(05 Nov 2020, 12:06 pm)Storx wrote You need to look into bus companies ran by governments more than that. Dublin Bus and Lothian are 2 companies you should be comparing to not London Buses which is franchised which is something different again. I'd rather than money went back into the governments hands than some big wig in an office somewhere. Technically one of the 3 bus companies is the North East is ran by the government anyway just the shame it's the German one and not ours. You don't have to have it ran by the government directly as a public service. LNER and Northern Trains are an example of public ran transport and they're both better than the private companies than ran it before there which surprisingly are 2 of the big 4 in the UK not to mention the bombshell with Thameslink Southern (GoAhead). To be fair though so is the Metro with Nexus so it all comes down who's running the show in a similar sense with private companies.
To be fair though I can't imagine there being much difference for the passenger who runs it with the same problems, we may have a few more evening and Sunday services though but that'll be about it and again it comes to runs it, if it's someone like Lothian then it could be good. If it's Nexus then I'm sure GCT will run the 21 and 308 well...
But Lothian still has competition, it may be owned by the LA, but they still have to compete with other operators as if they were running like any other commercial operator. The closest we really have to a government ran public transport network is TFL, they're just choosing to contract out the operations rather than run them in house.
To me, it's not about the owner, but about the system behind it.
Like I said, having all the buses ran by the government just moves the monopoly from a company owned by shareholders to a company owned by the government. At least with privatisation, there's an opportunity for competition, even if it's not well executed.
One thing I think we can all agree on, is that if NEXUS managed to get their hands on the buses, it'd be a much bigger shitshow than it is now!