Is the GCP taking the wrong route for the £160m Cambridge South East Transport busway?

Opinion | James Littlewood, of consultation charity Cambridge Past, Present & Future, explains why he believes the plans for the Cambridge South East Transport Scheme busway are misguided - and says there’s a better alternative, supported by a consortium of groups who have amassed a petition of 6,000 signatures.

On Thursday (12 September) the Greater Cambridge Partnership’s joint assembly discussed controversial plans to build five miles of new road across open countryside to the south of Cambridge.

Next, the GCP board and Cambridgeshire County Council will be asked for permission to submit the scheme to the government for planning approval.

The 14m-wide road will need three concrete bridges to cross chalk streams, it will cut through the slopes of the Gog Magog Hills and will cost around £160million. The road would only be used for buses and will connect a new Park & Ride car park at Babraham village to the Cambridge Biomedical Campus.

Everyone is in favour of improving public transport in the A1307 corridor in order to enable workers at the growing campus to avoid traffic queues and get to work more quickly, but there are two competing schemes: both will get workers to the various research campuses and central Cambridge much more quickly and help the local economy.

Both schemes start and end in the same place and the bus journey times for both are very similar. Versions of both these schemes were proposed by the GCP themselves. The diagram shows the two schemes.

The scheme that the GCP wants to submit to the government is to build a five-mile bus road through the countryside.

Starting at a new Park & Ride it will skim the outer edges of the villages of Sawston, Stapleford and Shelford (so of little value to local residents) before entering the western side of the Biomedical Campus. The cost is around £160m.

The scheme that the GCP rejects involves building 1.5 miles of bus road and 1.2 miles of bus lane alongside the A1307. Combined with the existing dual carriageway at Wandlebury, this would create 2.3 miles of continuous traffic-free bus route into the campus. An outbound bus lane is not needed because there is no traffic congestion outbound from Cambridge on that stretch of road.

Additional bus lanes and engineering would take place on the section of the A1307 from Babraham Research Park to the Park & Ride. The campus is planned to expand alongside the A1307 and so it would be served by this scheme but not by the scheme preferred by the GCP. The cost is around £60million.

Understandably, thousands of people have been asking why build the more expensive and more environmentally damaging option?

Why not build the one that is much better value for public money, less environmentally damaging and that will serve the expansion of the campus?

When these two options were being considered in 2018, the then mayor of Cambridgeshire, James Palmer, insisted that any major public transport infrastructure planned by the GCP must be capable of being used for his proposed Cambridge Autonomous Metro scheme.

Because building bus lanes next to the A1307 did not meet his criteria the GCP had little choice but to opt for the road across the countryside.

However, the mayor had no funding or business case for his metro and when a new mayor was elected in 2021 he dropped it from his transport plans.

By this time the GCP had spent two years and significant public money progressing the scheme. This is ‘sunk capital’ and one of the reasons why large projects are like juggernauts and so difficult to turn around.

Rather than acknowledge the main reason for their scheme no longer existed and money and time had been wasted, they have battened down the hatches and tried to make the case that one day there might be some kind of mass public transport system for Cambridge and therefore it would be better if we already had some infrastructure in place for it.

There is a snag though.

The original budget for the scheme was around £35m, not £160m, and the GCP doesn’t have enough money to build it.

In September last year, the scheme was put on hold while they asked the government for £160m. Many of us hoped that common sense would prevail, and central government might suggest that the GCP pursue the cheaper and less environmentally damaging scheme. Instead, the last throes of the Conservative government tossed them £7.2m to progress their expensive scheme further.

We have had a change of government who say they cannot afford to raise the cap on child benefit, have been forced to withdraw the Winter Fuel Allowance from millions of pensioners, and have decided to cancel or pause many other transport schemes.

It would be perplexing if they were to allocate £160m for a Cambridge transport scheme when £60m would do the job just as well.

A coalition of organisations has come together to make the case for the better value and more environmentally-friendly public transport scheme.

Working under the banner of Better Ways for Busways! this includes local charities Cambridge Past, Present & Future, Hobson’s Conduit Trust, Magog Trust, CPRE and Railfuture East Anglia and the parish councils of Stapleford, Great Shelford and Babraham.

Nearly 6,000 people have signed an online petition and a fundraising appeal has been launched to raise money for the campaign.

More details are at cambridgeppf.org/south-east-cambridge-busway.

The GCP response

A GCP spokesperson said: “CSETS has been developed to provide a safe, efficient and reliable transport corridor for anyone wishing to get the bus, walk or cycle in and out of Cambridge from the A1307 and A1301 area.

“The segregated route has been through numerous consultations and business case development to identify the best option – this process has discounted other solutions on sustainability, reliability and environmental grounds.

“CSETS will give options for the thousands of people who work on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus and for those who want to leave Cambridge to reach Granta Park and the Babraham Research Campus.

“The government has also recognised the importance of the scheme by awarding £7.2m in grant funding.”