Busway service has been massively boosted (most notably V2s running through all day), with the only cost being some unfortunately uncomfortable buses.
Wasn't the busway already contracted by TFGM and as such any changes made by First would have had to have been done in agreement with TFGM?
Increased service frequencies on lots of corridors? Night service on 36 and V1?
There were night buses before, they got cut due to low usage. Even so, nothing at all stopped TFGM funding these under deregulation, the same way they funded other tendered buses.
Puncuality has increased massively, the new busses are great.
It really hasn't. It's awful. TFGM will be using very selective figures for this. The lack of information on where their stats come from is pretty telling. For starters I know from speaking to some drivers that they are being told even when running out of service, log into the ticket machine and make it look like the trip ran. Drivers which are running very late are in some cases being told to keep running. Drivers going the wrong way because they aren't route trained, this is being logged as the trip ran (conveniently ignoring the fact the bus has missed areas)
In other cases, late or bunched buses are being taken out of service (seems to depend on the controller) and being ran dead to fill gaps and so while it may seem like everything is more punctual, it's actually just that some buses are less bunched together due to improved regulation. (One of the only good things I am seeing from franchising is some controllers regulating services better rather than letting them run later and later).
Oh, I don't know... several hundred brand new buses and a refurbishment programme for everything else?
You mean like the many buses that Diamond bought when they took over Bolton? Or the many new buses bought by Stagecoach over the past few years.. The franchising lark meant that for a number of years though operators reduced their spending on new fleets. Why spend more money on new fleets only to have everything taken from you in just a few years.
Complete fare integration across bus services, with better multi-modal integration on the way?
System One already existed and had TFGM attempted to work with operators, there could have been multi operator capping through partnership. Exactly as seen in Leicester. Not sure if multi modal would work that way as it's not been done yet, can't see why not though.
An app that actually works properly? (can't speak for all of them but the Stagecoach app at least was pretty useless).
You mean the one that had no live tracking for absolutely months and when it was tracking, it was a shed load of ghost buses which gave the impression a bus was nearby but infact no bus existed? Even so, absolutely NOTHING stopped TFGM creating a big transport app beforehand. They already had the data needed (as they were doing live departures and stuff pre bee network) and if not, the data was all available via Bus Open Data.
The fact that TfGM has just announced a fare decrease, which is almost unheard of in today's economic climate?
The fares are being cut to the level they were before Burnham raised them! He purposely didn't include some fares in his fare cap, let the fares go up, then made it an election pledge to bring them back to the level they were before.
And despite the doom-mongering on this forum, the punctuality and lost mileage stats are in fact showing improvements compared to before franchising.
Figures can be heavily skewed. Especially if one politician has seemed to have based their whole political career around this single policy. If this fails, Burnham has almost nothing else to show for his time as mayor. As we have seen many times with all things political (Not specifically Burnahm a mayor but a general thing), there are cover ups and skewed statistics everywhere.
