Well, I was always very quiet
The N10 night bus used to be well used, but disappeared during covid, never to be seen again
Do your two facts above not tell their own story?
You’ve said yourself that it wasn’t busy, and that the Arriva service between the cities wasn’t viable either
But, as with threads about reopening rural branch lines, you take the fact that a market is too small to sustain a commercial minibus as a reason for a more expensive “solution”
I’d typed out a longer reply to the other points that was lost when the old thread was removed but essentially..
1. National Express need to run commercially viable services in a market dominated by subsidised trains, so have to target some places (e.g. Mirfield) that have no trains, or extend London services to places with no direct London trains (e.g. Rochdale, Accrington)
2. If you insist on London to West Yorkshire services to divert into places like Mirfield, even though there are no passengers on board wanting to get off there, then you’re delaying all passengers on board just in case someone wanted to use a long distance coach for a trip from Mirfield to Dewsbury… similarly, if you’re insisting that an empty coach runs all the way to Rochdale then you’re threatening the viability of a route that doesn’t get the subsidy that the trains do
3. By making routes “set down only” like this, it means you aren’t diverting off the motorway for no reason but also it allows busy services to segregate passengers, e.g. a service from the south/ midlands might serve Leeds on its way to terminating at Bradford, but (if you’re not worrying about Leeds to Bradford passengers) you might run over coach into Leeds add a separate one to Bradford so that those passengers get home a lot sooner than going into and back out of central Leeds - why waste diesel having two coaches follow each other via Leeds to Bradford?
I see, would wonder how many used that service from Ayrshire
I guess that of you’re heading back to a depot then it’s worth serving Ayr/ Kilmarnock if there’s just a couple of people from Ayrshire who’d prefer a direct coach via a slow route (Stranraer) to having to travel into Glasgow- marginal costs etc