(04 Apr 2026, 9:15 pm)Adrian wrote One of the Mayor's criteria is also to grow mileage, particularly in rural communities, but irrespective of that, they would have had to look at routes, timetables and everything else associated with it. I don't understand the point you're making, because how do you present a franchising scheme assessment, proving that it is financially the right thing to do, without a comprehensive review of everything that is in place now?

Yes, they'll start with the network as things stand (or at a point frozen in time, which I believe is 2024), but they'll have short, mid and long term plans to better the network. It'd be insane for them not to, otherwise how are they going to weigh up the bids for the tenders they put out?

Nexus and NECA are two separate organisations btw, and to my knowledge they don't share staff, other than Tobyn having oversight of Nexus from NECA.

Sorry thought I replied, but I don't really see why they need to look at routing on a specific basis. Surely the point is to see whether it's sustainable - as it is - rather than how you're going to grow it with predetermined growth figures. The tenders etc, will be getting done once the franchising has been confirmed (which it hasn't yet). Otherwise you'll be biased as there's no way you can say with confidence that the private operators would make changes aswell.

Yeah I know with Nexus/NECA, they should be merged though imo; or partially merged anyway. Anything which isn't operations, should be merged into NECA, similar with NCC and DCC. There's some assets out there like Mark Ellis with Northumberland CC which would be an asset imo. Get all the planning team in one place rather than split up similar to London who have TFL (NECA) and London Underground (Rest of Nexus, they can do the ferry too).

I'm sure there's lots of arguments for/against but I'm sure there's arguments that it'd be better to franchise out the rest of Nexus aswell like everyone else does bar TFL.