Have operators been listening to Smarter Cambridge Transport? Or do some solutions become so blindingly obvious that, eventually, everyone is clamouring for them?
Designing a Park & Ride service where everyone wins
P&R services around the edge of the city make it quicker, more reliable and cheaper for car owners in towns and villages to drive part of the way, rather than use a bus for the whole journey. This reduces the numbers using the local service bus, and can lead to loss of services or reductions in frequency.
But there’s worse, as we get increased traffic on the roads approaching the P&R sites. An additional 200 cars adds over one mile to an existing peak-hour queue. The more spaces added to P&R sites, the longer the queues and the greater the delays to all traffic – including buses!But we could design a P&R system where everyone wins.
Read the full article, on the Smarter Cambridge Transport website here
Create an outer ring of ‘travel hubs’, at major towns and necklace villages beyond the green belt, which include some car parking. Provide frequent express buses from these, with limited stops in the city
A fuller piece of research, from 2016, is available here.
The CallConnect concept
Speaking recently with Michelle Hargreaves, the new managing director of Stagecoach East, the idea of travel hubs with linking services into inter-urban routes was mooted as a potential for Cambridgeshire. Michelle has managed a number of bus companies, most recently in Lincolnshire where the LincsBus CallConnect service fulfils this very function.
This theme was taken up by Stagecoach co-founder, Sir Brian Souter, at a recent meet-and-greet event at Stagecoach’s Cowley Road depot, where he spoke enthusiastically about the potential for Stagecoach to purchase small minibuses for community use. Volunteer drivers would enable villages to link into faster, more frequent inter-urban services.
Traffic-choked Harston might well agree…
Harston Residents’ Association: ‘We need a travel plan to rid village of 18,800 vehicles’
Gemma Gardner, Cambridge Independent , 28 May 2019
Harston Residents’ Association has produced a video setting out its concerns, which also include the ‘threat’ of a new Park & Ride at Hauxton.
Full article here
“Today an average of 18,800 vehicles will drive along the A10 through Harston – that’s 10 for every person that lives here. It’s a huge number for a historic village whose school, shops and village hall are all situated on the A10,” one resident explains.
The Greater Cambridge Partnership (GCP)is hoping to open a Park & Ride off the M11 northbound carriageway at Hauxton as part of plans to improve public transport to the west of the city.
“The proposed travel hubs at Foxton, Shepreth and Meldreth, with connections to a South Cambridge rail station are a priority for action – travel solutions that take people where they need to go.”
Can the plethora of local government bodies in our area – Cambridge City Council, South Cambridgeshire District Council, Cambridgeshire County Council, Parish Councils, Greater Cambridge Partnership and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority – find a way of working with bus operators to reverse the decline in rural services?
After all, there is a climate emergency, and one bus can take up to 75 cars off the road.
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