(20 Apr 2022, 11:52 am)Dan wrote I don't think I can add anything else to what I said previously - you haven't made a new point here really.

The Northern Echo love a story about buses - whether that's Go North East or Arriva - it's huge click-bait and that's how they make their money. Their reporters will happily admit that, so if one member of staff chooses to go to them or share an internal briefing with them, they will report on it.

As I said before, I don't agree with the claims that it's money 'wasted'. Nobody can deny that Go North East has done an awful amount of work on marketing and promoting its bus services and whilst it's open to debate whether new brands achieve any kind of growth, clearly the company or its management team think that this works and is something that will continue to happen. Stagecoach probably repaint an equal number of buses as Go North East, and Arriva are currently repainting/refurbishing many of their buses too. You don't hear about this though. Again, as I said before, this is really a debate about route branding - might some of these repaints have been avoided if Go North East didn't have individual route brands?

For 6332:

• delivered new in a livery to promote contactless payments
  
• repainted into X-lines X21 livery due to PVR increase on service X21 (and service's encapsulation into X-lines network)
  
• partial (back end) repaint into X-lines X45/X46 livery due to fleet re-allocations to improve reliability on service X21
  
• full repaint out of X-lines X45/X46 livery due to PVR reduction on these services.
  

So in that, two full repaints and one partial repaint in five years - but some of the comments I've seen on social media have heavily exaggerated this to the point you'd have thought it had been fully repainted 5+ times. None of these repaints have been 'needless', they've been done because the company has route branded buses...

What or who is GNE these days towards the normal passenger view , gone of the days when the passenger can identify the company of the service there want, what is the percentage of branded buses to corporate colour buses, there should be a higher corporate fleet than branded fleet, branded services might look good to the gne management view but not in really time for the passengers who paying your wages, with passengers trying to work out what bus there should get with all these confused services and brands, would be less confusing etc… if only a select view of services from each depot have branded routes and have a higher majority of there fleet in corporate colours showing the company identity, deptford depot is a free for all for branded services, even though martijn has said that service 5 and 9 will not be branded routes, but you have branded buses running those 2 services


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