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news
Cyclists and runners on DIY path next to Cambridgeshire Guided Busway (credit: Big Ron)“14 years of inaction”: Cyclists accused of walking on tracks and “holding up buses” in protest at constant flooding on active travel route, forcing users to create DIY path “dangerously close” to controversial busway
A cycling and walking group in Cambridgeshire has criticised “fourteen years of inaction” by the local council after persistent flooding on “what should be an exemplar active travel route” has forced cyclists and pedestrians to create a makeshift path “dangerously close” to a controversial guided busway.
The maintenance track which runs along a section of the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway between Swavesey and St Ives is prone to seasonal flooding, a problem local campaigners say has grown worse in recent years. As a result, Cambridgeshire County Council, which runs the busway, has closed sections of the path and warned cyclists, walkers, and wheelers to avoid using it.
However, the path’s perennial closure has led to locals creating an informal path to avoid the water, which is extremely narrow, often muddy, and slopes towards the flood, and runs extremely close to the busway’s tracks – while one local has claimed that he has seen several cyclists riding on, and even walking along, the tracks, “holding up buses” in the process.
The Cambridgeshire Guided Busway, established in 2011, is a rapid transit system connecting Cambridge, Huntingdon, and St Ives using old rail lines, and at 16 miles constitutes the longest guided busway in the world.
However, the scheme has been marred by safety concerns following the deaths of two pedestrians and a cyclist in three separate incidents. In September 2018, cyclist Steve Moir was killed when he clipped a kerb on the shared path that runs along the busway, close to Clare College sports ground, and fell into the path of a bus.
Earlier this month, as part of an independent review into the deaths, Cambridgeshire County Council offered a “profound apology and contrition for the serious and systemic failings” which led to the three fatal incidents, along with another collision which left a boy with life-changing injuries, but pointed that as the busway was a “novel transport system”, there “were no national design standards, only recommended practices”.
> Family says authorities "aren't really bothered" that cyclist died on Cambridge guided busway
And now, John Morris, leader of the Hunts Walking and Cycling Group, has called on the local authority and the Environment Agency to address the persistent flooding problem along the maintenance track “before we have another fatality”.
“People walking or wheeling have over the years created an informal narrow footpath along the top of the embankment to bypass the flood section of pathway,” Morris, who represents the 2,300-strong group, said this week, the Cambridge Independent reports.
“This informal narrow path is dangerously close to the guided busway track. A solution to the seasonal flooding must be designed and delivered before we have another serious injury or fatality on the guided busway.
“Fourteen years of inaction on what should be an exemplar active travel route between St Ives and Cambridge is simply not acceptable on this critical greenway used by many thousands of commuters and leisure users each year.”
Meanwhile, one local who uses the busway has said that he has witnessed a number of cyclists using not only the makeshift path, but also the bus tracks along the flooded section, posting a photo of one such occurrence on BlueSky earlier this year:
Cyclists and runners on DIY path next to Cambridgeshire Guided Busway (credit: Big Ron)The bus user, who goes by the name Big Ron on BlueSky, also claimed that he has seen “cyclists literally walking their bikes down the busway, holding up the buses, presumably in protest against the flooded path”, a practice he described as “blood boiling”.
Earlier this year, the council installed signs along the flooded sections of the busway, urging locals to avoid using the path, and prompting one local to write on Facebook that “the Dutch wouldn’t have made this rookie error” concerning active travel design.
“The guided busway maintenance track, the path which runs alongside the busway, is closed in parts between Swavesey and St Ives to the public due to flooding,” a Cambridgeshire County Council spokesperson said this week.
“Just before this section, there is a gate which has closed the path and a sign which clearly states ‘flood, path ahead closed’.
“We would urge people – do not try and walk along the busway while it’s flooded. We are actively looking to resolve the flooding issue at this location so that it remains open all year.”
Of course, the track running alongside the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway isn’t the only active travel route in the UK prone to long closures thanks to persistent flooding.
In Bath last year, cyclists criticised the apparent lack of attention afforded by local authorities to active travel infrastructure, after it was confirmed that a tunnel which forms part of the National Cycle Network and provides a key commuter route for local cyclists was closed once again due to flooding – just over a week after reopening briefly for the first time in three months.
