(23 May 2021, 8:56 pm)Adrian wrote The City Centre routes are also important for these night buses. A taxi will turn up at your feet, so buses need to do the same. People are simply not going to walk 10 mins to a bus stop when they're full of drink.

With the N56 for example; serving Grey Street, Dean Street and the Quayside, before heading over the Swing Bridge to Gateshead would be better than the daytime route. Or failing that; do the normal route but and serve the station bus stops, instead of St Nicholas Cathedral and the high level.

I agree that the night time economy is important, but it's like putting your eggs in one basket. 
For all sending the 56 via the Quayside might pikc up a load one week, there's no guarantee it will pick up the next. 

(23 May 2021, 9:27 pm)Storx wrote Personally I think it might be more of the routes.

The N20, N21, N56 and N58 we're all lucky as both ends of the routes had bars and a night time economy in Durham, Sunderland, Whitley Bay and Newcastle with Low Fell and Chester Le Street on the N21, Concord on the N56 and Houghton on the N20

The Stagecoach routes only have Newcastle so you might be lucky and pick up 10 passengers in Newcastle on the outbound journey but you can pretty much guarantee that the inbound journey would be dead and your not getting any intermediate journeys either. I'm not sure how expensive they were but your looking at least 20+ passengers from Newcastle to make it viable when you start to cost keeping a depot open, staff costs, lack of inbound / intermediate passengers etc.

Sadly think the 4 and 60 are going to have similar problems as there's not exactly much between Concord and Houghton for the 4 (depends on Amazon really) and there's going to be very little traffic heading into Sunderland early in the morning from Seaham for the 60, reminds of the N58 which failed miserably, but hoping I'm wrong.

The N20 didn't touch Houghton.
Not sure what night time economy there is in Houghton tbf
Certainly not of the legal variety.

Going back 20+ years, the 194 actively avoided Fatfield because of the crowds coming out of the bars and pubs down there.
The last few runs were diverted so that passengers didn't board at the end of the night.
That was when the pubs down there were rammed.

My own thoughts on the Amazon services are mixed.
Part of me is pleased they're trying something new (or at least slightly different). The other part thinks that it will end up like the Npower/Rainton Bridge services when they first kicked off or the insistence on sending the 20 on an evening via Doxford International - despite the majority of the offices there being closed. 
For all the numbers working at Amazon/Follingsby and needing to go to/from work, there's no way the 4 needs to operate on that sort of frequency within that area.