Transport in Cambridgeshire - seen by an outside observer. What can Wiltshire learn?
Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2012-01-15 11:11:31 - Graham Ellis
A week in Cambridge - traveling there, and around when I needed, without a car - and a chance to look, listen and learn a bit more about the wider transport issues of that city. Some may be lessons for us in Wiltshire, others may be items that I simply say "won't work here because of ...".
Between the hotel at which I was staying and the hotel where I was giving the course (oh - there's another story in there!), I had to cross over the A14. This is a road which sweeps from East to West across the top of Cambridge, then turns north west and is joined by M11 traffic as it heads up to Huntingdon. It's always busy (note the "queues likely" sign here) and prone to gridlock if there's an accident on it, or on one of the associated roads - and such accidents seem to be a regular occurrence - at least once a week, I suspect. I used to drive to Cambridge - I have a lot to carry and it's not ideal by train, but fighting the M25 then the A14 on my way up left me late several times, and these days I go for a far more relaxed train then taxi (on my arrival), walk during my stay, and bus to station on my return when my load is considerably lighter and so it's practical to use the bus. Takes a bit longer, but I arrive fresh and give a much better course.
As I walked to and fro (about a mile each way each morning and evening), I was observing traffic queues in the Cambridge suburbs and it struck me as disappointing just how many empty seats were being carried around in private motor vehicles. I counted a couple of queues ... in the first, there were 20 vehicles with just one person, six with two people and one (bless them!) with four young men. 27 vehicles = 108 seats, but only 36 seats occupied. In the second queue, 23 vehicles with 1 person, 2 with 2 and 2 with 3. Again, 27 vehicles = 108 seats, this time 33 seats occupied. So that's between 30% and 35% occupancy. If that could be raised to 50% occupancy, each of these queues would have been 7 cars shorter - a drop of a third in the number of vehicles, and the congestion would be cured at a stroke. But how could that be achieved? Perhaps by setting up an environment where motorists feel it's safe to pick people up, where they're allowed to get some financial return on doing so (tax free to encourage the scheme and keep it simple?), and where it's automatically included in the driver's insurance.
I trained at the Holiday Inn at Histon. It's in a wedge between the A14 and the guided busway (see later in this article), and the hotel's web site advertises "You can use our complimentary car park and hop on a local bus from Holiday Inn Cambridge to reach the colleges and shopping streets of central Cambridge, 2 miles away". But - it's about 400 metres from the hotel to the bus stop, you need to know where you're going, and in the early evening the bus stop is round that back of the streetlight pole so you're trying to read it in the shadows. How often is this scene repeated across the country? How often do things like this put people off using the bus? I knew that the bus was due at 17:26 on Friday evening, having checked online ahead of time. And I was at the bus stop at 17:15. But no sign at 17:26. A bus came and went in the other direction. Next bus due at 17:46. No current running display on this bus stop (though others in Cambridge have them) so I'm left wondering as to what's happened to the bus. How often is this scene repeated across the country? How often do things like this put people off using the bus?. 17:46 comes and goes, and I'm getting worried about catching my train ... do I try to phone for a taxi? But at 17:50 a bus turns up. "Did the previous one get cancelled?" I ask the driver as I buy my ticket. "I don't know" he says, "but I'm running 25 minutes late ...". And so, an uneventful journey to Cambridge Station on the number 8. And when I get off there - there's another number 8 with hardly anyone on board right behind us. 45 minutes gap, then 2 buses right together ... How often is this scene repeated across the country? How often do things like this put people off using the bus?.
I should perhaps complete my bus story here. I arrived at the end of my train journey into Chippenham at 21:57, to connect to the 22:10 bus to Melksham. Which didn't show up. Like Cambridge, no display at the station to tell waiting passengers what had happened (there are displays in Trowbridge, of course, because that's the country town ;-) ). At 22:30 I called Lisa who was picking me up at the Market Square in Melksham (I had 8 computers with me, so the final mile walk wasn't on) and she told me that the bus had only just left Melksham on its way up to Chippenham; rather than freeze at Chippenham Station (booking hall locked shut, cafe closed of course), I took a taxi. Others call on people / called up favours to get home. Horrendous taxi fare - £25.75 or about £4.50 per mile. How often is this scene repeated across the country? How often do things like this put people off using the bus?.
When I last traveled to Cambridge in December, there was but one through platform at the station - and I believe it's been that was from the opening of the station. 2 Bay platforms for trains to terminate when arriving from the north, and 2 for trains to terminate when arriving from the south, have provided extra capacity but that layout had become more and more of an operational nightmare over the years with more longer distance through trains such as London to King's Lynn and Stansted Airport to the north west of England. And the problems were made worse by the London to King's Lynn trains having to shed carriages so that only 4 go forward (limited capacity of electrical substations north of Cambridge, like we see west of Bournemouth in our own area).
