Passenger numbers - good? bad? could be better?

This morning's (16 August) meeting of the County Council's Economy and Environment Committee is due to discuss the Finance and Performance Report to the end of June 2018. Now, before you nod off, or navigate to videos of cats doing cute things, I should point out that this is of some relevance to the Busway.

According to the report's appendix (documents are at item 7 of the meeting agenda if you want to follow along), the 12-month rolling total of passngers on the Busway to May 2018 is 4.1 million. In May, 351,373 passenger journeys were made. Since its opening in August 2011, some 23.7 million journeys have been made.

Now, it's a little unclear whether these statistics include journeys made on Busway routes when operating on regular roads (most of Whippet's "U" service, for example; or Stagecoach's trips north of St Ives). But regadless of that sort of complication when talking about statistics, Edward Leigh, of Smarter Cambridge Transport, has been looking more closely at the figures and has noticed that the current usage is only just half of what was projected at the time the Busway was first proposed.

You can read more about this in a Cambridge News report. And Edward Leigh was also interviewed by Trevor Dann for Cambridge 105 (yesterday, I think), and that interview (covering more than just passenger statistics, admittedly) has been made available as a podcast. And is worth a listen. You can find that podcast here.