North East bus chiefs have been told they must turn around deteriorating bus services that passengers say leave them feeling like “second-class citizens”.
Operators have come in for major criticism over recent weeks, with many services regularly being delayed or cancelled – on top of significant cuts imposed since the Covid pandemic. Bus company bosses appeared before council leaders on Tuesday and were told that the last few months had been “utter misery” for people in the worst-affected areas, such as the villages of Hazlerigg and Dinnington in the north of Newcastle.
Meanwhile, a passenger group has pleaded for bus services to be restored to their previous levels and say that some places have virtually no buses on evenings or weekends.
Gateshead Council leader Martin Gannon told the North East Joint Transport Committee (JTC) that he was “pretty unique” in having some sympathy for the bus companies, who have been hit with rising costs and staff shortages, but that major improvements in public transport were needed to ensure the region can combat its climate and air pollution crisis. He added: “We need to make change, but unfortunately we seem to be going backwards and not forwards.”
A report to the JTC states that bus punctuality across the North East had dropped to 85.4% from April to mid-October, compared to a pre-pandemic baseline of 89%.
Carl Johnson, the deputy mayor of North Tyneside, claimed “utter misery” was being endured by passengers around the north Newcastle villages, parts of North Tyneside, and south east Northumberland – with passengers there having no way of knowing whether a bus is coming or not. Coun Johnson said: “If we want to combat congestion in our cities and towns, buses will be a critical point and we really need that reliability to get us there.”
The Tyne and Wear Public Transport Users Group (PTUG) said that too many passengers “are being treated as second-class citizens, left standing at stops in freezing temperatures waiting for services that often fail to arrive”. Calling for companies to reverse cuts to services and give drivers a “more attractive offer”, spokesperson Alistair Ford added “We know that bus companies are facing pressures from rising costs and staff shortages but the fact remains that passengers in our region are relying on services in serious decline.
"We don’t have frequent services or real-time information at bus stops like London, so passengers often face standing at freezing cold stops for long periods waiting for their buses. When your service has been cut to once an hour or every half hour, a cancellation of your bus can cause serious delays and disruption.”
Steve Walker, managing director at Stagecoach North East, told the JTC meeting on Tuesday that the staff shortage problems are “no secret” but that the situation was improving. He said that installing bus priority routes to beat increasing congestion on the region’s roads was the solution to reliability problems.
Mr Walker added: “Bus priority measures cannot come soon enough, and it will depend on getting the money from the Government, but that is key to getting proper, reliability into the bus services and greater passenger confidence and the modal shift that will benefit all of us.”
Ben Maxfied, business director of Go North East, said: “On recruitment and mitigating the shortage of drivers, we have taken significant steps to address those issues and we are still in that plan to get to where we want to be. We have reviewed driver pay rates and made significant changes to benefit that.
“We have increased spend on advertising and marketing around recruitment to reduce our turnover to a more manageable level.” He continued: “We have spent a lot of time over the last few weeks producing a strategy for ourselves to ensure we are getting back to those high levels of service delivery. We will keep working on that in the coming weeks and months to make sure we get there.”
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