City Deal consultation responses

This article was published in 2016, in Newsletter 125.

The Campaign submitted detailed and comprehensive responses to the seven City Deal consultations, Milton Road, Histon Road and five Cross City Cycling Routes. Below are brief overviews of the Campaign’s position. Full responses for these can be found at www.camcycle.org.uk/campaigning/issues/citydeal/.

Cross City Cycling schemes

‘We welcome the Cross City Cycling routes proposed by the Greater Cambridge City Deal and agree that these routes are strategically important links in the Cambridge cycle network. We hope that the final installations are high quality and of good design in order to encourage even more people to cycle, thus reducing congestion in Cambridge. With this objective in mind we have responded to proposals for each route, indicating the positives for each design, highlighting areas where the designs fail to meet the standards for cyclist safety and making recommendations for rectification. However, we feel there remains a lack of ambition overall, and we bemoan the continued lack of a proper, city-wide cycle plan.’

Milton Road

‘In summary, Cambridge Cycling Campaign does not support either of the two options, ‘Do Maximum’ or ‘Do Something’. Our ideal way forward would be for there to be serious restrictions on traffic volumes – perhaps by way of a congestion charge or other demand management measures. With such provision, there would be no need for bus lanes at all and it would be easy to make really good provision for pedestrians and cyclists. For the present, however, we have sought to work with and improve on the idea of bus priority. We do consider some elements of the proposals to be interesting but would like to put forward an alternative proposal. We have called our alternative proposal the ‘Do Sustainable’ option. It provides bus priority, fully segregated cycleways, protected bicycle junctions, and excellent pedestrian facilities whilst retaining an avenue of trees and fits this mostly residential street and route into Cambridge.’

Histon Road

‘We do not think that either of the proposals, as currently drafted, achieve this goal for people cycling. While we support the aim of improving the bus service, we believe that most of the improvement to bus services can be achieved without the provision of an inbound bus lane along the full length of the road, allowing for better cycling infrastructure and improved green space.’

The Campaign’s responses could not have been achieved with the support of all those members who volunteered a huge amount of their time assessing the proposed schemes, researching and helping pull together the different aspects into a cohesive response.

Roxanne De Beaux