Is the Combined Authority assessing the cumulative transport impact of planning applications in Cambridge?

Posted byCambridge Town OwlPosted inUncategorized

Applicants for large planning applications spend fortunes on consultants to provide transport assessments. Has anyone done an in-depth assessment on what the cumulative impact of these corporate reports is? And has anyone done an assessment of the private commuter bus services?

[Image – from Unite Glasgow – can’t we all have this?]

Back in 2024 I wrote about how teenagers in Cambridgeshire pulled up Stagecoach over its failings on public transport provision.

Two years ago I tabled a public question to the Combined Authority asking what assessment it had made of private commuter buses in Cambridge.

You can watch the video here – what did you think of the response?

I then wrote a blogpost on the issue of private commuter buses in July 2024 which raised the issue of regional transport. Because it turned out that we had a regional bus strategy.

Above – the Sub-National transport organisation’s bus strategy from 2022

The ‘England’s Economic Heartland’ sub-national transport organisation was also at UKREiiF 2026.

Above – ‘Global City Cambridge’ where you have to phone up an office in Alconbury to close a side road for a community street party, and where you have to catch a train to Ely to access the city’s local government archives

We are yet to see a vision document from any institution about what Cambridge might look like and be like in the next 25 years – something that covers the essentials including:

  • What buildings, facilities and services will be there and where geographically
  • Where the current major gaps are and how they will be filled – eg the shortages of doctors, dentists, town planners, and also of people working in the trades
  • Where any new major transport infrastructure routes will be and what method of transport is being proposed
  • Whether we will continue with fragmented local public service structures or whether we might look at local government having at least the basic oversight function of local public services irrespective of which sector provides them (something that should involve powers of summons to the executives responsible for providing them – even private sector ones).
There are *lots* of transport assessments that need looking at – one for any interested early career researchers?

Let’s take a few case studies:

And that’s just the few off of the top of my head, not including the other very large and ongoing ones including:

  • Cambridge Southern Fringe
  • Marleigh (East Cambridge)
  • Springstead Village (Land North of Cherry Hinton)
  • Darwin Green (NW Cambridge)
“Well someone’s been busy!”

Note South Cambridgeshire District Council also has:

“That’s a huge amount of information to process!”

Which indicates a new approach might be needed – one that doesn’t involve:

  • Trying to get existing staff to do it without the additional resources
  • Outsourcing it to consultants who may not live/work in Cambridge (And thus any knowledge that might be gained ends up being lost to the consultancy world)
Could a very large community research project/programme making use of the combined wealth of knowledge of city and county work?

It could – not least because the amount of information involved is:

  • Too much for one person to process and analyse alone
  • So great that it needs to be broken up into bitesize bits, including:
    • Working out the additional bus routes proposed by different applicants for large planning applications – and putting them on a map for residents and the general public (and students) to scrutinise
    • Working out what the likely minimum growth in active travel traffic is likely to be given the step-changes created by major routes such as the busway cycleway
    • Working out what the capacity of Cambridge’s city centre is for buses and identifying at what point that passenger traffic needs to be transferred to a light rail (that goes underground in the city centre) – mindful that Cambridge Science Park alone is bringing *an additional 20,000 jobs* to its site – which is the size of a small town (as Cambridge’s existing labour market cannot meet that demand).
“When will the next set of Combined Authority meetings take place?”

See the meetings calendar here Note the following:

Feel free to email over public questions which the CPCA Officers can table on your behalf

If you are interested in the longer term future of Cambridge, and on what happens at the local democracy meetings where decisions are made, feel free to: