(6 hours ago)ne14ne1 wrote Metro capacity will have increased with the new fleet rolled out by then, and also a system wide frequency increase will be possible thanks to the Metro Flow project a few years back.

New trains coming to Northern and the likes of Transport for Wales should free up additional 158s to come to the NE.

If you’ve visited any forward thinking cities such as London, Copenhagen, Amsterdam etc you’ll have seen that reallocating city centre road space to public transport and active travel is much more efficient in terms of volume of people moving, and is better for people’s health and the environment.
However, as others have said some councils here aren’t too willing and are scared to upset drivers, especially on the run up to the elections.

I don't even think that's the core of the issue here. The issue is that they can dig, change and reallocate all the road space they want, but they do not have the power (at present) to change the network in such a way that space is utilised. 

We've seen other examples around the region, where bus priority is introduced at great cost, yet the service frequency decreases.

Once there's some cooperation, hopefully we'll see some improvement.