Harriet Dolby is a Parliamentary Researcher, a former President of the Oxford University Conservative Association and a team member of Next Gen Tories.
In 1847, just two years after the project was approved, the first steam trains ran from Cambridge to St Ives, with tracks cutting across fenland and elevated above the Great River Ouse. From Ironbridge to the London Underground, Crystal Palace to the Natural History Museum, this regional feat of great Victorian engineering was just one of the many endeavours that made our nation great.
Over a hundred years later, I was growing up in Cambridgeshire, and the guided busway was always a novelty – taking us at ‘high speeds’ from the nearest market town of St Ives to Cambridge.
For those outside of East Anglia, the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway is the longest guided busway in the world. It stretches 25km, and connects many of the smaller villages, towns and new developments. A guided busway is a dedicated private road that uses an external system to control the direction that the bus moves in – a tad like a tram. To avoid other vehicles using this, there are car traps, gaps in the ground they can fall into.
Niche is probably one of the first words that comes to mind when describing this mode of transport, but it has made a significant positive contribution to the local area. Due to its ‘guided’ nature, it can travel up to 55 miles per hour in a more direct route, making the journey competitive as an alternative to car driving.
This is reflected in the statistics too, with over two and a half million journeys being made in the first year – 40 per cent more trips than expected – while traffic on the nearby A14 road was reduced by 5.6 per cent over the same period.
As unsightly as they can be, this project also created a new home for MAMILs (Middle Aged Men in Lycra) to avoid seeing their families on a Sunday, with a bridleway running alongside it. Thus, in a place dominated by pathless country roads, this has enabled a safe route for people to exercise, or, as I often see, even rollerblading.
Taking the course of the old Cambridge and Huntingdon railway station, the route is framed by beautiful former quarries, now nature reserves, fields and housing developments – a pleasing sight to the fellow YIMBYs on board. This new development is facilitated, in part, by the busway itself, enabling children to go to schools, and their parents to work in Cambridge, in a county where owning a car really is a necessity.
However, like so many other aspects of life today, the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway has been the victim of steadily increasing red tape. Whenever tragedy strikes, the instinctive response of many in politics is to make sure something like that never happens again. Yet those small, often sympathetic changes accumulate, creating an environment in which one can do very little.
The guided busway is a case in point. Sadly, between 2015 and 2021, 3 people were killed in collisions with the bus. As a result, Cambridgeshire County Council, who oversee the service, have been fined £6 million and have been forced to make adaptations. Namely, the speed limit has been reduced to 30 miles per hour, increasing the journey time by around twenty minutes.
Of course, I must reiterate that these incidents would have caused deep hardship to their respective families, but these changes are truly disproportionate.
Every day an average of five people per day die in car crashes and accidents, in England we tend to see a more pragmatic response, through lowering limits around schools and in high-risk areas. However, we must resist the temptation to go further, as Wales has done, for example, by reducing all urban areas to 20mph zones.
This guided busway speed change destroys its utility, making it relatively less attractive compared to driving. As a result, we have seen an average of 8 per cent fewer passengers since this change, meaning more cars on the roads.
Yet this pipeline from tragedy to well-intentioned, poorly considered regulation is routine.
We have seen this most significantly in the building sector, when, scarred with images of the high-rise tower in flames in the richest borough in London, drastic decisions were made. Post-Grenfell, the new Building Safety Regulator has rejected around 70 per cent of applications for so-called ‘high-risk buildings’ at the second stage. That’s on top of the Building Safety Levy, and the two-staircase rule for buildings over 18 meters high.
Together, these regulations have led to a slowing of building, meaning the cost of building a home has increased by around 40 per cent over the past five years, whilst in London alone, we have seen the number of flats and houses being built decline by 26 per cent since 2021.
Back to the busway, however. In response to those accidents, new fencing has been proposed, costing an estimated £12.5 million. Again, at first look, this seems sensible. But yet again we see the same sluggishness and proceduralism as with almost all public spending projects in the UK.
One county councillor involved on this said that “this section requires detailed ecological and design considerations as well as public engagement and discussions with key stakeholders before these works commence.”
