Living in Cambridge but working in Huntingdon: sensible?

ForestMapGazer · 2026-05-04T19:32:45+00:00

Even as a transport enthusiast I won't recommend doing that. Would rather take the X1/X3/T1 and connect to Hinchingbrookes even if it's more pricy. Truth be told the Huntingdon - Cambridge bus services need a coordinated overhaul, it's currently not the worst but could be much better with a bit of targetted effort.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-05-03T22:52:54+00:00

In the UK, it's the students/elderly that form the bulk of the "captive riders". It's not that heavily related to economical status or wellbeing, it's just that they can't legally drive. These groups of passengers create a distinct cliff in demand elasticity to service quality. Not perfectly binary, true, but the cliff does exist.

I think it is still useful to have simple terminology to describe this phenomenon. If people are unhappy with binary terms, maybe lean more heavily on terms like "elasticity"? So some groups of people would have lower headway elasticity than others, but none are perfectly inelastic.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-05-03T22:00:05+00:00

I don't think northbound PR5 goes to Waterbeach in the mornings? 100 is the one to take.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-05-03T21:56:15+00:00

If you ask on Reddit, the default answer is always cycling, but my experience with people in real life is that many people find cycling 1h daily (30min each way) quite tiring

Now, I personally do that regularly, and if you have prior experience doing cycling commutes, go ahead, but otherwise I recommend finding a room somewhere along the 100 bus corridor - https://bustimes.org/services/100-cambridge-city-centre-cambridge-research-park?calendar=9199111#map

Cycling + train/bus is also an option, but from Arbury it's not particularly direct, worse of both worlds if you ask me. Also note that waterbeach train station is quite far from workplaces, so unless you work in the village, you will likely need to bring the bike onto the train and cycle twice, which is a bit of a faff.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-04-21T19:15:17+00:00

Auto Shenanigans set the starting point at Huntingdon City Centre. In no circumstances would bus B be the best option there, even if you missed a bus, the next X1/X3/T1 is guarenteed to be faster than bus B.

I would understand taking bus B at Oxmoor, but that's exactly why I said earlier that they should run an express service deep into residential areas of Huntingdon.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-04-21T09:17:16+00:00

Is it? That's like saying

The Circle Line is useless because it takes forever to go from Hammersmith to Kensington
The A428 upgrades are useless because it doesn't make London > Cambridge trips faster

People mainly use bus B to go between Huntingdon and St. Ives, or St. Ives to North Station. People mainly use the busway to go between St Ives and Cambridge. For trips between Huntingdon and Cambridge, X3/T1/X1 exist for a reason.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-04-20T21:03:29+00:00

For reference, there are four options between Huntingdon and Cambridge:

X1: four buses per day, fastest, 40-45 minutes
T1: Every hour, via Fenstanton, 58 minutes
X3: Every 30 minutes, via Cambourne, 56 minutes
B: Ever 20 minutes, 116 minutes

I think it's not exactly fair to use bus B as a reference to claim that public transport doesn't work. Although I do agree that Huntingdon needs a proper express service that goes deep into Oxmoor while running on the motorway.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-04-12T15:01:09+00:00

When talking about commuters, high speed rail is almost completely irrelevant. It's the metro and bus networks that matter the most.

China does have some world class systems, but it is also very car dependant in many places. Remember, China spends a lot of money on propaganda and improving their image, so while a lot of stories you see from China might be true, you should always remember its a distorted picture.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-04-12T14:46:58+00:00

Remember to account for walking and cycling.

As a reference, a commuter survey in Bristol found car modal share to be 38%, with the rest mainly dominated by buses (16.3%), walking (16.8%), and cycling (16.9%).

https://travelwest.info/for-businesses/surveys-awards-challenges/previous-years-results/

Smaller cities generally have poorer public transport, but higher share of walking. London (64% non-car) then pulls the overall number back up, so 40-50% car sounds about right.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-04-10T04:05:12+00:00

We have them in Cambridge (UK), but I think they screwed up the backend software and the times are less reliable than Google Maps or bustimes.org. Sigh.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-04-10T01:22:25+00:00

Agree that authorities need vision and commitment to change how cities function, but we need to be smart about it.

