(03 Aug 2023, 7:47 am)Storx wrote The tax payer should not be paying for bus services so the big boys can pay their shareholders.
It's a completely broken system. Half of Birtley was 100% left without a bus service and it's much further than 5 minutes from Portobello to Durham Road down a massive bank aswell.
The 25 isn't commercial either.
North Tyneside needs to be franchised and completely redone with Metro integration in mind. People in some areas, ie. where the 351 goes, will cry that they don't have a direct bus anymore but their clearly not using it anyway so arguably a 30 minute service to somewhere like Northumberland Park with proper integration would provide a proper service.
There's loads of areas which are the same Backworth being another as the 54 clearly doesn't work either just to pick one out. From there duplication can be removed there's still no need for 6 buses from Blyth to Whitley Bay for example but it's all down to well I'm not dropping and nor am I problem. 3 BPH is more than enough along there, if not too much if you interworked it with the X7.
The whole area just needs someone to sit down and start again rather than botching, botching and botching. It's basically still the deregulation network with botches everywhere and it's broken.
Now, I agree with the overwhelming majority of the points you make here. But there is no easy answer. I expect that franchising will enter local transport discourse properly from September onward, but the enhanced partnership model is probably better for the region.
If the wider network was situated within one large metropolitan area, fair enough, but that's not the case. While a franchising model could be applied to North Tyneside, I think it's probably the only area of the north east in which it would be feasible for the longer term. It's the only subsidiary metropolitan area with sufficiently busy trunk routes which could support the less commercially viable stuff.
NB. I think most locals would classify Barley Mow and Portobello as their own places, perhaps at best subsidiaries of Birtley proper.