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Opinion: We all want better buses but daily road charge in Cambridge will unduly hurt low-income households




Cambridge resident Clare King offers her verdict on the Greater Cambridge Partnership proposals for road charging to fund a new bus network.

A Stagecoach electric bus
A Stagecoach electric bus

Something most people can agree on is that across the UK, and in Cambridgeshire, deregulation of the bus network – the transfer of bus services from public bodies to private companies in the 1980s – has resulted in service levels declining and becoming unreliable, passenger numbers declining and fare and operator costs rising sharply.

The impact of the Covid pandemic put further strains on operators with passenger numbers still not recovered to pre-pandemic levels and issues such as driver shortages and steeply rising fuel costs – and in Cambridgeshire, Stagecoach East recently announced impending service cuts to 18 routes despite receiving ongoing government help to maintain services.

Yet buses remain by far the most popular, and important, method of public transport with almost 70 per cent of journeys made by public transport in 2021 being by bus.

Metro mayors around the country have been looking at how to improve services, with both Manchester and Yorkshire regions introducing flat rate fares for single journeys and investigating reregulating through franchising and local control of bus routes. Nik Johnson, the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough mayor, also stepped in last week with over a million pounds to keep the threatened routes going until March 2023.

So why, when the Greater Cambridge Partnership (GCP) announced its scheme to expand the bus network in and around Cambridge, doubling current service levels, has it been met with enormous concern, with public meetings and petitions involving thousands of residents across the county, and even with a degree of anger? After all, GCP chair Cllr Elisa Meschini was delighted to approve of the proposals at their meeting (September 28), praising the “great groundswell of support that’s got behind what we are doing today” and stating that she was “very heartened to hear that we have the public behind us”. What was it they got so wrong in their discussions?

The rationale has little to do with congestion in the city

The answer of course lies in its parallel proposal to finance the proposed network expansion through levying a charge on residents, workers and visitors to Cambridge for using a car in a zone which encompasses the entire city boundary, applied across the board on any journey anywhere across 7am-7pm, Monday to Friday. Called a congestion charge, the rationale of the zone boundaries and hours of operation actually has little to do with congestion in the city and everything to do with the fact that the enormous revenue requirement – some £50million to £70million a year to support this and other GCP schemes – can’t be met unless all those who live or work or come to visit Cambridge pay for it.

In 2018, Cllr Lewis Herbert, the then GCP chair, said of a congestion charge that it would not be considered as “too many individual and business journeys would be unnecessarily affected and it will unduly hurt low-income city and South Cambridgeshire residents, and those from further afield, who currently have no option but to travel by car to work in Cambridge, often to jobs involving unsocial hours”.

Cyclists and buses on Hills Road in Cambridge. Picture: Keith Heppell
Cyclists and buses on Hills Road in Cambridge. Picture: Keith Heppell

As an hourly-paid shift worker for a major food retailer, I know that Cllr Herbert was correct then and now. The service sector in Cambridge – be that hospitality, care, retail or in the colleges – is dependent on low-paid hourly-shift workers like myself. Even doubling the bus service from its current low base will not provide an attractive alternative in terms of cost, time or convenience for many of the journeys I and colleagues have to take to get to work and back home at all hours, and inevitably we will be faced with a £5 charge on many days.

And then there are the other ordinary and everyday aspects of life that will affect so many – the parent who has to juggle school or nursery drop-offs and pick-ups with work hours and shopping trips, the hospital and medical trips, the family member with carer responsibilities, those taking children or, as in our case, our dogs to walk in green spaces like Milton County Park or Trumpington Meadows. It may be easier for higher income households to own a car (indeed it’s higher income households who often have multiple cars) but 60 per cent of low income households do own a car, and car ownership is itself a significant factor in social mobility and tackling the inequality of two-tier Cambridge which has already worsened over the last decade.

Transport services, including buses, are the responsibility not of the GCP but of the mayor and Combined Authority. And yet, despite a recent report (October 19) on the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority making clear that it is, in essence, in special measures with an Independent Improvement Board to be put in, that it lacks a coherent transport and bus strategy, and that its recent bid for government funding for Better Buses failed, despite the fact that the mayor and Combined Authority are not even agreed on franchising as an option to pursue currently. It has yet to ‘respond’ to the GCP formally and residents across the county are being asked to fill in the GCP consultation based on only a vision of improved bus services and the certainty of an all-encompassing daily penalty charge.

Better buses? Of course.

Congestion charge? Ah now, that’s what we need to talk about.

Want to share your opinion? Get in touch at letters@iliffemedia.co.uk



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