Going back to this, there really does need to be investment alongside the Metro, the creation of hubs for areas that don't have a Metro to get a chance to grow.

Take the new housing in Birtley/Portobello. Now most of this is executive housing so perhaps not a bus market yet the only bus that does serve there is the perpetually late X25 which doesn't run on a Sunday/Public Hol.

Now developers are pushing ahead regardless of the lack of transport, yet the infrastructure is there, new roads have been built, bus layby's have been built but the development is only really happening here because planning regulations have been loosened and areas of growth (around Metro Stations for example) are saturated (look at the growth around Longbenton)

The North East has the lowest level of 2nd car ownership for 'luxury' reasons. What does this mean? It means people are relying on the car throttling our already beleaguered road network because public transport doesn't exist to a good enough standard.

Take the Team Valley, I managed an office with 2,000 employees. On a survey we found that 18 used public transport to get to work and 6 of those were undergoing a test. We liaised a lot with Nexus to drive this as a business but the response from Nexus was poor, a pdf of corporate ticket savings and a lot of the response from employees was in the region of 'it would take 2 buses, it costs more, its unreliable and a few replied 'stressful'