Cheshire West is a funny one, for these. They have 2 fair sized developments (100+ homes), a bus goes along the main road every hour but there is no bus stops. No provision for bus stops short term so the buses have to fly past not stopping. It can't be made into hail and ride as it's a single carriageway, A road and I think the speed limit is 50.
In Huntington, rather than ask for a bus to go into the site of nearly 1000 odd homes, they asked for a funding for a frequency enhancement on the local bus which stops right at the bottom of the camp. Stagecoach, the council, nor the developer has the brains to extend the local bus 2 minutes to the roundabout which is located about 1/2 way into the development (roads are wide enough and space for bus stops. This put the route upto every 15 minutes. Now it's down to an uneven 3 buses per hour (09:51, 10:11, 10:36, 10:56, 11:21, 11:41, 12:06, 12:26, 12:51) so that they could take a bus off and rather than use any brains and interwork it so that the times could be made simple, they opted, of course, to make a hash of the timetable.
In Ellesmere Port, there is a 2,000 home development. Frequency enhancement to start with then new routes but no Sunday service (as the council is wasting the 1 Sunday tender in disused areas and providing links which aren't available any day of the week other than Sundays!)
The bus gate for a bus to go through the development is down to be left until the last phase and so any bus service would have a costly time penalty or need a dedicated bus. Council claim to procure a new bus to the local train station from 300 houses occupied, from 800 houses there may be some bus priority.
Theres also the 811 local service bus but but no one knows about it because it's a Merseyside tender and Cheshire West won't have anything to do with it despite it linking the development to Flintshire Industrial Estate and Broughton Airbus. Two of the biggest employers in the local region.
So while yes there may be some improvements, maybe, in the pipeline, they are a bit late on and nothing to try and make the buses viable from early on (like the bus gate into the existing neighbourhood which would combine existing and new demand).
Developments in Northwich are laughable. The Winnington Village Development has only recently gained a bus with the Arriva network changes. Good news you may say. Well..... There are no bus stops through the development yet, the bus passes though not stopping as no one knows where the bus stops. Developers were meant to put in bus stops in consultation with the residents but instead put up stops without consultation last summer (2021) and placed them (to quote a local councillor) 'outside peoples windows and doors' and caused 'great distress to residents' (how does a bus stop cause distress when there was no bus). Apparently 'due to the site layout, they are struggling to place the bus stops'.
Why wasn't any of this sorted earlier?
Other developments in Northwich and Winsford have no provision for bus improvements and the council approve the developments without any bus service, bus stop infrastructure improvements or paths linking less than 50m from the development to the main road (instead forcing people to walk all through the development out to the main road meaning what could be a 5 minute walk to the bus stop is actually a 20+ minute walk to the bus stop for no reason at all.
Councils these days, unless those who are very pro bus, just won't request 106 funding for buses. They'll rinse the developers for all of the other funds which directly benefit the council but refuse to ask for any money which goes to buses and the nasty, greedy private bus companies.
I am trying to figure out how demand for service is established for a new build estate before it is built. Operators and local authorities can guess. But know of one such area, next to a motorway junction and 3 miles from a town centre where around 60% of the residents work "out of town". Guess where the S106 bus goes....
To be fair, you can't work out the demand at all and plan the bus services unless you get every single resident to tell you all their journeys. It has to be an educated guess and 'into town' is the best guess for the most demand overall (60% of people may work out of town but most of them will work in completely different directions and at completely different times. It's not as if 20% of people in the development work at the out of town retail park. Everyone will go different ways. Though if a bus service is in place earlier on, some people looking to move will see the new bus service and perhaps plan their new job around that if that is feasible. In the same way that people without cars currently do 'I can't work there as I can't get there' etc.
