(27 Feb 2025, 4:30 pm)Superman wrote This point around reliability, punctuality etc always makes me laugh.

Various politicians argue that a franchised world will deliver big improvements to reliability (amongst other things) but in reality, will it?

Whether commercial or franchised, buses in the North East lack any significant levels of bus priority in most of our main towns and city centres. Certainly nothing that makes big impact. The two solutions are either :- more capital spend on bus priority infrastructure, which local authorities are clearly against (Newcastle City for example declaration that they will never put a bus lane on the Coast Road), or a massively increased cost to the authority to 'tender' services with 25% more resource requirement, which increases journey time and pushes people into cars.  

The system needs a rethink, but franchising is an expensive assumed solution, but it won't deliver.

Operators will build in penalty payments into their bid for a standard London style approach. Ultimately costing the public purse more money, whilst. Equally, no operator will be bidding big money to run a traunch the opposite way around either (i.e. run a set of routes with revenue risk), as the revenue will need to be declared at the bid stage, which will show it doesn't stack up - who is responsible if it doesn't? Either the authority needs to underwrite it, or the operator reduces the payments to assume a margin. I'm not sure this way is even legal within the framework to be honest. 

Not disregarding the various points made, but franchising only works if you ignore the balance sheet behind it. Someone is picking up that bill and it won't be the private operators.

You make some interesting points, but in places like Gateshead, there are plenty of bus priority measures. 
In theory, certain routes shouldn't be impacted by traffic at all as the vast majority of the route, can be and is on dedicated bus lanes or benefit from numerous priority measures. 
The short 21's for example, run in bus lanes at various points of the route between Chester and Gateshead. 

I've made this point numerous times and will make it again. 
You can make all the bus lanes and priority measures in the world. But if the buses aren't going to and from where the people want them to, the buses won't make any money and people will continue to use the car en-masse. 

But to get back to the main point, the status quo can't continue. 
The taxpayer can't keep picking up the (ever growing) slack and the operators can't keep up with their best Oliver Twist impressions.
Change needs to happen and it's up to the legal eagles to create a water tight agreement which ensures the taxpayer doesn't continue losing out.
Like they continue to do in Ben Houchens SNE love-in.

(27 Feb 2025, 5:08 pm)Adrian wrote In reality, I believe it can, yes. 

Operators are very quick to blame traffic congestion for reliability issues, and whilst I accept that it is a large contributing factor, it's not the only factor. Operators have for years published unrealistic timetables, which seldom factor in that congestion exists. We've seen with the Bee Network that TfGM have had to throw more buses into some routes to improve that reliability, whereas commercial operators just don't bother most of the time.

I can remember having to rely on the Arriva 56/57/57A/X12 services at peak times 10-12 years ago, and they were an absolute nightmare. Buses would run in pairs, end up extremely late or worse, turn up and go straight past you because they're full. That didn't need capital investment on bus priority, it needed capital investment by the operator.

Councils of course need to do more to improve capital investment and bus infrastructure, but one of the barriers has always been that they don't control the bus network. They could spend £20 million on a scheme and end up with no buses using it. At least the Combined Authority having overall control over transport would give some guarantee for that capital investment, and we've seen it works in Manchester for example. Most of the City Centre road network was redesigned around the trams having priority, and it works really well.

I know it's a bit of a tangant but arguably one of the best things infrastructure wise would be to open some extra depots.

Bishop Auckland, Hexham, Alnwick and Peterlee are the most obviously places for them as the places they're working from now are useless from an operational stand point. 

Would do wonders for reliability really if you could actually regulate some services which aren't really possible on stuff like the 6 and 56 right now as they're miles away from the depot. 

They're also objectively the areas which are most in need for a better network aswell since they've all had their depots shut over the years and the service decimated as a result and if using tranches would be very difficult to tender out.