(27 Feb 2025, 1:35 pm)Adrian wrote people missing interviews because it's unreliable

This point around reliability, punctuality etc always makes me laugh.

Various politicians argue that a franchised world will deliver big improvements to reliability (amongst other things) but in reality, will it?

Whether commercial or franchised, buses in the North East lack any significant levels of bus priority in most of our main towns and city centres. Certainly nothing that makes big impact. The two solutions are either :- more capital spend on bus priority infrastructure, which local authorities are clearly against (Newcastle City for example declaration that they will never put a bus lane on the Coast Road), or a massively increased cost to the authority to 'tender' services with 25% more resource requirement, which increases journey time and pushes people into cars. 

The system needs a rethink, but franchising is an expensive assumed solution, but it won't deliver.

Operators will build in penalty payments into their bid for a standard London style approach. Ultimately costing the public purse more money, whilst. Equally, no operator will be bidding big money to run a traunch the opposite way around either (i.e. run a set of routes with revenue risk), as the revenue will need to be declared at the bid stage, which will show it doesn't stack up - who is responsible if it doesn't? Either the authority needs to underwrite it, or the operator reduces the payments to assume a margin. I'm not sure this way is even legal within the framework to be honest. 

Not disregarding the various points made, but franchising only works if you ignore the balance sheet behind it. Someone is picking up that bill and it won't be the private operators.