(13 Feb 2020, 8:19 pm)Andreos1 wrote Totally agree. 
It's as though it's a race to the bottom.
Money not being made from certain routes (or not as much as they would like anyway) and they get axed and fleets get smaller. 

I genuinely wish (and challenge) at least one of the operators to take a punt - creating a service which is different and can make them money, rather than more of the same, just with a different livery and a few bits of tech thrown in. 

I can remember when Nexus did a huge survey a few years back. They visited libraries/community centres and spoke to people about what they wanted.
The sample must have been huge! 
Either way, they identified where people wanted to go and proposed a whole load of new routes as part of the provisional QCS scheme (or at least a forerunner of it). 
I've yet to see any of the operators make use of the mass of qualative or quantative data made available on a big scale (I think the X24 was one of the routes identified by Nexus. Not sure of any others).
It makes me wonder how ambitious these commercial departments really are or if as we see with the rumoured Teesside changes, they're just interested in saving pennies.

I have to agree about lack of ambition for trying new things especially routes, about the last real attempt Arriva gave a go at was the X1 from Darlington and that only happened as GNE introduced the competing OK1 service. About the only real changes in the last few years have been a few frequency increases and combining or altering of routes to make some form of improvements.

Arriva seem to be the worst for this atm, very little has changed and it feels as if nothing much is being done to combat the issues going on with things like timekeeping on routes, even with congestion increasing I still can't fathom why the Sapphire 7 seems to have so many issues sticking to time lately and is forever running in twos lately, the last month of service I've encountered from Arriva has been poor to say the least, nearly missed trains as a result of drivers crawling around the routes or just faffing about making services fall behind schedule or timetables that don't meet demands some of which I've expressed problems with for many years now.

Stagecoach has likely been the most ambitious recently with services of the big three with introducing the X24 plus that Saturday only X55 which didn't perform well but hey at least they gave it a go and of course that open top 'Seasider' service although must give GNE a mention for the Toon Tour even if it was just a replacement of sorts for the City Sightseeing tour. Hodgsons has done a bit since picking up some North Yorkshire tendered work including adding some extra runs to those services. Arriva have lacked this I feel, closest I feel was the 57/57A/58 changes in Durham recently and that was only because Scarlet Band seemingly didn't want to run the 58 anymore.