(22 Sep 2022, 1:32 pm)Adrian wrote But we're constantly told that these are creating desire, so where are all these folk full of desire to get on board a bus crafted by everyone's favourite design agency?
Passenger numbers have been shrinking for years, as we both know, but covid remains the excuse of choice in the absence of any creativity to achieve growth.
COVID was likely one of the final nail in the coffin for ZAP (and many other services) although from my experiences from using the service over the years it's never been particularly busy, always carried in the region of 20-30 pax max whenever I've caught it and at least 80% of those will have been concession pass holders, may as well have bought single deckers if they felt the need to buy new stock as I think I've only seen it remotely close to full once or twice. The post-COVID reduction in frequency from half hourly to hourly certainly won't have helped bring the passengers back either.
I've always thought of CITYZAP as more of a vanity project to Hornby than anything else, I feel some other companies would've binned off it ages ago and not bought specifically high spec new buses for it. I do wonder if ZAP would've continued for much longer had the opportunity to take over operation of the X98/X99 not come up especially as they can directly redeploy all the buses from ZAP onto it.
I still feel bus companies are relying too heavily on route branding, fancy timetable leaflets and gimmicks to try and and gain/retain passengers which do work to a point but it can only go so far and I see argubly little benefit to forking out for all these things like outside design agencies to design liveries and feel the money could be better utilised elsewhere.
(22 Sep 2022, 12:15 pm)wibblejunior wrote According to buslistsontheweb the Cityzap MMC's seating layouts are H41/27F, which would be 68 seats in total.
Sounds right as it doesn't have anywhere near as many single seats as the B7TLs did.