So - what a delight to have additional through platforms added - numbers 7 and 8 - now providing three through tracks. This should allow for further traffic growth here, and for more robust services when a train or two has been delayed - it should cut out many knock-on delays.
But I do wonder at a couple of the design issues of the new platforms. They're being used, it appears, for the London to Cambridge and (sometimes) beyond services, and a very high proportion of people arriving are from London. In London (Kings Cross and Liverpool Street), the pedestrian access to the platform is at the southern end of the train - but at Cambridge the footbridge off the platform is at the northern end - and this means that EVERY PASSENGER has to walk along 8 carriage lengths. To make matters worse, once you cross over that bridge in Cambridge you have to walk back south again along the old (single through) platform for 4 carriage lengths to the exit barriers. Did someone think this through properly? It's been suggested that the bridge couldn't go into the booking hall area directly because it may be a listed building. But surely it could have gone at the south end? There's an added irony here too - the number 8 bus stop (yes, that's the bus I was on) is outside the station level with the southern end of the new platforms - so a bridge there with an exit would eliminate a 16 carriage walk south -> north -> south .
I also look at the big, wide bridge, and high over the electric cables for the train's pantographs. And a rather small passenger lift. Arriving on the none-stop 8 car train from London that terminates at Cambridge (so that's 8 cars of passengers all for Cambridge), a long queue forms at the lift of people with heavy baggage - to the 45 minutes taken for their journey, you need to add another 10 to 15 minutes just to get out of the station. Was the lift specified down to a budget? Were the calculations for it made on the basis of average flows, overlooking the peaks of an arriving train rather than the gentler profile of use for departing trains? Or is in intentionally small to discourage its use by all but the most needy?
Walking through the Arbury area of Cambridge, I noticed that a few of the houses had these stones set in the grass verge just outside their gates. They look very much like cycle parking spots to me. Alas, none of them showed signs of being in active use. A last sign of an experiment that failed, or the end of something that was a success in its day? Would it work today? It raises the whole idea of cycles, and cycle provision, which is high-volume in Cambridge. Lots of designated cycle ways, lots of shared pavements ... and lots of cyclists who at times appear to be a law unto themselves even when on the roads. You wait, as a pedestrian, at a crossing for the little green man, and you check to the right to see the cars have stopped. But - beware - there are cyclists who ignore even the road traffic lights. And at the island in the middle of the road you check to the left ... but you had better check to the right too, as there are cyclists who will pass the wrong side of an island if it suits them. When and where I was brought up, children on small cycles were allowed on the pavement, but once you got a full size cycle you were on the road, and you obeyed traffic directions in just the same way that cars did. I'm not sure if "roads have got faster" these days, as we're told - the 30 m.p.h. limit is unchanged and we have chicanes and road humps and some new 20 m.p.h. zones. Clearly, there is increased pressure for road space though and that can lead to conflict, and the need for compromise between walkers, cyclists, car drivers, buses and delivery vehicles.
Of course, one of the ways to avoid conflict between different modes of transport is to provide segregated corridors for each mode. And one of those modes in Cambridge, is the guided busway which opened about six months ago. The busway track consists of two wide concrete "rails" for the buses wheel, with a strip of grass down the middle, and smaller upstanding guide rails at the side. The guide rails are followed by guide wheels which are set at 90 degrees to the normal running wheels. Because of the raised edges, only vehicles which are specially made (or adapted) to run on the busway can use it. These vehicles can, however also run on normal roads and indeed - in the case of the Cambridge system - must do so as the tracks are in sections separated by flat crossings, and don't cover any route in their entirety. It should be noted that buses going in opposite directions on the guided system can pass one another at a higher speed / with a smaller clearance than would be the case for a non-guided system, in the same way that a train is on a unique track (but a tram may not be).
In the Cambridge papers, there is much talk this week of the success of the busway. The headline early in the week told how the number of people using it is 50,000 a week, as compared to just 24,000 people a week on the bus routes "on the A14" that it replaced. And later in the week, there was a story about the 1,000,000th journey - which happened to be made from end to end of the line (St Ives to Addenbrookes) by a woman taking her elderly father to hospital. What a fortunate co-incidence that the millionth journey was made by someone traveling for such a good social reason, rather that it being a regular trip by a student into college or something like that. And the papers are full of sidebars of happy people saying how good the bus is, and how much time they're being saved.
But - hang on a moment - that's only one side of the story. I don't believe 50,000 people a week. I think it's 50,000 journeys. Over 20 weeks, that would come to the million journeys quoted. Most of the users will be daily commuters, making 10 single journeys each - so you're down to some 5,000 users / 2,600 new users, or about 1% of the population of the area being new users.
