A14 road closures weekend of 14-17 September

A major road closure on the A14 will mean that Bar Hill buses will be unable to operate along Huntingdon Road.

Instead a shuttle bus service will connect Bar Hill with Longstanton Park & Ride.

Citi5 will run between Bar Hill and Swavesey.

Details here.

Parking Charges at Guided Busway Park and Ride Sites

As previously reported here parking charges were due to be introduced at the St Ives & Longstanton Park & Ride sites "in April".

April is nearly gone, but there are clear preparations at St Ives, and signs stating that charges start on 14th May:

Notice of start of parking charges

There are a total of 7 ticket machines at St Ives - all currently covered over - two groups of 3, and one on its own.

Three behind the toilet block.

 

 

Three near the open area between the bus stops and the parking.

 

 

And one at the east end.

 

Also some additional signs around the car park:

 

 

 



 

Parking charges at busway Park & Ride sites

Parking charges are to start in April at St Ives and Longstanton Park & Ride sites according to an article in the Hunts Post (11 February, page 3).

The daily charge will be £1. There will be monthly ticket (£20) and annual ticket (£230). Prices for longer stay have been published (18-24 hours £10, 24-48 hours £20, 48-72 hours £30).

To prevent 'displacement' parking in Meadow Lane, restrictions will be introduced there.

Also reported by Cambridge News here.

Parking charges at St Ives and Longstanton park and ride sites (2)

A brief follow-up to Andrew's 11 Nov posting. Although the County Council approved the introduction of parking charges at these two sites in November, implementation still requires a Traffic Regulation Order. This was advertised in the Cambridge News on 19 December, and at its meeting next Tuesday the Highways and Community Infrastructure Committee will consider the officer's report on that stage of the process. The TRO generated just 5 objections/representations - they're included in the report, which can be found here. That document also sets out the proposed scale of charges, which the committee also needs to approve (basically: £1 per day, with season tickets offering discounts for regular users; more expensive for longer stays, with a maximum of 72 hours per stay).

New cycle spaces at Swavesey and Longstanton

New cycle parking spaces have been installed at Longstanton Park & Ride recently.
This week, the cycle storage area at Swavesey is being enlarged.

Swavesey Busway Stop - cycle storage area

Parking charges at St Ives and Longstanton park and ride sites

BBC Look East this evening reveals that Cambridgeshire County Council is introducing parking charges at the Park & Ride sites at St Ives and Longstanton.

Agenda for the relevant committee (Economy and Environment Committee) can be viewed here http://www2.cambridgeshire.gov.uk/CommitteeMinutes/Committees/AgendaItem.aspx?agendaItemID=10571

The story is also covered by today's Hunts Post (12 November, page 3). Charges are said to be between 50p and £2 per day and will start in April 2015 and are expected to bring in revenue of £120,000 a year. They also plan to introduce double yellow lines on roads near the park & ride sites to prevent motorists parking there. The article states that the St Ives  and Longstanton Park & Ride sites are estimated to cost the County Council £508,00 to run in 2014/15. Concessionary fares cost the County Council almost £1 million in 2013/14.
http://www.huntspost.co.uk/home/e-edition

Honourable mention for Cambridgeshire busway

Yesterday's Times (19 July, page 32) carried an article analysing the effect of Park & Ride schemes on people's driving habits. In general, it seems, people drive longer distances to use a P&R than they might have done otherwise. So P&Rs are maybe not as green as all that. Of course, P&Rs are designed to prevent people taking their cars into congested city centres - but there is clearly a cost in terms of driving distances. This is according to the work of Prof Graham Parkhurst of the University of the West of England.

However, Prof Parkhurst praises the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway , since it manages to intercept car trips early in their journey.

You can read the article online here if you have an online subscription to The Times.

Parking charges at Busway Park and Ride sites

Cambridgeshire County Council has approved a list of measures designed to save £37 million. This includes introduction of parking charges at Busway Park & Ride sites in 2015/16 aimed at raising £120,000.

From 2015/16 the Council will also stop concessionary fare use on park and ride buses to save £300,000.

Link to Cambridge News here.

Concessionary bus passes on guided busway

There are two rather alarming letters in this week's Huntingdon & St Ives News & Crier (19 December, page 6). The letter writers, who both contacted the paper by email, seem to believe that Cambridgeshire County Council wants to end the use of concessionary bus passes on busway and park & ride services.

