You're both wrong; the daily charge for big vehicles is £50. The fine (ie penalty for failure to pay) is £120 plus the charge.
Tyneside is a charging zone not a banning zone so there would be no negative impact (even if the CAZ were administered by Nexus it is hard to see a reputational damage sort of issue) through correctly paying for a non-compliant vehicle.
One imagines that some drivers at least will already be familiar..... but of course we all know how the big groups work.
Think it was pretty clear what we both meant!
Hence why I'd said spirit of the CAZ (Clean Air Zone), agreed though that it would probably have no impact.
Given Stockton has never been allocated any of the double deckers currently in service at Durham I'd say it's extremely unlikely that any of them are familiar. The only real reason they'd have driven any is if they'd transferred from another depot.
If it goes to an indefinite strike, you’d hope Arriva show some operational and commercial noise and step up. It’s well known the Durham Road corridor is the most lucrative hence the 21 being the GNE flagship, money to be made and we don’t have the independent operators to cover the strikes like we had in the 90s strikes.
They don't really have the drivers or the vehicles to do that, they can barely cover the services they're already running. Even if they did try, by the time they sourced enough vehicles and route learned a load of agency drivers I'd think that Unite and GNE would have likely reached an agreement, so it would all be for nothing.
I'm more surprised that GNE haven't tried to run a skeleton service on it using the staff who they are using to cover some of the routes in North Tyneside, though I believe these may be agency drivers who were already route learned on those routes prior to strike action.