Cambridge transport follies home page
March 2003
Cambridge University opened a "Park and Cycle" site on Madingley Road, about a mile from the city centre, on 26 April 2001. The university has removed more and more car parking from its central Cambridge sites, and this car park was built on the premise that people who live outside, and west, of Cambridge and work in the city centre would be happy to drive to here and then cycle (or walk or take a bus or taxi) to work.
According to the university website the site cost around 1.5 million pounds and provides 292 car spaces (and also 150 cycle lockers). As can be seen in the photograph (a sunny weekday in spring during full term) the site is mostly empty (it was around 10 percent full). At its current occupancy level each space cost around 50000 pounds. That's very expensive asphalt.
Why is the site so empty? Well the local government believes people should be forced to cycle or take a bus to work. In particular it believes that nobody should be able to park anywhere near where they work no matter how much space there is (except for senior managers, of course). Hundreds of university employees work within a hundred meters of this car park (on the West Cambridge site). None of them are allowed to use it, as an explicit condition of planning permission. For a city that is supposed to be full of smart people, Cambridge makes an awful lot of dumb decisions.
Eventually the site could (should) be better utilised by its intended audience. For now it would make sense to allow people who work in West Cambridge to park there until demand picks up. There is even a possibility of dual use: people are generally happier to cycle in good weather (e.g. in the summer) than in bad weather (e.g. in the winter), so the local workers and the city centre workers are natural users of the car park at different times, the former in bad weather and the latter in good weather. Unfortunately common sense has little bearing on transport policy in Cambridge (or elsewhere in the UK).
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