Can Cambridgeshire cope with growth plans?

Cambridgeshire is seeing unprecedented pressure for jobs and housing growth. But will plans to dual a busy road help or hinder the creation a modern, efficient transport system for the county? The Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority and the Greater Cambridge Partnership have published the outcome of a major study examining future travel patterns between […]

It’s raining A10 consultants reports – can they come up with a decent solution?

With so much development planned in Cambridgeshire, transport consultants are having a field day. Are they being asked the right questions, and are they brave enough to give an answer that might work? As part of their local election campaigns in 2016, some prospective county councillors dreamed up a scheme to turn the A10 from […]

Digging a trench in a swamp – Why widening the A10 won’t tackle congestion

An active campaign is underway calling for an upgrade to the A10 between Cambridge and King’s Lynn via Ely. At the centre are Conservative Party county councillors who claim the A10 is unfit for purpose and that “doing nothing is not an option”. The campaign is wrong headed. Kings Lynn to Cambridge is not a […]

Is Arctic Live the most depressing programme of all time?

Last night the BBC accidentally captured the essence of our dystopia. Ostensibly a programme about polar bears, Arctic Live, had a lot to say about the darkness in the soul of man. Unsurprisingly for something airing at 9pm on BBC2, I don’t think is what the programme makers set out to achieve. More likely, the […]

EU referendum: Stratified, distant, undemocratic – and that’s just the voters

Here’s a startling finding from a recent YouGov poll on the EU referendum: “There was a Leave lead of about 30 points among people who left school at 16 and a Remain lead of 33 points among those who were in education beyond the age of twenty.” This is not to make a crass or […]

Choking: Roads policy that’s straight out of the 1980s

The Government’s belief that it can build its way out of congestion comes straight from the disastrous roads policy of the late 1980s – but this time it’s air pollution, not Swampy, which stands in its way of the plans for more tarmac. At Prime Minister’s Questions last week Ben Howlett, the MP for Bath, […]

Why contempt of politicians is bad for us all

The power of low expectations. Here we have a national opinion poll earlier in the month that shows a slim lead for the Conservatives. Given the recent rash of negative stories concerning the governing party, this might be somewhat of a surprise – but it shouldn’t be. While all Governments have their travails, it’s been […]

Car dependency: how Government policy is leaving millions behind

Earlier in the month, the Department for Transport published a new analysis of how we use the country’s roads. The image that emerges is of continuing and deepening dependence on cars. The Government is actively supporting this through public spending and taxation policies. But the negative impacts are not being equally felt across society, with […]

Network Rail – breaking up should be hard to do

The Government is reportedly planning to break up Network Rail and replace it with a dozen mini Railtracks. Rather than pulling the railways to bits and selling them off, we should be creating a network operator that can deliver the bigger and busier railway the country needs. First, a reality check. No one would argue […]

Transport needs to end the cult of the individual

Big money is pouring into more roads and electric cars as a solution to our transport woes. If we really want to tackle the impact our journeys have, we need to face down the cult of the individual. Our collective opinion of transport seems to embody John-Paul Sartre’s maxim about hell being other people. The […]