Wednesday 23 March 2016

Busway services over the Easter weekend

Stagecoach have announced what bus services they will be running over Easter. Good Friday and Easter Monday will have a Sunday bus service i.e. no evening buses. Easter Saturday and Sunday will have a normal Saturday and Sunday timetable.    Full details here.

Whippet likewise will be running a Sunday service on Good Friday and Easter Monday. Info here.

Saturday 19 March 2016

Truimpington accident - report published

The County Council has published its report into the accident that took place near Trumpington on 22 February. The bus crossed a maintenance track, and came to rest on the embankment on the western edge of the Busway corridor. The report is pretty damning, and it's clear that the driver was at fault - quite possibly negligent? Access to the report is on the County Council's website. It has been picked up by various media, including the BBC and Cambridge News.

Two things I noticed in passing: one is the reference in the report to something called the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway Operations Handbook. I'm guessing this is regarded as an "internal" document and not available for consultation by members of the public. The other is that Stagecoach refused to allow the County Council an archive copy of CCTV recordings from the bus involved in the accident, limiting access to the report's authors to a viewing onsite at the Fenstanton depot.

Saturday 12 March 2016

Flooding Near Fen Drayton

The Foot/Cycle/Maintenance track / Bridleway is closed between Fen Drayton and St Ives due to flooding.

Going from Swavesey towards St Ives this morning the first indication of flooding was finding the gate at Fen Drayton closed for people going towards Swavesey. And in that direction the track is not (yet) flooded.

Gate closed at Fendrayton

On my return I opened the warning sign at Swavesey.


Near Oxholme lake the track is indeed flooded, and water appears to be rising. Doubtless nearer St Ives it is deeper.

Near Oxholme Lake

Water is flowing across Holywell Ferry Road towards Swavesey, and the level in Covells drain is above the level of the surrounding fields.

Holywell Ferry Road

Thursday 3 March 2016

Smile - you may be on camera!

CCTV is everywhere, of course. And the Busway is no exception. But the output from only a small proportion of CCTV cameras is fed to the web here in Cambridge. (Compare this to, say, Washington DC, where all of the traffic cameras feed images to the web.) What's perhaps more surprising is that, in Cambridgeshire, such web output is limited almost exclusively to the Busway and its associated Park and Ride facilities.

Interestingly, less that half of those feeds (just 19) are included in the County Council's own listing:
http://voyager.cambridgeshire.gov.uk/CCTV.aspx

Once again, I'm indebted to Richard Taylor, who discovered that there are no fewer than 43 such feeds operating, and has listed them all on his own blog:
http://www.rtaylor.co.uk/cambscc-cambridge-cctv.html

(The list appears below the latest output from each of those cameras within the City.)

I would draw your attention to Richard's comments about the inconsistency/illogicality in the County Council's labelling of its cameras - it sometimes requires a fairly detailed knowledge of the location to work out exactly what you're looking at and from where.

These are snapshots, and not continuous live feeds. Images seem to be updated every 5 minutes. If old images are archived publicly, I've no idea where.
Remember, too, that these aren't fixed cameras, so the angle and breadth of coverage from any one camera can change (the temporary speed limit at Trumpington was more obvious earlier this week than it is at the time of writing, for example).

Since it's over 4 months old, I've rechecked Richard's list in the past few days, and all of the links seem to be still active. I was unable to discover any new ones, although there are plenty of unused IP addresses in the range covered by the active feeds.