One of the projects that the Greater Cambridgeshire City Deal Board is pushing very hard is the provision of better transport links on the A428 corridor. This ofcourse is because the City and South Cambs want to show that their plans to put 3500 houses on Bourn Airfield and 2300 on West Cambourne is viable and sustainable.
It would seem they are willing to do that at any cost – even if that cost is so high as to be a complete waste of taxpayers money. Why do I say that?
The Officers came up with 5 options to consider, and the City Deal Assembly made strong recommendations to the City Deal Board as shown below:
The City Deal Board, at its meeting on Thursday 13th October 2016, decided to reject the recommendation of the City Deal Assembly in relation to Option 3. It decided to rule out all the other options completely and focus instead on Options 3/3a.
For the sake of clarification, the map below shows Option 3 (including the area highlighted in yellow) and Option 3a is the section highlighted in red between Bourn Airfield and Madingley Mulch Roundabout
You can find the other options in the meeting papers Appendix on South Cambs website.
This is the Officer preferred option, because it provides the opportunity to fully segregate the bus route off road. But it is also the most expensive option, with a cost of circa £141 million, and the option with the worst value for money. It is supposed to provide “High Quality Public Transport” (HQPT), which to them means a busway. Of course, the overaching view is to get people out of their cars and into buses, the much touted “modal shift”. This completely ignores the fact that the problem with the A1303 Madingley Rise is that it is the only access to the M11 for traffic coming from the St Neots/Bedford direction and wanting to go South on the motorway.
Another aspect of Option 3 that has been consistently ignored by Officers is that the proposed route south of Hardwick and Caldecote will cut through Hardwick Woods, and also go through a Special Site of Scientific Interest (SSSI) in Caldecote. In their haste to preserve 800 Wood in Madingley (which is visible to the public), they seem to have no qualms in decimating Hardwick Woods which is not visible to the wider public, and plough through a designated SSSI.
For those of you that have the time to watch the video recording of that meeting, you can find it here on youtube, courtesy of Richard Taylor. It is rather long at 4 hours, but worth watching especially the speech by Heidi Allen MP in which she called on the City Deal Board to pause the current plans and consider alternatives, that she was prepared to help if the Board had the courage to go back to the drawing board. Not surprisingly, the response of Cllr Herbert to Heidi Allen’s showed they did not have the courage. You will find this at 1hr 49mins in the recording.
I could not attend the meeting due to work commitments, but watched it the following day. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement. To compound matters, Cllr Burkitt wrote a piece to the Cambridge News on behalf of the Board, to explain why they had taken the decision that they did. The fact that they had to take the step of doing that shows just how unpopular their decision was, and that they had to justify themselves to the public.
Compounding one mistake by making another does not solve the problem caused by the original mistake!!