Do you believe that First, TLC etc withdrew the services you now say Connexions, Transdev should be running just for the fun of it? Or is it more likely that they were running at a loss because there wasn't enough passengers using them?
If you were running your bus company, would you be throwing lots of expensive resources at a service that others had tried and failed with?
No I don't, and if you had bothered to read my posts properly you would see why. Anyone living in the area needs only to observe the ever growing problems with the roads, traffic jams get longer and longer as bus services fall away. There is direct correlation between worsening public transport and worsening traffic congestion, and if you are suggesting that there isn't a flow of traffic from the Wharfe to Aire valleys and back to sustain at least 1 bus an hour I can only assume that you do not have to suffer the congestion every day.
When TLC took over the Otley route, they ran it as a few services a day using Solos, basically a fraction of the capacity of what First had offered. Of course it was never going to be popular, especially as the majority of services were outside the peaks. I don't blame TLC for this BTW, they were a small company with a very small fleet trying to make a difficult route work. But such low capacity simply could not offer passengers what they needed, so by the time TLC had capacity to increase to an hourly (remembering that before that they had scaled the Otley service back to starting at Shipley in the form of the 650) there was hardly a passenger base left. However that does not mean there is no market.
The problem I often see here and elsewhere is that people simply assume that because a big company dropped a service in the past means that there will never be a market for it again. But herein lies the heart of the problem, companies like First don't necessarily drop services because there is no market. In the case of the 653 there has always been flows along either part or all of the route. That still exists today, and indeed as I stated earlier there are more housing developments that have gone up along the route, with potentially a lot more to come. So there is a market, providing that it is suitable for commuters as well as shoppers. The problem is that it is a difficult area to serve, with few main roads with a growing population feeding two cities (albeit with much more flow to one). Now of course at this point if we had a nice joined up transport policy in this country, the DfT, Metro, the providers would see a massive opportunity to develop local services that fed the rail network. The only problem is that these services are often full at the heavy peaks, and so there is no opportunity to increase capacity without investment, and that costs which we all know is a crime against taxpayers so is a none starter. Instead more and more commuters take to the roads, and spend more and more of their time on them (as well as increasing their costs and reducing productivity). This is the typical British state of mind when it comes to transport, can't see the solution, won't pay for the solution.
This has turned into a bit of rant, for which I apologise. But the bottom line here is that the big companies won't touch the routes not because there is no market, but simply because they are difficult. But if they persisted they could easily develop them into popular routes, both for the longer portions and for more localised journeys, including travel to and from stations along the route.
