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I understand the relationship between the owner of Forth Boat Tours (FBT) and Lothian soured, which led to Lothian withdrawing their service and FBT reaching out to Bright Bus.
The 514 is funded via developer funding (as is the M7), which goes through the relevant planning authority and doesn’t come out of SPTs budget for subsidised services. However, SPT manage the procurement process in the same way that they do any of their other tendered service contracts.
The...
They closed all the local area offices quite a number of years ago and centralised everything at Leeds. Edinburgh was the only local office they kept open, but a long serving employee recently left and they seem to have decided to move the Scottish area office to Leeds too.
That is correct. The initial batch came with ‘standard’ Yutong seats, with later batches having seats to McGill’s specification. This was largely down to availability at the time (post-covid) and the desire to have them prior to COP26.
Primarily because a recent update from the app provider means that cancelled journeys now show up when you’re searching for live times at your bus stop, but the fact that there are a lot fewer now is also relevant.
Other than it operating on a FlixBus service at the time, FlixBus isn’t really a contributing factor. It’s more likely that human error or a mechanical issue will have contributed, but you’d assume that will all be part of the investigation.
I don’t think it’s the operational side of it that is the major issue, but more about the acquisition/confiscation of the business that many operators have built up over many years, often with significant investment. If that was done using appropriate market value rates, then I suspect there...
Provided those public hands aren’t grossly underfunded.
Ownership and regulation change will make relatively little difference. However, any option properly funded has the ability to bring about noticeable changes.