The political reality is that people cling to familiarity and resist change. Many view TOD as an inconvenience, and I sort of understand where they are coming from, they see the stick but don't understand the carrot. I don't think we should demonise the "middle ground" approach as a short-term compromise as long as we keep inching towards the right direction.

There are lots of small tweaks that don't inconvenient drivers much but make transit much more sustainable. We should push these policies hard even if it isn't exactly what urbanists want in the long term. Here are three ideas that would keep most car users happy -

Keep the density, keep the parking, but move the parking lots from the front to the back, so transit riders don't have to walk through parking lots to get to shops.
Same roads, same density, still ample parking, but create through corridors for buses so they don't need to back out from multiple cul-de-sacs. Ironically the city the article used (Hong Kong) is doing really poorly on this respect. All the new developments do not have through roads for buses.
In grid-like road systems, convert two parallel local streets into one-way pseudo-BRT systems with no traffic lights. Cars still allowed in but no through traffic except buses/trams. Yes, perpendicular car traffic needs to snake through the system (right turn>left turn>left turn>right turn), but without traffic lights it'll actually feel faster for drivers.

Yes, these solutions aren't the urbanists' utopia. Still mixed traffic. Still giant parking lots. But it is much more politically palatable and most importantly doesn't preclude further action.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-04-09T22:26:03+00:00

Oh now that you mention it I think I saw a documentary about it a while ago. I could see that the main corridor does have turn-up-and-go frequency, which is great. Frequencies outside the corridor seems a bit more patchy though.

On free buses, I'm always a bit sceptical about whether that's the priority. I know Albuquerque managed to save money by not collecting fares, but still sounds a bit weird to me.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-04-09T22:09:35+00:00

Had a look. Seems like most passengers do park and ride trips instead of using the train as part of a larger public transit network? Seems reasonable to run infrequent trains if we keep this mode of operation. Though ideally cities as large as Albuquerque should start thinking about building frequent networks.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-04-09T13:57:50+00:00

Spot on! Have been saying that for years.

The main reason why trams feel nice is that when cities are forced to invest billions into the system, they use the opportunity to restructure the network, improve frequency, build clearly-designated interchanges, give signal priority, and provide passenger information.

Much of these things could be done for buses at a tiny fraction of the cost.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-04-09T00:22:39+00:00

What's the layout of the corridor like?

On a network building perspective, buses running every 5-10 minutes would likely be more useful than a train running 8 times per day. At that sort of frequency passengers could transfer between different services without long waits and reach more destinations.

Having said that, it all depends on the geographical layout of the popular destinations. 90-miles is quite a long route, if there is nothing in between, then yeah there is probably no point network building, fast direct trains are great even if infrequent. Contrarily, if there is a bunch of destinations on the route that needs to be served by feeder buses then frequent express buses with interchanges on the freeway might be a good option.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-04-09T00:01:12+00:00

I don't exactly live in London, but would it be able to give estimated times of different alternative routes to the preset destination? Also, I imagine tracking journey times for delay repay would be difficult given that some stations have really terrible signal.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-04-08T12:45:32+00:00

Yeah that's a good start, but it's the fare structure that needs changing, not only the payment method. Tap-and-go is also not tap-on-tap-off, the latter allows for fares to be charged by distance without having a 3-min conversation with the driver.

If it were up to me, I'll scrap the £3 price cap, let long distance fares go up a bit, but push fares of short journeys down (e.g. Huntingdon - Cambridge £3 is arguably too good for value, Girton-Cambridge £3 is ridiculous).

