It's showing on VOSA today that 63/63A, 64 and 70 will finish on 28th March, not 16th as was showing yesterday morning.
Stagecoach, like the other big companies, were helped along by deregulation too, expanding rather quickly at little cost.
From my point of view, Reays just kept changing things too much, passengers would finally get used to how a service was operating for it to be changed to something different only weeks later, with little or no notice about the route/timetable change. Fares were another thing to change too, its been reported that a passenger had very recently been charged £3 single to city centre, with the driver claiming cheap fares weren't being sold any more (can only assume that meant the £1 to Town promotion). Services with a lot of buses running almost empty having their frequencies increased to just have more buses running around nearly empty.
Another thing was how services were being "improved" for the empty buses, their changes just seemed to follow what Stagecoach have rather than looking at filling gaps to create new links, almost as if they were kind of admitting that Stagecoach have had it right all along and there wasn't any improvements that could be made in Carlisle. I still think there are a few areas in Carlisle that could be improved, but Reays changing services to copy Stagecoach's more just doesn't make those links.
It makes you wonder about passenger number claims too, when 64, 70 and 74 were improved back in October it was claimed they carried 20,000 passengers per week in Carlisle, then when 300R/302R started the press release in December claimed they were carring 35,000 passengers per week on CityHopper, while buses were still running empty or almost empty. An increase of 15,000 passengers per week in Carlisle alone just seems too good to be true, now there's the claim that services aren't performing as expected.
