(15 Aug 2022, 2:32 pm)Adrian wrote To play devils advocate though, and as I've said previously on here, the contract work is guaranteed income for any operator. Commercial work isn't, and it'd be a really dangerous move financially to abandon the contract work side of things.
Like it or not, but commercial services have a higher risk factor, as they can end up running around all day carrying fresh air. That's not to say I agree with the deregulated market - far from it - but that's the reality we have in the current system.
In an ideal world under the current system, operators would all maintain a good balance of commercial and contract work, but the latter is becoming more and more competitive to win, because public sector procurement is essentially a race to the bottom. GNE have always ran for contract work, and really it's only even being raised as an issue because of the driver shortage and commercial work going uncovered. Again, that's the nature of the beast, and it'll come down to penalties for non-operation of contract work vs nothing for non-operation of commercial work. We'd see a different attitude if there was a universal system like delay repay in place, but there's another fault in the current system...
(15 Aug 2022, 2:36 pm)Unber43 wrote There should be £50 for any service which doesn't operate a full journey e.g 50 South Shields to Durham £50, Durham to Washington £25
GNE would come up with drivers.
I'm all for having such things as Delay Repay for delayed/cancelled journey's over 30 Minutes like they have on the trains, to be fair with Go North East they reluctantly refund fares to their customers but not without the customer arguing the toss about first though as I've experienced on more than one occasion.
I do personally think that it unfair that despite all these constant changes to services over the past 12 months that it's passengers that pay the penalty through fare increases when services have been significantly reduced, I feel the recent fare increases should be reversed as they are now unjustified and in effect passengers are now paying a premium rate for less than half the service they had a year ago, you wouldn't pay a full months line rental for your Mobile/TV/Broadband if you have a number of service outages in the month, so why should you still a pay for a monthly bus pass for example if you've been impacted by a number of delays/cancellations.
Operators should be fined by the likes of Nexus/Local Councils for non-operation of services if it means improving punctuality of bus services that they operate and that if there is a history of offences within a short period then the contract should be revoked and retendered for another operator to take over.
(15 Aug 2022, 2:28 pm)DeltaMan wrote When you see it listed like that, it screams firefighting
Makes for grim reading when looking back through all the changes they've made.