(19 Jul 2020, 1:48 pm)Storx wrote I understand your point here but personally I disagree. It's all good for those who live on the bus route who constantly gets the new buses ie. the 21, X1 etc but if your one of the unlucky people who live on one of the routes who don't ie. 6, 25 you end up having a worse service but paying the same fare. At least if everything is uniform there's no first class and second class services. It can leave a bit of a bitter taste when you pay more for a worse service which at the same time is less infrequent. You just have to look at Birtley for an example of that, one side has a 7 minute service with new Streetdecks, the other side a slow 30 minute service with old Omnicity's without any discount fares which exist for the Angel.

At least if you travel on Stagecoach you know whether you get an 07 plate Enviro or a 13 plate Enviro the level of service is the same or thereabouts. It's no co-incidence that GNE's core network is doing well but the rest of it is falling apart with constant changes and service reductions whereas Stagecoach has pretty much been stable.

Constantly get new buses? X1 hasn't had anything for 8years. I believe it was the Npower contract that paid for new buses on the X1 in 2011 due to the requirements of low floor DD. Due to increased passengers on X1, further 7 were bought to deal with demand the following year. The 21 never received a proper allocation of new buses until 2017, when the 15 B5H were introduced in 2012, the PVR was increased and allocated older DD to compensate. Made sense to acquire new buses that met PVR and allocate the B5H to the 1....that was well overdue an upgrade.

Let's not forget the CAZ due to come in everything going into Newcastle has to be euro 6, meaning newcastle services need to take priority. No doubt there would of been an even distribution of new buses had this not been the case