(31 Jul 2020, 8:08 am)streetdeckfan wrote I suppose you can look at it both ways.

If it's a monopoly, one company is getting all the money, so has plenty to invest in keeping the fleet up to date, plus, it's not as if there is no competition, there's always taking the car. And if you're the sole operator, your only competition is the car so you have to keep standards high. Or it can realise it can keep buses on the road well past their sell by date as passengers have no other options but to keep using them.

I think it's dangerous to look at through the lens of 'monopoly bad, competition good', you've got to look at the context of the situation.
If there aren't enough passengers to fully support two operators, then you're going to end up with two crap services.

Similarly, I think franchising can be both good and bad. Look at London for example, they have a fantastic public transport network, but it's heavily subsidised. If they were to try and actually run it for profit (or even to break even) people would be very surprised how expensive tickets would be!

Yeah I can't disagree with that tbh. Have to be fair and mention the train aswell as Burnley, Blackpool etc have a decent rail or tram service which they have to compete against aswell sadly something which is pretty much non-existant up here in most areas.

There's definitely a better case going further towards the monopoly side rather than full scale competition though as I can't really think of anywhere with full on competition with a good network - is there anywhere? Suppose it depends on the operator though ie. not First as Stoke residents probably disagree with that.

The London franchising network doesn't really work in reality tbf, would be horrendous up here as Nexus or NECA or whoever ran it would just make a balls of it. Not sure how you could just tell GNE to disappear aswell without large sums of money without a backlash of some sort.