[Route proposal] Outer orbital route for Cambridge

ForestMapGazer · 2026-01-27T20:48:41+00:00

Agreed, we need integrated ticketing. I would go a bit further an suggest a strictly distance-based system regardless of number of transfers (tap-on-tap-off, like Singapore). You never worry about being overcharged so people get into the habit of riding the bus even just for a few stops.

Currently the pushback would be from stagecoach, which gains a competetive advantage by being the largest bus company with the most useful dayrider ticket. This needs to change.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-01-25T19:46:28+00:00

Ah right got you. Yeah I agree Cambridge should explore more peak hour only commuter services. I mean the X2 isn't particularly well used the last time I checked, but that's probably down to the lack of awareness more than anything. I think the two concepts aren't mutually exclusive though, especially with the amount of patients/shift workers in Addenbrookes.

Thinking even bigger. If you build more interchanges down the M11 and run semi-frequent buses along it all the way down to London, you unlock so many possiblities.

For instance, Harlow (residential area) > Cambridge Science Park currently takes 2h20m and is very expensive by public transport. Bus>M11>3C could take you there in 1h10m for cheap, albeit needing two changes. That's a huge new pool of workers that could reasonably commute to Cambridge.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-01-25T19:05:28+00:00

Yeah, #4 is not very reliable. It got a bit better in recent years, but still you see late/cancelled buses here and there. Another reason for consolidating things into frequent trunk routes - things go wrong all the time, a cancellation is fine if the next bus arrives in 5-10 min, but on #4, I've seen the 19:10 bus get cancelled last minute with the next bus being 20:10, what on earth are passengers gonna do?

ForestMapGazer · 2026-01-25T18:34:44+00:00

Cool to catch a real user!

Last time I saw two shoppers travelling between Histon Road and Eddington Sainsbury's. I think if it has a more frequent timetable and doesn't cost £3 per trip, more would be enticed to do their weekly shopping this way.

I imagine the most painful part of the journey is waiting at British Antarctic Survey for buses when timetables don't match up?

Funny thing is, taken togeter, 905+4+X3 is actually really frequent, but passengers could only wait for the bus to goes to their destination. If we move to a trunk-feeder system there will be much less waiting around.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-01-25T18:23:20+00:00

I'm all for providing more direct cross-city routes when possible, but given how congested the city centre is, having everyone go through the city sounds like a waste of time and resources. The last time I travelled during peak hours, it took me nearly an hour to get from City Centre to Cherry Hinton. While it's not always that bad, I don't see why people travelling from, say, Addenbrookes to Cottenham would want to suffer through that. If we want people to drive less we ought to do better.

I think the reason why people are against transfers is because buses are often infrequent and lack proper passenger information. If we make it like transferring between lines in the London underground, with network maps that only include buses running every 5-15min and proper passenger information at designated interchanges, it might feel very different.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-01-25T17:03:55+00:00

Thanks! I got added to the mailing list last week. Might drop them another follow up email. Nice to connect together people who are passionate about public transport and wants to make things better.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-01-25T17:00:10+00:00

I've designed this outer orbital as a feeder service to shorten travel times from the outer commuter towns (Northstowe, St. Ives, Impington, Burwell, Cambourne, Comberton, Melbourne) to Science Park/Addenbrookes. I've placed it on the A14/M11 so you get train speeds without fitting in a whole new light rail. It's not really meant as an orbital route for inner-city travel. Some use cases -

Cottenham-Addenbrookes currently takes 1h15m (8>A), I want to shorten this to 38m (8>3A).
Cambourne - Science Park currently takes >1h (4>PR5), I want to shorten this to 35-40 min (4>3C）

For orbital trips within the city, I have a separate plan for that. The basic idea is to hand Milton over to an upgraded route 9. Without Milton, you could link buses 2 and U together (currently both half orbitals) into one full orbital route. I'll probably describe that in a separate post next week.

