(28 Aug 2022, 6:50 pm)DeltaMan wrote So, put the Bank Holiday in the working week but not mandate drivers to work them? Forward allocators will love you!
How much extra resource do you think enhancing a Sunday timetable for a bank holiday would require? Every time it's mentioned on here, you'd think the suggestion was to run every service to a normal weekday or Saturday timetable!
Demand has changed, but not that much. I can't see Saturday timetables for Bank Holidays being needed network-wide for the foreseeable future, but there needs to be an enhancement to Sunday timetables to reflect all the examples already given in this thread. Sunday timetables have been butchered recently, so the problem has only become worse.
Maybe you ought to ask yourself whether operators can afford to keep staring gift horse in the mouth? In case you hadn't noticed, Buses in England are on their knees and begging for money to survive. The more that they are car-friendly, the less chance we've ever got of getting out of this spiral of decline.
(28 Aug 2022, 6:57 pm)mb134 wrote I'm sure getting that past a TU, without other significant compromises from operators, will be a breeze.
I fully support BH services being better than what they currently are, but realistically it's going to be quite difficult - even just thinking about agreements for BH working.
There are always workable options to achieve something, and it doesn't have to become an industrial relations disaster in the process. Where I've seen this change happen elsewhere, it's usually been on the basis of guarantees around the number of BHs you can be asked to work, not being rostered the whole weekend or an agreed enhanced rate for the shift.
Just because something was written decades ago with the right intentions, it doesn't mean it's workable in the current day. Otherwise we'd still be running every bus in England with a conductor.
I started to touch upon this above, but what would an enhanced bank holiday timetable look like anyway? I personally don't think it'd be much different to a Sunday timetable, other on the core routes of the network and ensuring that some of the early morning services run to support people getting to work. Stagecoach only (sensibly) enhance the E1, E2 & E6 to almost a Saturday timetable, so the additional resource requirement isn't going to be significant for them to cover. GNE, off the top of my head, would likely only be the X1, 21/X21 and the Coast Road stuff. Again, not really surging the resource demand, in the grand scheme of things.