(07 Jul 2019, 10:06 pm)Jamie M wrote Congestion, and the management thereof is the problem in hand.
1) Our roads are poorly planned, especially bus lanes. The few we have, they either have bottleneck blind joining junctions (eg bottom of lobley hill), filled to the brim with cyclists so renders them useless (eg durham road-harlow green) or so short, pathetic and end up merging with cars every few meters (bensham bank).
2) It's a waste of everybody's money and time to develop these 'solutions', when they offer no benefit except to the white paint and signage budget.
3) Simply put, the only express service I can think of - that is a quicker version of a normal route is the X122, where there's minimal congestion along the route until you hit hexham.
4) If we weren't negotiating traffic lights with no priority and bus lanes that are redundant (...and more painful to use than the normal road), then this would create huge opportunities for the industry.
It's great we're having these new look buses, and I believe it vastly improves how buses can be seen, but it's not going to work any magic tricks until the infrastructure takes on funding and a competent planning team - but neither seems likely for now.
Durham Road through Low Fell was designed in such a way, that from the mid 80's onwards, it was only going to suit pedestrians and local traffic.
The removal of footbridges and installation of traffic lights every few yards, was a determined way to discouraging traffic from the area.
The recent installation of speed humps, is just painful.
It does nothing to make me want to use the bus (express or not) and I can't be the only one.
In the past, you had longer distance services from say Co Durham, which operated on a limited stop basis once they got in to T&W.
Since then, it seems that a number of these routes have had an x pre-fix added and they now call anywhere any everywhere.
Going from Birtley to Newcastle back in the day, you had the limited stop services or the local services, that stopped everywhere.
The X1 (or X5 as it was known), was limited stop south of the Galleries too. It didn't offer the painful stop/start service around the coalfields, that it does now.
I do think there needs to be some balance, offering passengers an alternative, particularly when travelling a distance.
The X21 did offer some alternative over the 21, but seeing as it now serves Low Fell, the only major difference between the two, is Birtley.