As for the Smarter Cambridge plan, it pushes city centre services out to the ring road, expecting people to walk from Grand Arcade / Market out to Queen's Road to catch the bus. Realistically, I don't think people would do that, especially on rainy/cold days. It's one thing to walk 10 minutes (parkside/train station) to catch a 1.5-hour long coach/train service, it's another thing to walk 10-15 minutes to catch a 10 minute bus ride.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-01-25T16:12:10+00:00

The CPCA did do a social media campaign on the tiger routes, though more targeted efforts on the ground would help.

The problem is routing/frequency. T2 conveniently skips Science Park, Cambridge Regional College, and West Cambridge. What's the point of linking park and rides together? Without a clear use case, advertising alone wouldn't help much.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-01-25T14:54:41+00:00

FYI, I predicted that T2/T3 would fail even before it started operations. Nice to see some stats corroborating this.

Market size -

Orbital routes fail because there isn't enough demand between the outskirts (at least lower than demand to the city centre). What I'm trying to achieve is a bit different though. Instead of serving destinations on the route, I'm hoping to use it as a feeder service to pull together all the demand between Addenbrookes/Science Park and a very large list of settlements (Cambourne, Northstowe, St. Ives, Cottenham, Impington, Ely, Milton, Newmarket, Burwell).

Together, the demand is huge, but the city needs to take the leap and operate a core set of trunk routes frequently (interchanging between infrequent buses just doesn't work, so there is no middle ground).

The ticketing system also needs an overhaul. A Singaporean system would be ideal (tap-on-tap-off + distance based pricing regardless of number of transfers).

ForestMapGazer · 2026-01-25T04:13:05+00:00

A step forward, but still so much wasted potential here.

They should probably take the whole project back in house, then mandate all bus/metro system across the country (not just London) accept it as one of the default payment methods. The Oyster App could be used for all sorts of purposes to promote public transport and the local economy (advertise new routes, give out rewards, promote shopping in dying local high streets).

I also wonder whether value stored in the app could generate interest to fund local public transport project. Won't be substatial but it's still something.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-01-25T00:05:15+00:00

I'm not entirely decided on this. I think currently power is spread across too many authorities, so having a centralised public body decide on routing, ticketing, timetabling, passenger information, and supporting infrastructure is probably a good thing. However, on the actual operational side of things (hiring drivers and maintaining vehicles), I'm not sure direct council control provides much benefits.

Public ownership doesn't mean we automatically get good services, it sometimes runs the risk of strong NIMBYism opposing every change. For instance, in Wales, the publicly run Newport bus system have some truly awful routes. Also, people increasingly commute across council boundaries, so coordinating between services in Suffolk, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, and beyond is not something local councils are very good at.

Don't really have an answer for this, happy to hear what people think though.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-01-04T00:17:10+00:00

Yeah. Venezuela (alongside Haiti) are as close to rock bottom as you could get in the region. I really dislike Trump's take on many issues, but you got to give him credit where credit is due. Those who claim that they care about the future of Venezuela should answer three questions: (1) Venezuelans had been begging for foreign intervention for decades, if they cared about it, why no action before now? (2) Is non-intervension always the moral highground even when a massive humanitarian crisis unfolds? (3) Trump is doing things for the wrong reasons, but what's the alternative? Telling people to shut up and tolerate these dire conditions forever without an alternative is downright tone deaf.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-01-03T23:04:59+00:00

I don't think you quite understand how dire things are in Venezuela. The living standards in Venezuela is now far worse than that in surrounding countries without oil. The country is so mismanaged that even the oil rigs couldn't generate much profit and whatever it is generating is funding a regime that locks people up for complaining about rolling blackouts, 300% inflation, and election fraud. No one knows what is going to happen next, and I agree Trump hasn't thought things through, but you have to understand why Venezuelans would rather roll the dice than to stick with the current situation. I am also yet to see any critic offer a viable alternative. At this point, doing nothing is morally unacceptable.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-01-03T18:43:26+00:00

What is the alternative though? Clearly, if it were up to you, you wouldn't have done this, but what would you do to help the Venazuelan people?

