(13 Jan 2025, 10:09 am)omnicity4659 wrote I guess that they're able to rotate electrics more easily, especially with having a larger fleet and dedicated charging spaces. Chargers at Riverside are out of use through the day to allow for staff parking so can't be used to "top up" buses for the late runs.
Hard to tell whether this is parody or real. If real, I am lost for words.
(13 Jan 2025, 6:18 pm)Adrian wrote In conclusion
I've spent the best part of 4 hours today doing what should be a simple journey in and out of Newcastle City Centre, to my office. People who don't use buses are often quick to suggest it's because of the flyover and Tyne Bridge work, but that couldn't be further from the truth.
The fact is that the corridor down Old Durham Road into Gateshead, through Gateshead Town Centre, on to and over the Tyne Bridge in to Newcastle, is arguably some of the best bus priority in the region. Once you're actually on a bus, it can almost glide through queues of cars because of the investment in putting this priority in place. Yes, there's still sets of lights to contend with, but this is massively better than before we had all this in place.
These delays are caused by sheer incompetence of the bus operator, with an attitude that comes across as if they don't give a toss. The Go North East network, over two decades now, but over the past few years has been cut to the absolute brink. The frequencies don't match the demands, and at peak times, they simply struggle to cope. This is exactly what the Arriva County Durham operation became under the same MD - and this is before you throw in their inability to get wheels turning on the road.
I think this is literally the only time I have encountered anyone with a positive take on the shitshow that is the road network around Gateshead and the Tyne Bridge. Given the entrenched and worsening failures of the operator to run anything resembling a reliable service all we have is the worst of both worlds. A crap road system with reduced capacity creating queues to get into queues to queue to get back to almost where you started for the 75% sat in their car to create lovely priority measures for the 5% lucky enough to be on a service thats turned up while the other 20% wallow at some godforsaken bus stop watching an app lie to them. As ever, the only real attempts to make the bus more attractive rely on making it worse to use the car, not actually making it better or easier to use the bus.