Buses Bill

[Barney]

RE: Buses Bill

(20/05/2016 19:27)Dentonian Wrote:  At the risk of repeating myself, the Elected Mayors may or may not go ahead with franchising and will have numerous other powers to consider/influence. Also, there is no reason to think there will extra front line staff to process the Franchises, whilst still dealing with existing contracts, commercial withdrawals (one already registered for 24 July, for instance!) and all the other day-to-day tasks.

"Modern technology" is largely irrelevant when thousands of jobs are potentiallly to be affected. Also - and irrlevent of the politics - Deregulation hardly went smoothly, despite those at the sharp end simply needing to evaluate services on a more financial basis. The original De-reg date should have been 26 Jan 1986, but some time in Summer/Autumn 1985 after many service Registrations were already being prepared, Whitehall delayed it by 9 months. Then, it was pretty disasterous from Day one with the travelling public not grasping the concept of services running for profit; understaffing and geberal chaos. Such that a large part of the network was hastily changed again 3 months later.....and again nearly a year after that! It would be foolish to rush such major changes that affect hundreds of thousands of passengers - especially as this time, blaming it on the public sector *would* be justified - unlike 30 years ago.

Just seen on Granada TV news that GM is to push ahead with bringing all bus operations under its control with a standard livery, fare structure and route planning asap.