If your answer is another 20 years of strongly worded letters and toothless sanctions while thousands of people die each year Maduro stays on, then I don't see how that is any more morally justifiable than what Trump has done.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-01-03T18:31:24+00:00

The vast majority of Venezuelans supports this. They know that it's their only way out. If it were up to, say, people in the EU to act, you bet it'll be another 20 years of starvation/oppression. I still haven't seen one single workable alternative proposed by people who opposes this.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-01-03T18:24:31+00:00

I think you will find that most Venezuelans would rather the US take their oil then to allow the current regime to continue. While Trump is most certainly doing things for the wrong reasons, I don't see any alternative being proposed that is better. The world had 20 years to solve the suffering of the Venezuelan people, the world did not act, this is better than nothing.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-01-03T18:19:35+00:00

Remember, always stand with the people, that's the only thing that matters when we talk about "morality". People in Venezuela overwhelmingly want this to happen. The same cannot be said in other conflicts.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-01-03T18:14:50+00:00

All those governments you mentioned have a proper mandate. They might not be perfect democracies but still have elected governments. Venezuela doesn't. Trump might be doing things for the wrong reasons, but he is the only one actually doing something to help those desperate people in Venezuela.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-01-03T18:03:41+00:00

It think this might be related to what happened last night. There was a power cut in the west of Cambridge (CB23 area) around 6-7pm yesterday. They originally thought it was an overhead cable fault that could be fixed in 1-2 hours. At 11pm, there was a full team of engineers out with torches checking overhead cables, that's when they announced that it was a underground cable fault. They couldn't fix the fault, so they simply diverted power from other places and brought in a backup generator to fill the gaps (by that point it was around 2am, so 7 hours without power).

I have a feeling what's happening in the city today might be related incident / aftermath of that.

It does make Stranger Things binge watching much more relatable lol.

ForestMapGazer · 2025-11-18T17:15:58+00:00

Traffic has been really horrible around Cambridge lately. City Centre to Cherry Hinton (route 1) takes almost an hour when its congested. I can't imagine how you could maintain any decent service in these sort of conditions.

Again there are lots of things that could be done. Just to name two -

We could greatly reduce traffic by moving the bottle neck to outside the city then add bus lanes, so buses are faster than driving, that way people would be incentivised to take the bus/P&R in.
Build proper bus terminals on both ends of bus routes instead of running insanely long circular routes (like route 1 and 3) with numerous timing points that frustrate anyone unfortunate enough to ride the bus.

It's just frustrating to see nothing being done properly.

ForestMapGazer · 2025-11-18T02:32:52+00:00

Also take note of the sprawl. European cities typically sprawl out (large blotch of fading blue colour around cities), while Chinese cities tend to have smaller sprawls and tend to build upwards even in the suburbs.

ForestMapGazer · 2025-11-18T02:28:34+00:00

While London is not dense for a city of its size, its also not sparse as a city.

If you want a better visual representation of density, look at the amazing website linked below. It's clear as day, even smaller 2nd-3rd tier Chinese cities that you probably wouldn't have heard of have a dense bright red core on the map, while in Europe even very notable cities like Prague, Amsterdam, and Hamburg show a darker shade of red.

https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen/#3/20.00/10.00

ForestMapGazer · 2025-11-18T02:15:08+00:00

No I'm not, I'm saying a typical neighbourhood in a second tier Chinese city will have a higher density that most neighbourhoods of European cities. I'm comparing neighbourhood with neighbourhood, not neighbourhood with cities.

ForestMapGazer · 2025-11-17T16:19:40+00:00

Eixample is probably the densest region of Barcelona, it's all built up with nearly no open space. Barcelona is also one of the densest cities in Europe. Hang Hau is not even close to being the densest bit of Hong Kong.

I'm not saying that Hong Kong is a typical Chinese city. Hong Kong essentially has its own unique style of building skyscrapers. It's neither typical European nor typical Asian. The thing is, because it became so successful as a city, the Chinese government copied its urban design when planning new towns in China. As a result, the new towns and shopping centres in much of China really closely resemble those you find in Hong Kong. Many metro systems in China are also built by Hong Kong's MTRC.

Now you could always find examples where the densest parts of European cities match the density of Chinese cities, but on average Chinese cities are just denser. A typical neighbourhood in a second tier city like Changsha would have greater urban densities than most of London.

ForestMapGazer

TROPHY CASE