I've wondered for a while how the "not carrying enough passengers to be viable" actually stacks up.

A few thoughts on this - first it seems GNE want buses as full as possible to maximise profits, however that is potentially counterproductive when I suspect I proportion of customers would but put off by a fuller vehicle, having to sit next to someone etc. So by making buses fuller to meet their profit targets, GNE are potentially going to reduce evern further those "wanting" or choosing to use the bus.

My other thought is about vehicle size - routes like the 28, 29, 55 etc are deemed too empty to viable, but are using a fairly large vehicle. If they were run with e.g. Solo they would be potentially half full - realise some of the fixed costs don't reduce using a smaller vehicle, but this is true of every minibus route and plenty of those are deemed viable...Often this stuff just comes across as 'we cant fill enough of the sized bus we want to run on here so we are pulling the service' rather than trying to adapt the offer to increase viability.