Opened in 2013, the Devonshire Tunnel is part of Bath’s Two Tunnels route, a shared-use path frequented by commuters and leisure cyclists seeking to avoid the city’s hills.
However, heavy rainfall in the area over the 2023 Christmas period, which overwhelmed a nearby damage drain currently awaiting repair, led to the tunnel being severely flooded and almost impassable by bike, with cyclists noting the presence of “large objects invisible below the water”, and Sustrans admitting that attempts to solve the drainage problem “could take some time”.
After obtaining a PhD, lecturing, and hosting a history podcast at Queen’s University Belfast, Ryan joined road.cc in December 2021 and since then has kept the site’s readers and listeners informed and enthralled (well at least occasionally) on news, the live blog, and the road.cc Podcast. After boarding a wrong bus at the world championships and ruining a good pair of jeans at the cyclocross, he now serves as road.cc’s senior news writer. Before his foray into cycling journalism, he wallowed in the equally pitiless world of academia, where he wrote a book about Victorian politics and droned on about cycling and bikes to classes of bored students (while taking every chance he could get to talk about cycling in print or on the radio). He can be found riding his bike very slowly around the narrow, scenic country lanes of Co. Down.
Latest Comments
- mdavidford 8 min 55 sec ago
Obviously it means 'springing out of the bunch' on a critical sector. Or maybe it's referring to the time of year.
- David9694 55 min 53 sec ago
Car crashes through garden wall for second time in 18 months https://www.wiltshire999s.co.uk/car-crashes-garden-second-time/
- David9694 57 min 28 sec ago
Woman taken to hospital after flipping car onto roof in Trowbridge...
- A V Lowe 1 hour 39 min ago
Its blindingly obvious from the image that the DKE of the buses include the mirrors which extend to nearly reach the edge of the tarmac pavement on...
- Sredlums 2 hours 12 min ago
It's sad when being very good at your job - any job - isn't enough to earn a decent living. It shouldn't be that way....
- eeney 2 hours 24 min ago
Bont double wide wearer here. Even Lake, for me, are too narrow in the toebox and midfoot, but Lake work for a lot of people....
- ktache 2 hours 41 min ago
I seem to recall saint Chris being more on recent BBC road cycling coverage rather than less.
- chrisonabike 3 hours 53 min ago
I never heard of anyone having their leg sliced off / unexpectedly wiping out using a spoon brake, but discs...
- chrisonabike 3 hours 54 min ago
Meanwhile, in the Netherlands... (cycling to hospital, s''Hertogenbosch, Utrecht. Cycling to hospital and cycle parking, Assen)....
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53 comments
Members of Public?
Oh, right - that would make sense.
They should have written 'TGU', though - then it would have been clearer that they were referring to The Great Unwashed.
Yeah they were trespassing so they deserve it! Well done!
Being a response officer means what? You assist in picking up the peices but what about causal analysis and prevention?
What is the system safety argument to allow the system as designed to run? It was built without barriers how did they justify that?
Did the argument consider the frequency and reason for ped/cyclist being closer to or even on the track? If not why not? It was absolutely foreseeable that the flood plain would flood and that would make the lower path inaccessible .
What recommendations were made after the first death?
How was the safety argument reviewed and reasserted as safe? Or does this only happen once we get 10 deaths or more? Or because we have normalised death and VSI on transport networks other than air transport we just don't care?
What about city centre tramways? They have no barriers and people walk all over the centre of towns with them. How and why are they considered different? What enables them to operate more safely?
Or do we again just shrug again and go silly people, why arent they doing what I expected, without really getting a full understanding of the causes?
It's a shit design, they raised the bus route but scrimped on building up the adjacent path, why?
That is typical of UK infra projects, poor assimilation of the problem, poorly written design requirements, poorly written specfiication all leading to half arsed execution based purely upon KPIs of time and budget and not actually what is functionally required.
Should never have been opened in that condition.
They are buses, not trains. They don't travel at 186mph or take over 2 miles to stop under braking. It should be inherently no more dangerous than any other unfenced infrastructure where PSVs/LGVs run alongside pedestrians / cyclists (so 99.9999% of the roads in the UK).
