When I took my Brompton bike to Cambridge last year for a cycling trip, I loved the smooth paths next to the busways. Didn’t actually ride the buses but even just for the benefit to cyclists and pedestrians it’s awesome.
They need to extend further into the city to create real benefit. Creating routes through countryside is not really addressing the issue in the places were transit is slowest.
15:20. You would think that as a bus approaches the lights would turn red to stop the traffic and let the bus carry on through at speed rather than slow down.
Comparing this to the much, much older Adelaide O Bahn system, this has some serious flaws drawn from penny pinching engineering, which is a shame, as it's otherwise a very promising project. At grade intersections, where there is abundant space to build in proper grade segregation, and not even any fencing or meaningful barrier between the cycleway/footpath and the running alignment. Furthermore, the stop which not all services are stopping at have no passing loops so express services could easily be disrupted by stopping services should they have a lot of passengers to load or unload, or have to board a wheelchair or pushchair etc. Finally, as a fairly new system I'm disappointed this wasn't built as an electrified system to charge electric buses en-route and let them run on batteries in the city centre.
Whilst there is enough space to build bridges and/or tunnels, it really isn't necessary to build these for the roads that the busway crosses, and would also have substantially increased costs for something which already went way over-budget. Though I can't deny there have been accidents at these crossing including one in 2019 that resulted in the car and subsequently the bus catching fire. On Cambridge's busway there are no stopping or express services, all services stop at all the stops they pass BUT your point about the boarding of wheelchairs is definitely correct along with multiple people buying tickets. Your final point I agree with, this would been a good opportunity to run trolleybuses or 'in-motion charging' but sadly the UK seems to have a fear of modern trolleybus systems, with people more conscious of the environment than ever before I don't understand why. Thanks for watching and taking the time to write this comment, it is interesting to read what people think about the busway and what improvements could be made.
I do not understand the traffic lights on the guided busway. Surely the bus should be prioritised, and the road traffic automatically stopped as the bus approaches the junction?
The buses do have priority. All the junctions have sensors which detect the bus and change the lights for it. Though sometimes the lights don’t change straight away
Thanks, took forever to upload. This was something I thought about, and having them all in the same livery would completely defect the point of the colours since that’s how they’re meant to be easily identified.
HD Transport Funnily enough they’re making the stagecoach gold into the new livery and logo which I’m actually wondering how they’re going to do it without it looking shit... 😬😬
fantastico 😂 ...our company reduce the miles at spurbus due to it's lenkzeit no privileg ( Holly , Paige Y , Emiliy , Emma-Louise , Elena and hundrets more " i like your university cambridge !" ) i feel free to reapeat our ex-chancelor Dr.H. Kohl ... you can say you to me 😅
I don't think there are any gearboxes like that available for this sort of bus. The latest deckers (the large three axle ones) are speed limited below redline.
Can't be used by other vehicles (in most cases physically), is narrower than a normal road (excluding the maintenance track/path) and allows buses to travel much faster.
There’s 15 years between the last train and the busway’s start of construction (in 2007), and 37 years between the last passenger train and the busway’s start of construction. The railway would have needed to be completely torn up and redone anyway. Add electrification, modern stations, signalling, etc, light rail would have costed millions aswell.
Just a reminder that Cambridge is too small to support a light rail system let alone get the necessary funding+trying to squeeze trams onto the already narrow streets of Cambridge
That’s correct. Therefore meaning it would either terminate at the Science Park (as Cambridge North didn’t exist in 2011) or be a tram train to Cambridge Station. Neither are in the city centre so doesn’t really connect as well. Chances are this was a major major deciding factor when choosing what to build on the railway alignment.
