Peter Graham, Chief of Staff to the Mayor of the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority gave evidence on behalf of Mr Bristowe in a closing speech in the final week of the public inquiry hearings
“The busway began as an unspecified mass rapid transit connection to a tunnel that would form part of a Cambridge Autonomous Metro. Now it would essentially serve West Cambridge if it ever took buses at all. Taking buses at reduced frequency and without the connectivity envisaged would make the costs unjustifiable…. …Any bus that got beyond the [Cambridge] end of the busway would find itself in the same traffic and congestion that still needs to be solved. C2C is a route to a tunnel which doesn’t exist…and when a mass rapid transit network does begin, it won’t connect. No one is enthusiastic about the busway.”
As speeches go, it was a powerful one that highlighted the farcical structures we’ve had in Cambridge for the past decade – and the responsibility for that is with the ministers at the time which created the institutions with overlapping responsibilities. The fact that in law it is the county council that has to make the application under the Transport and Works Act 1992 to the Transport Secretary for a segregated busway that is going to be operated by a Combined Authority Mayor who has been elected opposing the construction of the busway and stating that there’s no guarantee he will commission bus services along it when franchising comes in before the busway is built, shows how all-over-the-place the Greater Cambridge Partnership’s proposals are.
I also agree with Mr Graham on his assessment that the application is only going ahead because:
- Supporters of the application believe we need to do something and this is something
- This is all that the Greater Cambridge Partnership has left before its funding runs out in 2030
- So much resource has been expended on this project that ‘they may as well complete it’ rather than cutting their losses.
The most powerful point for me was the statement that the county council nor the GCP could compel the CPCA Mayor to make use of the busway assuming it got built. The reason being that under franchising all decisions on bus routes will be taken by The Mayor of the CPCA. Even with the creation of the unitary councils, there is no mechanism for such a council to compel a combined authority (soon to be strategic authority) mayor to use a specific road or piece of new infrastructure.
Note that the application for the C2C Busway was made in November 2024
Which was before the mayoral election of May 2025. Given how tight the timescales were, I can see why the GCP did not want to wait until the mayoral election result. That said, should they have pulled the application given the election result? Is it even possible to withdraw an application once it has been submitted?
The last mile challenge that the GCP gave up on.
“[The Cambourne to Cambridge Busway Project] …offers no solution apart from the City Access program of soft measures to restrict on-street parking and reallocate road space to active travel. The assumption is that these measures will be enough to enhance bus speeds and provide more reliable journey times across the city. However, no detailed modelling of the likely impact has been conducted so it remains uncertain whether bus accessibility will improve.”
Agenda Pack for Greater Cambridge Assembly, 20 June 2021 – p 325.
As I wrote in my 2021 blogpost:
“I contend that the planning for Phase 1 of the Cambourne – Cambridge busway remains incomplete. It makes no provision for what is the biggest and most challenging transport challenge: That final mile at the Cambridge end.”
As things stand, if the busway gets built, all that will happen is more buses will get stuck in an already congested part of Cambridge at a time when the bus companies are struggling to fill their vacancies of bus drivers.
It will be interesting to see what the Transport Secretary makes of the warning from the CPCA Mayor about building a busway that no buses use.
Food for thought?
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