As an occasional user of the busway, the problem is the poorly thought out bits like the raised kerbs, the poorly designed crossing points and junctions, etc all of which could be addressed relatively easily with a little thought and a little funding. Oh and of course the flooding with no signposted diversion (as a non-local who was 50+ miles from home, I had no idea how to route round the closure)
The Highways Agency called.
They want a billion miles of fence to make cycling safe on the roads.
Less brain dead hyperbole please.
I was thinking I don't recall the bus way, I guess the clue is in the name, was going to be a walking,jogging, cycle route too when it launched.
As I understand it, the maintenance track beside the busway is and always has been designated a bridleway so it was in fact always a route that could be used by joggers, walkers and cyclists.
And horses/horse riders.
Bridleway designations can be removed during planning permission of new developments and the maintenance track may well have been converted, I presume from a more standard bridleway soft ground setup, to its harder path setup on that basis.
Jolly good. Only it hasn't been and it is still a public bridleway. Feel free to look it up.
The most fundamantal element of the risk audit here will highlight that the DKE of buses travelling at 56mph extends at least 30 cm from the guide edge of the busway - which is barely the width of the concrete upstand on the cycleroute pavement
Up to 2016 I noted 8 bus derailments, with major excursions several violating the cycleroute at speed, not including level crossing crashes on Huntingdon section (one including a fire IIRC)
Could write whole treatise on this & Dunstable if someone sponsored it
Similar fatality on Edinburgh Trams after busway was 'converted' & crossing speeds raised from 10mph to 50mph!
Out of curiosity, what options do you have if you get - say - halfway along there and then find that it is closed due to
incompetent civil engineeringflooding? Do you have to go all the way back and take an alternative route? How much distance would that add to a journey?Miles, plus one of the alternatives is concrete slab road. So yes you are supposed to turn around.
The flooded section is gated off quite a way ahead, and warns of fines for going past the gates. The worn path next to the busway really shouldn't be used due to the speed of the buses.
There's a FB group where people post passability updates and a Strava one (updated less regularly). The water levels have dropped but that's taken months.
The worst, most continuously flooded section, is by the lakes and it's partly due to drainage culverts not being maintained.
No the answer is to stay off the busway, fence it or use an alternative route.
Not acceptable. If the A14 was blocked like this and I said 'find an alternative route' you'd rightly reply with some choice Anglo-Saxon expletives.
It was stupidly designed as a service road by utterly incompetent travel planners who, in absence of any active travel thinking, decided no-one would cycle that far. 🤦🏻
I cycle next to Austrian railways with no barriers, on perfectly smooth, flood-free greenways and there are a fraction of the incidents we have, over far longer distances.
We are an incompetent nation.
We can't build infrastructure properly. We're f00kwits glued to our phones while walking with cyclists. We put dogs on near invisible leads that extend across cycle paths, we ride at TT pace past small children and dogs (on invisible leads), and our arrogant car-is-king culture is the most toxic on the planet.
You can find me to chat further, with a shovel, digging a f'ing ditch at the flooded portion of the misguided farceway.
You won't find anyone in local government doing anything competent with anything to do with cycle infrastructure.
Tip top mate, tip top
Where did I say it was ok to use the busway itself or that path on the track?
I do use an alternative route and have done for months. Actually.
This is why we can't have nice things.
The temporary answer is to build a scaffolded walkway along and over the flooded path. That would probably take a day to do, would be perfectly safe, and would prevent another death whilst also keeping the buses moving. This isn't rocket science.
Exactly. There must be a special training course in local government called 'how to spend taxpayers' money on doing nothing'.
I've worked in local government before and some really don't need any training for that - they're already masters!
That was my first thought. I'm not familiar with the route, but if the flooding really isn't that deep, but it is a recurring issue that isn't close to being solved, then the next time it's dry-ish - get some kind of temporary walkway in place.
It would need a bit of planning, and someone to approve spending money on a cycle path, but I don't believe that it's particularly difficult from a technical point of view. And let's see a plan for unclogging and repairing the drainage.
Then it sounds like they need to raise the levels of the path at the areas that cause most problems.
It's hopefully an urban myth but I heard it was designed that way on purpose, so the cyclepath captured any flooding and the busway would remain clear
I believe it's an urban fact that there are zero cycle infrastructure experts employed in the UK.
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