Let's take another look at those statistics - 26,000 new journeys. There is a "northern" section and a "southern" section each side of the city, and it's fair to assume that most journeys are going to be made to or from the city or station. Indeed, I know people in Cambridge who are using the guided buses only from the Science Park to the Station - about 10 yards on the guided section and the rest on the City streets; better than service number 2 as it's more direct and is limited stop. So of those 26,000 journeys, there are realistically around 13,000 extra journeys a week on each end of the busway, balancing off non-guided journeys v through journeys. As the busway runs in two directions, that's 6,500 journeys a week each way - let's say 1000 on each weekday with fewer on Saturday and Sunday. Spread over even 10 hours of the day, you're looking at around 100 extra passengers per hour - that's about the capacity of one doubledecker. And these sort of loading figures help explain why there's only one bus every 20 minutes - woefully under capacity - at the Science Park, and why (when I tried to catch a bus there soon after 5pm) the electronic sign told me I had 39 minutes to wait. Yes, I'm sure that was a delayed service again, but it hardly - yet - makes it a reliable "turn up and go" service, nor a roaring success.
Of course, new public transport takes time to build up - some of the justification behind the guided busway project is to provide commuter transport for new towns not yet built, and people will move onto the corridor and shift across over time - perhaps when they pension off one of the two family cars. I know that we're looking at a three to five year ramp up for passengers on TransWilts trains. And I also know that our surveys indicate 600 commuters per day from early on - interest already expressed. And that leads to a staggering cost comparison. For 1000 passengers per day on each end of the busway so far, £116,200,000 has been invested - that's £58,100 per passenger. For 600 passengers per day on the TransWilts, we're looking at a maximum of £5,000,000 for seeding costs / improved interchanges to cope with the increased traffic and spent on those commuters alone you're looking at £8,000 a passenger (and you could even take a risk and seed purely a service increase for a fifth of that, following on with station and interchange improvements as needed). But of course the TransWilts isn't just commuters - a single extra train on 8 Sunday mornings in 2011 brought an extra 2,000 people / 4000 single trips onto the train. That's ONE extra train, 8 days out of 365. It really makes me wonder why it's proving so hard to come up in Wiltshire with just 1% to 2% per head of what's been provided in Cambridgeshire.
A final aside - part of the sales pitch for the guided busway was "it will relieve congestion on the A14". Hmmm ... the happy, smiling faces in the paper were all about people who use the guided bus and have found it's great for them - people from the 2,600 users. No-one is shouting about how much clearer the A14 is (in fact it's still grumbles about delays), and when you think about it that's no surprise - for 100 people an hour relates to 2 people per minute taken off the road so far. Hardly significant ...
Pavements show signs of wear / of the need for repair and improvement. Although Cambridge is a showcase city, many of the areas close to the centre are surprisingly far from being "showcase" in upkeep. This is the only footway to a major hotel with capacity for 320 residents, and conference facilities for around 150. And it's the footway you have to use to get to the public transport service they recommend on their web site.
This made me smile - but it was a humourless smile, I'm afraid. I mentioned earlier on about the conflict for space between cyclists and pedestrians, and here's an attempt to segregate them - but how sad that the cyclists are given a nice tarmacked surface and the pedestrians have to force their way through the undergrowth!
And as this blog is "The Horse's Mouth", I couldn't resist finishing off with a picture that included some horses. Leisure riding only, I'm sure ... I don't think there's any serious business / work / commuting use made of horses in Cambridge any longer, even though they would have been a full part of the scene hundreds of years ago.
Lessons to learn in Wiltshire from studying Cambridge? It makes a very interesting comparison. They share some problems / issues with us. They have some solutions that we don't need. There may be a few things they could learn from us (though I was not looking from that viewpoint). And they've had an envious level of investment - some (such as the station works) clearly long overdue, and others which are yet to have their full potential realised.
Between the hotel at which I was staying and the hotel where I was giving the course (oh - there's another story in there!), I had to cross over the A14. This is a road which sweeps from East to West across the top of Cambridge, then turns north west and is joined by M11 traffic as it heads up to Huntingdon. It's always busy (note the "queues likely" sign here) and prone to gridlock if there's an accident on it, or on one of the associated roads - and such accidents seem to be a regular occurrence - at least once a week, I suspect. I used to drive to Cambridge - I have a lot to carry and it's not ideal by train, but fighting the M25 then the A14 on my way up left me late several times, and these days I go for a far more relaxed train then taxi (on my arrival), walk during my stay, and bus to station on my return when my load is considerably lighter and so it's practical to use the bus. Takes a bit longer, but I arrive fresh and give a much better course.
