(18 May 2022, 9:37 pm)Dan wrote Nobody can deny this is a kick in the teeth for customers and it is poor, but is it better that there are short-notice cancellations the day before/on the day, or planned frequency reductions in advance? Those are the two options here, because covering every single journey clearly isn’t an option right now.
Perhaps I am being cynical but if drivers are scheduled to work and they are avid football fans, it could well result in a large number of failures on the day. Maybe this is planning to fail or perhaps it’s being realistic and knowing that this couldn’t be absorbed on the day on a Saturday service?
I wonder if they would have had the same backlash, or less, if they chose to ran a Saturday service with cancellations as normal? Presumably this enhanced Sunday service will result in every journey being operated with no cancellations.
Speaking from a personal point of view as someone who lives in Sunderland, most of my friends (and their families) are all heading down to watch the football on Saturday. It feels like I’m going to be in the minority as someone staying in the city this weekend…
I am told 14 buses were missing at various parts of today at Arriva Durham (far greater than Go North East’s missing journeys from one depot today). Absolutely nothing said by Arriva about this, in print or online. As a result, absolutely nothing said on this forum about it. I have said it before and will say it again, but Go North East’s honesty results in them getting a lot of backlash. Some of the comments are warranted, but some just pick fault…
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Except it's not an especially honest description of the situation to claim "To help with this" - who is it helping? It implies this is a choice GNE are making because of expected low passenger numbers, making it not worth them running the scheduled timetable - which I think would be in breech of the TC Regs - whereas this is actually because GNE appear to be unable to trust their own staff to turn up to work.
As for the more general point about the whole city emptying leaving only a minority in the region, it's probably worth bearing in mind, Sunderland have been allocated a little over 46,000 tickets. Ignoring the fact that a good chunk of these will not even live in Sunderland, that does still leave well over 230,000 (of over 80%) of the population not uprooting to London for the day.
Let's hope Sunderland never return to the heady days of filling the SoL or, with similar numbers of punters tied up for a couple of hours than we are talking about heading down to Wembley, presumably GNE would switch to a Sunday service every second Saturday afternoon.
It is just, as others have rightly said, a really poor attempt to polish a pretty massive turd.