(Yesterday, 11:34 am)Storx wrote In fairness, just on this point they've made the point buses will be safer. I agree it's a policing issue, but putting that statement out now invites people to criticise them because they said they'd be safer.

It was a stupid claim and should've never been made.

It's better to under promise and over deliver rather than over promise and under deliver and a lot of the public claims are pretty bold - borderline fantasy, especially things like reliability which is again outside their control unless they stop backing out at every bus priority measure and scale them back to some traffic lights (which usually are worse ironically).

I'd argue that they'll have the ingredients to make it safer, beyond just saying it'll be safer.

We know, for example, that PCCs are being scrapped by the next electoral cycle in 2028, so at that point the responsibility will be under the elected Mayor's remit. That alone, in my opinion, is not enough, and we should be looking to gain coverage of the Tyne and Wear Metro as a whole by the British Transport Police. They're best equipped to deal with the kind of crime and anti-social behaviour associated with the railways, but that's obviously outside the scope of the FSA.

One practical step that you can take is to have a staffing presence in Interchanges and Bus Stations. This is something that existed and was cut back by private operators, and indeed Nexus cut their own presence back, but the problem is that it's always been left to Nexus to fund alone. You can only charge so much for a departure charge on a bus station before operators refuse to use it, nor can you mandate them to contribute towards the staffing, so this is another example of having one budgeting process should allow an improvement to be delivered.

There's a lot more that can be done and needs to be done, but a chunk of it will be through partnership working. Take Blakelaw for example, where Stagecoach have decided not to go any further after 18.30 on an evening. I understand why Stagecoach have done it, but it doesn't actually resolve the problem, nor the additional problems it creates. It requires proper partnership working, and that's something private operators have been pretty poor at by record.