I trained at the Holiday Inn at Histon. It's in a wedge between the A14 and the guided busway (see later in this article), and the hotel's web site advertises "You can use our complimentary car park and hop on a local bus from Holiday Inn Cambridge to reach the colleges and shopping streets of central Cambridge, 2 miles away". But - it's about 400 metres from the hotel to the bus stop, you need to know where you're going, and in the early evening the bus stop is round that back of the streetlight pole so you're trying to read it in the shadows. How often is this scene repeated across the country? How often do things like this put people off using the bus? I knew that the bus was due at 17:26 on Friday evening, having checked online ahead of time. And I was at the bus stop at 17:15. But no sign at 17:26. A bus came and went in the other direction. Next bus due at 17:46. No current running display on this bus stop (though others in Cambridge have them) so I'm left wondering as to what's happened to the bus. How often is this scene repeated across the country? How often do things like this put people off using the bus?. 17:46 comes and goes, and I'm getting worried about catching my train ... do I try to phone for a taxi? But at 17:50 a bus turns up. "Did the previous one get cancelled?" I ask the driver as I buy my ticket. "I don't know" he says, "but I'm running 25 minutes late ...". And so, an uneventful journey to Cambridge Station on the number 8. And when I get off there - there's another number 8 with hardly anyone on board right behind us. 45 minutes gap, then 2 buses right together ... How often is this scene repeated across the country? How often do things like this put people off using the bus?.
When I last traveled to Cambridge in December, there was but one through platform at the station - and I believe it's been that was from the opening of the station. 2 Bay platforms for trains to terminate when arriving from the north, and 2 for trains to terminate when arriving from the south, have provided extra capacity but that layout had become more and more of an operational nightmare over the years with more longer distance through trains such as London to King's Lynn and Stansted Airport to the north west of England. And the problems were made worse by the London to King's Lynn trains having to shed carriages so that only 4 go forward (limited capacity of electrical substations north of Cambridge, like we see west of Bournemouth in our own area).
Walking through the Arbury area of Cambridge, I noticed that a few of the houses had these stones set in the grass verge just outside their gates. They look very much like cycle parking spots to me. Alas, none of them showed signs of being in active use. A last sign of an experiment that failed, or the end of something that was a success in its day? Would it work today? It raises the whole idea of cycles, and cycle provision, which is high-volume in Cambridge. Lots of designated cycle ways, lots of shared pavements ... and lots of cyclists who at times appear to be a law unto themselves even when on the roads. You wait, as a pedestrian, at a crossing for the little green man, and you check to the right to see the cars have stopped. But - beware - there are cyclists who ignore even the road traffic lights. And at the island in the middle of the road you check to the left ... but you had better check to the right too, as there are cyclists who will pass the wrong side of an island if it suits them. When and where I was brought up, children on small cycles were allowed on the pavement, but once you got a full size cycle you were on the road, and you obeyed traffic directions in just the same way that cars did. I'm not sure if "roads have got faster" these days, as we're told - the 30 m.p.h. limit is unchanged and we have chicanes and road humps and some new 20 m.p.h. zones. Clearly, there is increased pressure for road space though and that can lead to conflict, and the need for compromise between walkers, cyclists, car drivers, buses and delivery vehicles.
Of course, one of the ways to avoid conflict between different modes of transport is to provide segregated corridors for each mode. And one of those modes in Cambridge, is the guided busway which opened about six months ago. The busway track consists of two wide concrete "rails" for the buses wheel, with a strip of grass down the middle, and smaller upstanding guide rails at the side. The guide rails are followed by guide wheels which are set at 90 degrees to the normal running wheels. Because of the raised edges, only vehicles which are specially made (or adapted) to run on the busway can use it. These vehicles can, however also run on normal roads and indeed - in the case of the Cambridge system - must do so as the tracks are in sections separated by flat crossings, and don't cover any route in their entirety. It should be noted that buses going in opposite directions on the guided system can pass one another at a higher speed / with a smaller clearance than would be the case for a non-guided system, in the same way that a train is on a unique track (but a tram may not be).
Pavements show signs of wear / of the need for repair and improvement. Although Cambridge is a showcase city, many of the areas close to the centre are surprisingly far from being "showcase" in upkeep. This is the only footway to a major hotel with capacity for 320 residents, and conference facilities for around 150. And it's the footway you have to use to get to the public transport service they recommend on their web site.
This made me smile - but it was a humourless smile, I'm afraid. I mentioned earlier on about the conflict for space between cyclists and pedestrians, and here's an attempt to segregate them - but how sad that the cyclists are given a nice tarmacked surface and the pedestrians have to force their way through the undergrowth!
And as this blog is "The Horse's Mouth", I couldn't resist finishing off with a picture that included some horses. Leisure riding only, I'm sure ... I don't think there's any serious business / work / commuting use made of horses in Cambridge any longer, even though they would have been a full part of the scene hundreds of years ago.