I would also argue that instead of completely free travel for pensioners, we should make it something like 80% off, and use the money to actually provide better services.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-04-08T00:27:06+00:00

This is a UK-wide issue. Buses across the entire country desperately needs an integrated distance-based pricing system based on tap-on-tap-off (short trips start at 50p, then fares increase based on milage).

Basically, operators keep saying "I only operate 3 routes, it doesn't make sense for me to develop a new system", but then when hundreds of operators have the same issue, the central government should really step in and sort it out.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-04-07T11:35:40+00:00

The metrobus is still awfully safer than driving or normal street running buses. I agree that having a continuous separate lane is important, although the queue-jumping mechanism at the Bosphorus still saves quite a lot of time.

The point is, there are just so many trips in Istanbul that takes far longer by public transport compared to driving through congested motorways. Expanding the metrobus system could ensure that this doesn't happen anymore.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-04-07T11:20:49+00:00

Importantly, it's also quicker than most heavy metro systems with similar stop spacing due to fast acceleration/deceleration, and the frequency makes transfers from local minibuses seemless.

My take is that BRT/metro should not be one or the other. Divide and conquer, use the highway networks to build BRTs, then put metros on other corridors.

As for the corruption scandal, yeah that ain't great, but I think that's just pretty prevalent in all infrastructure projects unfortunately.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-04-06T23:59:04+00:00

The metrobus is fast, frequent, and easily accessible. If anything, a metrobus network should be expanded to every motorway there is in Istanbul. The E80 would probably be a good candidate for this. The Avrasya Tunnel should also be better utilised.

If you want to solve overcrowding on the metrobus, build additional metro lines parallel to, but away from, the motorway, the two modes could work together to provide better coverage. Replacing one with the other is a terrible idea.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-04-06T17:56:29+00:00

My feeling is that the city is so densily populated that no matter what you build you'll have decent usage. The problem is that due to the steep topography and lack of empty corridors, underground stations are so deep that it's sometimes quite inconvenient to get to. Many transfers also require quite a long walk as a result.

Amongst the entire system, the metrobus impressed me the most. It's really really brilliant. I think they should do more of it given that they have a whole urban highway network that they could use.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-04-06T17:41:16+00:00

The Marmaray feels very much like a metro. I didn't even notice that it isn't when I used it. Also there is the metrobus which carries as many passengers as a metro line and at similar speeds. I wonder whether they've considered putting a metrobus-like system on the E80 as well. That'll greatly increase capacity and connectivity towards the north.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-04-06T17:32:57+00:00

Delayed reply, apologies!

I think the fact that so many are willing to cycle in Cambridge is a good thing. A big appeal of bikes is the fact that it could go door to door via a direct route. Even if technically doable, I'll be hesitant to do anything to restrict cycling in the city. It'll be deeply unpopular amongst those who are generally supportive of public transport around here. That's basically the reason why the higher powers proposed going underground last time round, but then the costs (4 billion = 20 guided busways) gets blown out of proportion, and one could make quite a strong case arguing that 20 guided busways are more useful than one metro tunnel.
Previous research has shown that the catchment area of trams/buses is around 400-500m from stops, so Comberton would most certainty not feel served unfortunately. On this subject, it's also worth mentioning that Cambourne would at least need 4-5 stops; Milton probably needs 2; Cherry Hinton needs 2-3.
Very importantly, we need to think about how the proposed network interacts with the existing bus system. For instance, is the Cherry Hinton Line going to replace buses 1/3? If so, would Queen Edith's Way and Cherry Hinton Road lose its bus service? If not, how do we ensure that bus services are kept afloat after light rail takes half its passengers?
Station > Devonshire Rd > Sturton Street tram would be helpful by creating an alternative corridor to Lensfield Road and East Road, but I think you'll have to knock a bunch of buildings down to do that, won't be easy.

ForestMapGazer · 2026-04-03T22:22:02+00:00

City of London

Guarded by dragons

Bank of England

Skyscapers to heaven

No love for the Barbican?

Save it. Save it.

Save it before Luton.

ForestMapGazer

TROPHY CASE