(26 Jan 2022, 9:45 pm)Bazza wrote Maybe we’re seeing the last dying gasps of a 40 year experiment in bus deregulation.   

Many people / companies have made a lot of money in that time, but the public have very little improvement, in terms of service delivery levels, to see and take away from deregulation.   

If operators have to work together to make services sustainable, I’d rather profits generated are ploughed back into public transport than salted away overseas or into the pockets of the wealthy shareholders

I think we'd all like to see that, but it's never going to be prevented, not even by franchising. It'd have to be a complete transfer of everything into public hands. 

Enhanced Partnership schemes and the Bus Service Improvement Plans that have been drawn up all over England would have been a huge step forward in working together at long last and working in the interests of the public, but there were questions asked from the outset on the sustainability of it. With the NBS budget slashed by more than half before any plans were put into motion, there's now a £5bn funding gap between what is required and what is on offer.

(27 Jan 2022, 12:15 am)DaveFromUpNorth wrote The death of the high Street has a strong factor of bus companies creating cross service operations  giving no purpose for passengers to get off and change

We used to have feeders to the metro like Heworth or Wallsend buses went to them and you were forced to use them to get to Newcastle or Gateshead quicker.

What we now have is Nexus Assets occupying bus interchanges  and wasted space in terms of provisions for bus layovers and breaks when it's not necessary look at Heworth  we could build a lidl on the arrival side  and still effectively run a bus station

Infact a drive through could be added to increase footfall at Heworth to generate rental increase and passengers

I'd say Heworth is necessary for rail replacement operations on the central section. It's a good base and allows buses to be parked up without impacting other traffic, which you can't really do anywhere else on the network.

Adding something to encourage cars to come to into a bus station sounds like a recipe for disaster. 

(27 Jan 2022, 12:39 am)Ambassador wrote I don’t think anyone is promoting job losses but we have to be realistic in how we got here and where we go from here, we probably should fund public transport in a better way, but it doesn’t win votes so we won’t. It’s too easy to push this whole thing on covid, it’s not just Covid. Covid exposed frailties for sure but we’ve been creaking at the seams in GNE terms for years. Private companies have done alright out of the network for a long time, it can’t be one way anymore.

The GNE network and branding has been so scattergun, even the flagship routes. Look at the 21 in the last 25 odd years. We’ve had: 221, Classicliner 21, 21-24/7, pink Angel ,red Angel, panicked pink deckers Angel again, hybrid green and newer green. You don’t see the same chaotic approach at Arriva and GNE (and this is on a route aside an hourly X12 they hold a monopoly on)

Even the ticketing has had so many changes and tweaks and gimmicks where SNE have…dayrider/mega rider. The zones make no sense. A purple zone carries you from barley mow/Birtley to Blyth and Ashington but not to Chester le St where you might want to go shopping or socialise

That funding conversation is going to have to happen sooner or later. It's easy to blame Covid as the cause of something, as you say, but I think it's accurate to say that the Covid impact on passenger numbers has accelerated what we'd have seen over the next 10 years anyway under the current system.

Deregulation has failed and without significant Government funding, most of the country is going to be left with a skeleton service at best.