Those of us who use the guided busway are painfully aware of the delays cause by traffic conditions on the ordinary roads - mainly in central Cambridge, but also at times in St Ives.
Today, the Cambridge News has published an article about a £190 million scheme to explore 'innovative sub-surface solutions' to Cambridge's traffic problems. This is a revival of an idea, first proposed in 2008, to build a network of tunnels under the city centre from Castle Hill to Coldham's Common. There would be underground bus stations a below Christ's Pieces and the Grafton Centre and possibly a link to the Railway Station.
It is reckoned that traffic delays cost businesses in Cambridge £1 billion a year.
The tunnel scheme is one possibility for trying to sort out Cambridge's transport problems and Cambridgeshire County Council and Cambridge City Council are putting in a bid to the Government for funding.
Click here to read the article.
There are serious problems - tunnels must be double width as vehicles travelling in single-line tunnels must have end doors for evacuation in emergency (as on the London tube, Tyne-Wear Metro etc). Buses cannot have end doors. With diesel buses there must be ventilation shafts at regular intervals and there is little space on the surface for underground station entrances. The gradient from Castle Hill to beneath the river would be remarkably steep, and where would the tunnel entrance be? Since 1950 there has been a series of impracticable transport proposals for Cambridge; none of them happened, and this is the latest one.
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