No Date for the Guided Busway
Have I missed something?
It all seems exceptionally quiet on the busway front!
Dealing with the Cambridge Busway Overspend
The long-running saga of the Cambridge Busway seems no nearer a conclusion, with no opening date announced.
But today the Cambridge News claims that a million pounds of taxpayers’ money could be spent on the busway.
Taxpayers’ money could be used to cover an overspend on the guided busway.
Cambridgeshire County Council has set aside £1 million of funding for local transport and community safety projects in a contingency fund.
Opposition Liberal Democrats say the cash is being set aside for the guided busway but the Conservative- run council has said the funding cuts are “not related specifically” to the project, although if developer contributions fall short, it could be.
Projects affected by the reductions for 2010/11 include safety schemes cut from £1 million to £800,000, the Cambridge Access Strategy cut from £600,000 to £447,000, community transport cut from £200,000 to £50,000, Market Town Strategy schemes cut from £1,575,000 to £1.4 million, and local bus infrastructure in Cambridge and Huntingdon cut from £975,000 to £680,000.
It looks like the busway may be on the point of being like an out-of-control bull in a china shop.
The Cambridge Busway Goes Quiet
I have a Google Alert on “Cambridge Busway”.
There has been little or no news thrown up since Christmas.
So is it ever going to open? Probably! But when?
Cambridge Busway Art
It’s good to see that Cambridgeshire County Council has it’s priorities right on the busway.
They’ve spent a lot of money on an art work by a German artist for one of the unopened Park and Ride sites.
I wonder how many councillors and officers of the council visited the artist in Germany? Hopefully none, but someone please tell me, so I can post it here.
Also, has anybody any idea when it will open?
Crystal Palace 3 – Ipswich 1
Selhurst Park is a dump. It looks like it’s been nicked from all sorts of places and to me sums up why as a North Londoner, you rarely venture far south of the River. Whoever’s idea it was to put the river in the centre of London had a good one, as it creates a proper barrier between what is worth seeing and what is not. Selhurst Park is definitely in the once seen, why did you bother category.
Selhurst Park
This picture shows the bad view from the visitors’ stand, but it doesn’t do justice to the old wooden seats, the cramped conditions, the bad screen and the general dereliction of most of the ground. The pitch wasn’t good either.
The football was ruined by the sending off of Jon Stead. The foul was bad, but as he’d just been upended by a Palace player I suspect, he was too angry to think about what he was doing. It was the sort of foul though, that some referees would have been lenient with.
So I left a few minutes before the end and struggled to get back to civilisation, eventually taking a bus and then a train from Penge. And that was cold, but then all trains south of the Thames seem to be much colder than those north of the river.
I’ve now woken up and found I have a splinter in my palm. From those dreaded wooden seats no doubt!
Busway Humour
You really know you have made it, when you start appearing in humorous Christmas lists. In today’s list in the Cambridge News, number 10 is as follows.
For £116 million you could build a guided busway . . . although Santa could be a little late delivering it.
No delivery date has been set either!
Busway Farce Goes National
The national press has been rather quiet on the Cambridge Busway. Perhaps, here in East Anglia, we’re rather irrelevant or perhaps Cambridge is just somewhere you pass by on the way to your second home in Norfolk. The truth about Cambridge is actually much more important, as without it we’d all be further into the do-dah than we are.
But today, the infamous signwriting error has been reported in both the Daily Mail and The Telegraph. It’s even in the Odd News on UPI.
Obviously, spelling is much more important news than a badly executed project with massive cost overruns.
The Cambridge Gutterway
This letter to the local paper talks about the green credentials of the Cambridge Busway. In fact the writer is not very impressed, but as he is the chairman of CAST.IRON, which is a group that campaigns for a real rail service on the route, this is probably to be expected. On the other hand, it certainly looks like that group may well have been right on a lot of things, including costs.
But what I like is his use of the term “gutterway” for the busway. After all it’s effectively a long concrete channel, that has generated large amounts of cardon dioxide and absorbed lots and lots of money.
Only on the Cambridge Busway
The news today just adds to the shambles of the Cambridge Busway.
How can you trust an organisation that can’t spell only?
The Anonymous Widower 