It is not clear where they have got their suspicions from unless it is the minutes of the Council's Enterprise Growth and Community Infrastructure Overview and Scrutiny Committee's  meeting held on 7 December. In the minutes there is a clarification that 'concessionary fares only applied to ‘standard’ bus services, not for ones with additional services like parking, toilets, etc.  The Guided Busway was seen as a ‘standard’ service in this respect, as it could be caught from normal bus stops with no parking or additional services.'

In reality, of course, the Park & Ride services can also be caught from certain ordinary bus stops, and in my experience, if you start your journey from the city centre, you get charged the regular single journey or day ticket price for Cambridge, not the reduced Park & Ride fare. Park & Ride service serve a limited range of bus stops during the day, but after 6.30pm appear to serve all stops on their respective routes, which might seem to imply that they are 'standard' bus services. Information about Park & Ride services, including ticket validity is at this page.

See an earlier blog post for a further comment relating to this topic here.

The Council committee minutes are here .

Parking charges at Busway sites?

There's been a lot of noise in the local media about the County Council's plans to charge users of the Cambridge City Park & Ride sites for parking (in addition, of course, to the bus fares they need to pay to ferry them into town and back). What I'd missed until this morning was that the same Council meeting had also, in principle, agreed to back the imposition of charges for parking at the Busway P&R St Ives and Longstanton sites from 2015/16.

Almost inevitably, Stagecoach's Andy Campbell has something to say about this (well, there's a potential loss of revenue = profits for his company) - and, equally inevitably, the Cambridge News has used this as the basis of a story. See here for the CN news item.

The County Council documents, meanwhile, are to be found on the rather dull-sounding "Enterprise, Growth and Community Infrastructure Overview and Scrutiny Committee" web pages - follow this link for the specific agenda item relating to this. The proposal first appears in Appendix A, and is budgeted to raise £120K in 2015/16. (There are other Busway-related entries in these Business Plan papers which might well repay closer attention, if only I knew how to interpret them!)

The Council's Press Release didn't go into details, so I'm allowing myself to forgive me for missing this amongst all of the paperwork. And it's worth noting that the final decision hasn't actually been made - that's up to a meeting of the full Council in February.

Parking charges at Cambridge Park and Ride sites

News that motorists are to be charged £1 to park in addition to their Park & Ride bus fares has been released. How this will affect Busway passengers remains to be seen. Busway route A serves Trumpington Park & Ride, but the slow detour of this bus route around the Addenbrooke's Hospital campus makes it a poor choice for people wanting to travel into Cambridge city centre. It seems that the County Council wishes to reduce the Park & Ride's  £1 million deficit, and they are hoping to raise money from people who park then cycle or walk.

Read Cambridge News article here.

St Ives Park and Ride

Some weeks ago I posted that work had been completed on the extension to St Ives Park & Ride car park. That wasn't quite right. Since then some work has continued.The most recent has been the erection of wooden fences to prevent  (I suppose) pedestrians straying into the path of the buses.

I haven't done any counting of parked cars, but it does seem to me that the end of the car park nearest to St Ives town centre is always busier than the far away section. That says to me that people are using it as a free car park for access to the town centre. Good news for St Ives shops and businesses, I guess. But not really the intention of the car park extension.

Maintenance work at Longstanton Park and Ride

The normal bus stop for west bound guided buses at Longstanton Park & Ride is out of use at  present. This is due to maintenance work being carried out on the concrete drain covers  alongside the platform.

Buses towards St Ives and Huntingdon are calling at the stop normally used by the Citi 5 service.

St Ives Park and Ride

The extension to the park & ride site at St Ives is now completed. In fact, it's been open for a week or two.

St Ives Park & Ride

Work starts next week on doubling the size of the car park at St Ives Park & Ride. It will cost £2m and the number of parking spaces will increase from 500 to 1000. Huntingdon & St Ives News & Crier ( 8 November, page 13).

St Ives Park & Ride

The park & ride site at St Ives is to be doubled in size thanks to a Department for Transport grant of £2m. The site will expand from 500 to 1000 car spaces and will hopefully attract even more car users off the A14. (Huntingdon & St Ives News & Crier, Jun7, page 33 and Cambridge News website)