I've just been looking at Tees Flex, the council (Tees Valley Combined Authority) funded, Stagecoach operated, app-based demand response travel system. It largely replaces the Boroughbus Network which has been eroded over the last ten years or so. My opinion is that, if we but aside pre-perceptions of what we think a bus service should be and asses it on the merits of getting people to where they need to be, it looks like one of the better attempts at making demand responsive travel work.
Now, I'm no conspiracy theorist, but I was wondering what the forum though on how the app has been zoned, or more accurately re-zoned in the latest update. Firstly, the Hartlepool Zone:
The active zones seem painstakingly carved out to very specific borders. Comparing this to the town's local network, exclusively operated by Stagecoach, the live zones exclusively cover areas unserved by the commercial network - I.E. what the service is intended to achieve.
Similarly in Stockton (a mixed bag of Arriva & Stagecoach for local stage services), the town centre zone is restrictive, but it does allow users to make a journey from the town to Teesside Park as well as making a journey between any intermediate points en route. Rather than being split into two zones, like Hartlepool Town Centre & Navigation point are, the zone is stretched along the path Arriva's X12 take along it's fairly recent commercial expansion into the shopping park:
Moving across into Darlington, full Arriva territory since Stagecoach famously bowed out. Here the travel zones get wider still, allowing journeys between the rail stations, from the town centre to the hospital and much of the residential area around it. Much of the area near the hospital is in the catchment area of Arriva's 19 and the app even allows Tees Flex users to make journeys which have a 10 minute headway from Arriva, such as Town Centre to North Road Morrisons or along Woodland Road:
Finally across to Redcar, another exclusively Arriva district in terms of registered services. Tees Flex starts to certainly look a little fishy here, where the central zone is a simply oblong through most of the town:
According to the Tees Flex website, there's some reasonably complex rules about how passengers can travel from 'Primary' and 'Secondary' zones and which in theory restricts such journeys that could be made with Arriva. In practice however, the app doesn't prevent users from booking any journey, regardless of zone status or length. To re-iterate my original point, if this is assessed as how successful is Tees Flex at moving passengers to where they want to be then I think its all great, whether the seeming discrepancies in zoning are fair to Arriva, however, is questionable.