Fences aside, the busway itself was subject to great difficulties in its conception and creation.
It faced 2735 objections, for a bus running along an existing former railway route. Some people clearly have too much time on their hands! We are seeing a similar story again with the proposed extension to the route, in Southeast Cambridge and Cambourne to Coton, causing much upset from landowners, environmentalists and busy bodies.
It is clear that our nation is overregulated, and that the economy has been stagnant, in per capita terms, since 2008. Fish disco, bat tunnel and newt surveys have all become have become synonyms for the problem.
For a country so conditioned to politeness and apologising, this attitude clearly permeates through our building and planning system. It is something we should be ashamed of, and it is holding us back.
The Chinese comparisons are humbling to say the least. In September 2025, China opened the world’s highest bridge, twice the height of the London’s Shard. It was built in just three and a half years. Yet, despite commencing only a year later, we are still building a motorway overpass near Manchester, one which is just 34 meters long. Likewise, China has built 56 new nuclear reactors since 1995, the same year our newest reactor became operational.
Or if we look closer to home, tram projects in Britain are 2.5 times more expensive than in France, on a per mile basis- meaning in the last 25 years France has built 21 tramways, 805.3km worth, whilst we have failed to build one in Leeds, spanning just 27km.. Whilst each mile of HS2 will cost four times more than each mile of the Naples to Bari high speed line, and eight times more expensive per mile than France’s high speed link between Tours and Bordeaux.
HS2 has been a national embarrassment: costly, overrun, and shortened. Need I say more? Yet we can see parallels with the construction of the guided busway too. It cost £35 million more than expected, opened two years late, and did not extend all the way to the hospital in Huntingdon.
So where does this leave us? Cambridgeshire Guided Busway, a quirk in the county, and for some, a point of pride. However, it is a micro example of the sclerotic nature of our nation, the sluggishness of our growth, an unwillingness to build, and a resistance to making quick decisions. If this is the attitude to a relatively small extension to the guided busway, in what is supposed to be the ‘Silicon Valley of Europe’, maybe I should move to Dubai.
Harriet Dolby is a Parliamentary Researcher, a former President of the Oxford University Conservative Association and a team member of Next Gen Tories.
In 1847, just two years after the project was approved, the first steam trains ran from Cambridge to St Ives, with tracks cutting across fenland and elevated above the Great River Ouse. From Ironbridge to the London Underground, Crystal Palace to the Natural History Museum, this regional feat of great Victorian engineering was just one of the many endeavours that made our nation great.
Over a hundred years later, I was growing up in Cambridgeshire, and the guided busway was always a novelty – taking us at ‘high speeds’ from the nearest market town of St Ives to Cambridge.
For those outside of East Anglia, the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway is the longest guided busway in the world. It stretches 25km, and connects many of the smaller villages, towns and new developments. A guided busway is a dedicated private road that uses an external system to control the direction that the bus moves in – a tad like a tram. To avoid other vehicles using this, there are car traps, gaps in the ground they can fall into.
Niche is probably one of the first words that comes to mind when describing this mode of transport, but it has made a significant positive contribution to the local area. Due to its ‘guided’ nature, it can travel up to 55 miles per hour in a more direct route, making the journey competitive as an alternative to car driving.
This is reflected in the statistics too, with over two and a half million journeys being made in the first year – 40 per cent more trips than expected – while traffic on the nearby A14 road was reduced by 5.6 per cent over the same period.
As unsightly as they can be, this project also created a new home for MAMILs (Middle Aged Men in Lycra) to avoid seeing their families on a Sunday, with a bridleway running alongside it. Thus, in a place dominated by pathless country roads, this has enabled a safe route for people to exercise, or, as I often see, even rollerblading.
Taking the course of the old Cambridge and Huntingdon railway station, the route is framed by beautiful former quarries, now nature reserves, fields and housing developments – a pleasing sight to the fellow YIMBYs on board. This new development is facilitated, in part, by the busway itself, enabling children to go to schools, and their parents to work in Cambridge, in a county where owning a car really is a necessity.
