The 313 used to have 160 seats per hour (Enviro 400s with 80 seats). Now there are 74 seats per hour (E200 MMCs with 37 seats and sometimes even less with short E200 MMCs) That’s over a 50% reduction in the number of seats.
To be clear, I don't have any insider knowledge upon which to base the following comment. But a lot about the 313 is making me wonder if they intended to have a frequency increase and had to cancel or postpone it at the last minute.
It is not unusual for new buses to have
slightly fewer seats than the ones they replace for various reasons. But to go from double deckers to single deckers without changing anything else seems very out-of-place - the places it serves are hardly the middle of nowhere and, at least from my trips on it, it seems reasonably well-used. 30 minutes is a pretty poor frequency for what seems to be the main or only service for large parts of the fairly densley populated suburb of Adswood, which probably merits turn-up-and-go transport. And the suboptimal timetable with a lack of turnaround time makes me wonder if they are not running the timetable they really intended to.
If the 313 ran on TfGM's standard-ish 12 minute frequency with 37-seat E200s, that would be 185 seats an hour - a similar number, in fact a modest increase, to when it was run with double deckers. But it's easy to see why someone might look at such a significant increase to the frequency and decide it was undeliverable, at least for now. It's what I'd like to see them do in the long term.
I suppose we will never know for certain whether this was their intention or not.
