Connexions jumped in with the now cut back from Ilkley X52 and now withdrawn X53 as soon as First announced cutting the 653 which deterred anyone else from registering so saying its not commercially viable is making some assumptions. There is also the issue with a number of their services that the York and North Yorkshire Combined Authority have indicated they are looking at improving services. There was reference made to smaller buses for Harrogate with the implication that services woud expanded back towards the former Hoppa network which seemed to have a bus down virtually every through route. That would encompass the X4 and X12.
I have no doubt that Harrogate to Otley would be commercially viable for another operator. The fact that Connexions jumped in when First Bradford withdrew it is positive, but another operator
could have done that. Transdev did try going head-to-head with them some years later but by then the X52 was well established and so passengers stuck with them. If YNYCA want to pay for more regular hoppa buses to places like Duchy Road, Wedderburn, Claro Road and any of the other neighbourhoods that have lost their service in the last 15 years then that would be great, and I'm sure even if Connexions
don't get the contracts then they will hardly miss the income from their X4 and X12 journeys.
Reductions on the 412 in 2023 were so bad that North Yorkshire Council stepped in with a minibus providing a singular round trip between York & Wetherby on weekdays.
Obviously double deckers on the X4/X12 is excessive but I believe these vehicles often interwork with school services.
To be specific, the service
no longer offered a commuter journey to Wetherby. This was actually as far back as November 2018 and coincided with when Connexions withdrew the X70 from Tadcaster and at the same time dropped the commuter journey from York to Wetherby, even when the 412 was still 2-hourly during the daytime and interworked with the X70, and that NYCC journey has remained unchanged ever since. To be fair, Connexions had been running the service commercially and so at no cost to the council, which previous operators had not been willing to do, so for them to put on one minibus journey which then goes on to work other services for the rest of the day is small beer in comparison to what they would have been paying out in subsidy over the last 10 years for anyone else to run it.
Yes, a lot of their services interwork with school journeys, that's why they run double deckers on minor routes like the 412 and 923 where passenger numbers don't merit anything much bigger than a Transit!
