(29 Aug 2024, 8:49 am)PH - BQA wrote Those organising the petition seem to either be deliberately spreading information, or are too thick to understand what the changes actually entail.
The changes represent a significant increase in daytime and evening frequencies, an improvement in journey times to Newcastle, while maintaining the link with Gosforth through the 49.
These frequency and journey time improvements are nowhere to be seen in any of the posts by the people most actively promoting the petition, who seem more bothered about getting home from a pub in Gosforth on a Sunday night.
Of the 2000 signatures, I genuinely believe a significant amount of them will be due to people believing that the bus service is going entirely because of the 'cutting us off' claims peddled constantly on Facebook pages and the Chronicle.
They've also started to be annoyed at the fact that Stagecoach will operate diesel buses, without grasping that they meet Euro 6 emissions standards and that they live on a new build estate with lorries driving around constantly...
The Q3 as it stands is essentially worthless as a service to anyone wanting to get to or from Newcastle, which is surely the predominant use case for it.
They're very inconsistent aswell. One minute they want a bus to Jesmond, the next minute they want a fast bus that misses Jesmond. It's all a mess if you ask me.
They should work with the Nexus / NHS and extend the 553 through every 30 minutes instead of you ask me.
It does exactly what they want, obviously they'll no doubt moan that it's too far to walk in Gosforth instead but at the end of the day they did use the Q3 excuse for Freeman connections. They can have one direct now...
(29 Aug 2024, 11:43 am)toward6931 wrote Well the extension to throckley didn't help and a lack of double decks isn't a help either, the 62 was the longest route by far and it has a couple of bottlenecks which really slow it down and bunch them up,
There was an idea of a 64 route which I heard floated about but never seemed to get off the drawing board, from the sounds of it, it was a quicker loop service of shields road to west Denton park I believe, I don't know whether it was envisaged as a higher frequency route or a express route.
The best thing they could do is drop the 62/63 down to every 20 minutes and add a new short 64 between Four Lane Ends and West Denton. The buses on the Northern side are nowhere near busy enough to warrant a 15 minute service at any point of day so it would be better to have to buses on the core section instead imo.
Obviously you'd end up upping the Throckley extension to every 20 minutes but that's not the end of the world.