RE: Stagecoach North East Latest News
The issues in the outer west are that it’s a bit awkward to design a public transport network that doesn’t have lots of different bus numbers. Estates were never designed with public transport in mind and are mostly in/out via the same road. Stagecoach are pretty conservative when it comes to network reviews, so I don’t think they’ve ever really done an assessment of travel patterns in Newcastle and whether or not certain end to end routes make sense in the 2020s, always keeping in mind that the idea is to encourage people to use public transport, not a creeping managed decline. To be honest I don’t think anything major will change until about five years after a franchising scheme has been introduced because that’s when enough data will have been collected across all the services currently operated by all the various operators and informed decisions can be made. So, for example, who is to say that a route currently operated by Stagecoach in west Newcastle can’t be merged with a route currently run by Arriva up the Great North Road?