However, like so many other aspects of life today, the Cambridgeshire Guided Busway has been the victim of steadily increasing red tape. Whenever tragedy strikes, the instinctive response of many in politics is to make sure something like that never happens again. Yet those small, often sympathetic changes accumulate, creating an environment in which one can do very little.
The guided busway is a case in point. Sadly, between 2015 and 2021, 3 people were killed in collisions with the bus. As a result, Cambridgeshire County Council, who oversee the service, have been fined £6 million and have been forced to make adaptations. Namely, the speed limit has been reduced to 30 miles per hour, increasing the journey time by around twenty minutes.
Of course, I must reiterate that these incidents would have caused deep hardship to their respective families, but these changes are truly disproportionate.
Every day an average of five people per day die in car crashes and accidents, in England we tend to see a more pragmatic response, through lowering limits around schools and in high-risk areas. However, we must resist the temptation to go further, as Wales has done, for example, by reducing all urban areas to 20mph zones.
This guided busway speed change destroys its utility, making it relatively less attractive compared to driving. As a result, we have seen an average of 8 per cent fewer passengers since this change, meaning more cars on the roads.
Yet this pipeline from tragedy to well-intentioned, poorly considered regulation is routine.
We have seen this most significantly in the building sector, when, scarred with images of the high-rise tower in flames in the richest borough in London, drastic decisions were made. Post-Grenfell, the new Building Safety Regulator has rejected around 70 per cent of applications for so-called ‘high-risk buildings’ at the second stage. That’s on top of the Building Safety Levy, and the two-staircase rule for buildings over 18 meters high.
Together, these regulations have led to a slowing of building, meaning the cost of building a home has increased by around 40 per cent over the past five years, whilst in London alone, we have seen the number of flats and houses being built decline by 26 per cent since 2021.
Back to the busway, however. In response to those accidents, new fencing has been proposed, costing an estimated £12.5 million. Again, at first look, this seems sensible. But yet again we see the same sluggishness and proceduralism as with almost all public spending projects in the UK.
One county councillor involved on this said that “this section requires detailed ecological and design considerations as well as public engagement and discussions with key stakeholders before these works commence.”
Fences aside, the busway itself was subject to great difficulties in its conception and creation.
It faced 2735 objections, for a bus running along an existing former railway route. Some people clearly have too much time on their hands! We are seeing a similar story again with the proposed extension to the route, in Southeast Cambridge and Cambourne to Coton, causing much upset from landowners, environmentalists and busy bodies.
It is clear that our nation is overregulated, and that the economy has been stagnant, in per capita terms, since 2008. Fish disco, bat tunnel and newt surveys have all become have become synonyms for the problem.
For a country so conditioned to politeness and apologising, this attitude clearly permeates through our building and planning system. It is something we should be ashamed of, and it is holding us back.
The Chinese comparisons are humbling to say the least. In September 2025, China opened the world’s highest bridge, twice the height of the London’s Shard. It was built in just three and a half years. Yet, despite commencing only a year later, we are still building a motorway overpass near Manchester, one which is just 34 meters long. Likewise, China has built 56 new nuclear reactors since 1995, the same year our newest reactor became operational.
Or if we look closer to home, tram projects in Britain are 2.5 times more expensive than in France, on a per mile basis- meaning in the last 25 years France has built 21 tramways, 805.3km worth, whilst we have failed to build one in Leeds, spanning just 27km.. Whilst each mile of HS2 will cost four times more than each mile of the Naples to Bari high speed line, and eight times more expensive per mile than France’s high speed link between Tours and Bordeaux.
HS2 has been a national embarrassment: costly, overrun, and shortened. Need I say more? Yet we can see parallels with the construction of the guided busway too. It cost £35 million more than expected, opened two years late, and did not extend all the way to the hospital in Huntingdon.
So where does this leave us? Cambridgeshire Guided Busway, a quirk in the county, and for some, a point of pride. However, it is a micro example of the sclerotic nature of our nation, the sluggishness of our growth, an unwillingness to build, and a resistance to making quick decisions. If this is the attitude to a relatively small extension to the guided busway, in what is supposed to be the ‘Silicon Valley of Europe’, maybe I should move to Dubai.