(10 hours ago)cbma06 wrote We're making changes to some of our Sunderland services from Sunday 25 January 2026
A summary of the changes is detailed below:-
Service 8: So as to improve reliability, there are some minor timetable changes to Monday to Friday morning trips before 9am, with these journeys operating slightly earlier. All other trips continue unchanged.
Service 10 and 11: So as to better match service frequency with prevailing customer demands, services 10 & 11 are revised to operate every 30 minutes during Monday to Saturday daytimes, offering a frequency of a bus every 15 minutes on combined sections of route.
Following customer feedback from consultations and in order to provide a regular, reliable evenly-spaced frequency of service between St Lukes, Ford and Pennywell, service 10 and service 11 trips will both operate a clockwise loop when heading from Grangetown and Sunderland City Centre towards Pennywell operating to Pallion Road as before then via Fordfield Road, the full length of St Lukes Road, Meldon Road, Merle Terrace, St Lukes Terrace, returning back to Sunderland City Centre and towards Grangetown via Pallion Road as before.
Owing to frequent instances of inconsiderate parking and difficulty in allowing buses to traverse this area safely, services will no longer operate along Midmoor Road and operate along the nearby St. Lukes Road instead.
Customers are able to board and alight at any part of this route to continue their journey.
All other services remain unchanged.
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It seems like more blah blah blah from Stagecoach, who have effectively decimated Sunderland with their commercial bus cuts. If you compared what they operate now, alongside service frequencys to what was available just a few years ago, it literally seems and feels like Sunderland is left with only half of what was available previously.
It just feels like it's a trend for operators to make changes to services to make them less appealing & attractive to use, then once enough people have given up using or trying to use the service, a great excuse comes up to make further reductions or just pull the service off completely.
Then the audacity for them to raise their fares three times within a one year period, then remove services, cut frequencys, bring in older vehicles & going back a while, but the Free WiFi offering was silently discontiued. They certainly know how to 'play the game' to be able to recieve various funding streams for virtually a much worse service offering, then when the service is already paid for, they don't bat an eyelid if the bus is running around empty without anybody using it.
I thought there was a big push to encourage more people to use the bus, how can they do that when it is more of an inconvenience for them, most of the services are effectively worse than a few years ago, no connectivity, unless you work the connections out yourself. This isn't just limited to one operator, it's various routes & operators & I'm sure not just limited to the North East either.
Sunderland to North Shields for example; The 319 is not timed to connect with the 9 within good time. Yes, the Tunnel segment is a contract section & the current operator of that won the tender for it, although none of the connection times were thought out, particularly on a Monday to Friday evening.
Then the 319 is still running to an hourly frequency at weekends when it doesn't need to anymore, now that most of the Tyne Tunnel work has finished. The service had worked much better when it was the 9 running through to North Shields, although the 10/11 did also seem to do quite well with some new links created from parts of South Tyneside when that was running to North Shields.
Tunstall Bank to Sunderland is another example, they previously had 14 buses per hour in early 2015. That comprised of the 29/39 running at a combined every 10 minute frequency. The 42 (then the 2/2A) at an every 10 minute frequency & then two 38s per hour. They are now down to 6 buses per hour with the 62/62A/63 & that's just one example of cuts to commercial services within a decade.
I do admire the commercial start-ups alike the X22/X43, where I'm sure it would have been uncertain at getting enough people to use them, although they are very clearly advertised & people just know those routes will get them to the Metrocentre faster than the other services they may have previously been using, and from observations they seem to have had quite a fair few passengers on-board...