(15 Mar 2021, 2:23 pm)mb134 wrote The frightening thing is that, for a number of people, that rag is their main source of news. Agreed though, not enough people fact check news before taking the first source as gospel because it aligns with their personal beliefs (which, often, wouldn't be their personal beliefs if they'd bothered to actually do some reading once in a while). 

I find 20 to be the sweet spot myself, majority of routes that aren't wholly in a city don't need more than that on the whole. As soon as you start taking it down, especially if you want a clockface timetable, you then have half hourly or hourly. Half hourly for me is a tricky one, on one hand those services don't tend to deserve an increase in frequency, though at the same time I find that service frequency will put people off using it for their commute, for example, as if they miss one it's an awful long wait on a cold morning. Same thing with hourly - on current (pre-Covid) loadings there's not a chance in hell I'd suggest something like ANEs 57 should be more than hourly, yet if it was would those in Ashington/Bedlington be more likely to use it to get to work in Cramlington, or those in Delaval more likely to use it to Whitley Bay? It's ultimately a balancing act, which is why I think this statement from Boris quite irresponsible, between being attractive enough for punters and making enough money to keep the wheels turning. With every 20 minutes, you generally find that there are other reasonably frequent services on those same corridors, leading to an increased confidence for passengers that they'll be able to catch a bus easily, resulting in healthy passenger numbers.

The issue is going from a 30 minute to a 20 minute frequency is a 50% increase, that's quite a big jump, and some routes just won't be able to justify it.

(15 Mar 2021, 3:14 pm)Adrian wrote It actually looks like most operators, including Go North East and Stagecoach, have spoken out in favour of this.

https://twitter.com/gonortheast/status/1...74914?s=19

https://otp.investis.com/generic/regulat...px?cid=273&newsid=1460855

I was a bit surprised by the latter, so I'd be interested to see the finer detail and how the benefits for customers stack up vs benefits for operators.

Sent from my SM-G965F using Tapatalk

If the big operators are in favour of it, then there must be more to it that we haven't heard yet.
On the surface, it seems like they're wanting to do over the whole country what they're doing in Manchester, but if the ops aren't opposing this then there has to be something.