(06 Jan 2020, 5:14 pm)OrangeArrow49 wrote I think bus services are unfair, some places are 'territories' exclusively operated by a single operator, other places are dominated by an operator but have some rival operator services, and then we have places with lots of buses from lots of different operators, possibly too many buses in some cases. In the West End of Newcastle, I always found Stagecoach to be the exclusive operator, but Gosforth is actually dominated by Arriva and Denton Burn has all the big three and other services, despite being dominated by Stagecoach. Thankfully, I am therefore able to access services from all of the big three if required, although Stagecoach is the main player across the West End. Territories are ridiculous, they limit where passengers can travel without being 'disloyal' and having to pay more. Dominant is fine, if slightly inconvenient, but exclusive operations I don't like. Ideally passengers should be able to choose from the big three, not be forced to use any of them in particular.

This is a problem with ticketing though blame the councils not the operators. If you have proper multi operator tickets you fix all the problems you explain there. All you'll end up with if you do what you want is 20 buses going along West Road competing against each other but the likes of the 6, 7 and 8 will be scrapped / run down to the ground as they'll be more focused on petty games. You just have to look at North Tyneside for that, you have 14 newish buses an hour running along the Coast Road - mostly carrying fresh air. Yet everything else is just second hat, there's no NSA's / USB's / WiFi etc. on any other service in the area. The 19 and Little Coasters arguably have some of the worst buses in the GNE fleet now. Similar with 57 (Arriva) with the battered darts. Competition won't improve things for the non core bus routes if anything it'll make them worse.

If you want people using buses the focus should be on being on time, good connectivity, easy to change between operators without hassle, ability to use bus, metro and rail on single tickets, regional smart cards / contactless with capping (like Oyster). Not who's the cheapest and has best customer service. The operator of the bus should be irrelevant.