11:15 pm)deanmachine wrote The 60 does the same thing. Busy routes such as these are hard to keep to time, so adding time in where it's needed I don't think is a bad thing. It's not hard for a passenger to look at the times on a bus stop and look at their watch/phone, hopefully now it might arrive closer to the time it says at the stop, so I don't see the problem.
(05 May 2018, 8:45 am)missedbus wrote Surely a clock-face timetable is still better, though? Why not run it every 12 minutes instead of that absolute mess of a timetable? OK, it's a frequency reduction, but if it improves reliability with the same resources it's probably the best solution. There aren't the passengers around to justify putting more resources in.
I was just about to comment about a clock face timetable. You beat me to it
I would argue a clock face timetable is not only attractive, but easy to understand, for effectively what is a turn up and go service.
Passengers are seeing a difference of up to 4 minutes with some of these changes. A 12 min frequency, would see a difference of two.
Assuming that the run which comes 4 mins later than scheduled now, is running a few minutes late, having been caught in works at Boundary Houses and Bournmoor or the queues at Fencehouses lights.
By the time it gets to the stop, it's now 6/7mins+ behind where it should be on the current time table.
It might as well be a PVR reduction.
I touched on connections before. The 60 doesn't market itself as that sort of service and didnt come about as a replacement (in part or not) for a direct bus to Newcastle.
Most of us know that 4/M1 not only replaced the 194, but the 21A and X3. Punters rely on the 4 to connect to the X1 for trips to work, school, college, shopping and hospital. The timetables were supposedly planned to connect with each other. It will be interesting to see how this shambles of a timetable and the X1 now work.