The Greater Cambridge Partnership are planning to move the Newmarket Road Park and Ride, as the lease on the current site will come to an end.
There’s a consultation online that readers may be interested in.
The proposals are hugely problematic, in a number of ways.
Instead of calling it a Park and Ride, it’s being labelled a Travel Hub, a concept originally championed by Smarter Cambridge Transport. This terminology is misleading and incorrect – we have already discussed the differences between Travel Hubs and Park and Ride and it’s abundantly clear that the proposal is purely a Park and Ride, with all the associated problems.
The proposal is to build a huge car park, doubling the current number of spaces, on a green field site well away from any local people. At a time when local councils have declared a Climate Emergency, and in South Cambridgeshire the transport sector is responsible for over 40% of the District’s carbon emissions, such a car-centric development is irresponsible.
One fundamental problem with a Park and Ride system is that it encourages people to drive, thereby abstracting ridership from local bus services, making them less viable to operators, leading to reductions in service and a vicious circle that forces more people to drive. Such a massive development as proposed here will reduce the potential ridership of rural bus services by about 1,000 passengers a day (the additional parking spaces), while increasing congestion by attracting another 1,000 cars a day (a 5 mile queue) onto Newmarket Road from Bottisham, The Swaffhams and the A14.
At this early stage, it appears that there are no concrete plans for what bus services might operate to take customers on their onward journeys, nor how the development works with other Newmarket Road improvements. It seems that the philosophy is “build it and services will come”. While the onset of franchising may lead to a more coherent set of services in the longer term, the proposal here shows no evidence of being part of such a larger plan.
In addition to such a purely car-centric design being harmful for rural bus services, the location is harmful for active travel. It would be silly for anyone to walk or cycle out from home closer to the centre of Cambridge towards the new site, as such users should have their needs met by services that call much closer to home. The correct location for a Travel Hub is in a population centre, where everyone is within a few minutes walk or cycle ride, and where lower density services bring together people from other local settlements onto a trunk service into the local population centres – Cambridge in this case. You can imagine Travel Hubs being placed in Bottisham and Burwell, for example, along an express route between Cambridge and Newmarket, with feeder services linking the smaller villages.
As the wrong design in the wrong place, the proposal is badly flawed, runs counter to its stated purpose, and needs to be rethought from the ground up.
Cambridge Area Bus Users 