Stagecoach East has brought forward planned changes to the Busway timetable, which will see peak time buses from the village go more frequently to central Cambridge but less frequently to Addenbrookes and Cambridge Rail Station.
The new timetable, originally scheduled to be introduced in June, will now start on 19 May. The company is making the changes in an attempt to tackle overcrowding on the route from St Ives through Impington to Cambridge.
Central Cambridge service improvements
Busway routes A and B are due to provide a combined 10-minute frequency along the main section of the guided Busway track during the morning peak.
Bus users from the Impington Busway stop will therefore see changes that significantly improve rush hour services to central Cambridge. From mid-May, 15 Busway buses from Impington are timetabled to reach Cambridge between 7.30am and 9.30am, compared with 10 at present.
Hospital and station trips affected
The news is less positive for those commuting to Addenbrookes. Service A departures from the village, which currently run every 15 minutes in the mornings, will be reduced to every 20 minutes.
Similarly, services to Cambridge Rail Station, which currently go every 15 minutes, will in future run 20 minutes apart. Buses to Cambridge North Station will continue to run every 20 minutes as before.
Student service
The current ‘C’ service to Hills Road and Long Road Sixth Form Colleges will end. Instead Route B will be extended to serve the colleges Monday-Friday, with the same frequency but at slightly different times.
The timing of services to the Science Park, also serving Cambridge Regional College students, will change too, but again, with roughly the same number of buses.
Darren Roe, Managing Director of Stagecoach East, has accepted that current services are failing some bus users. He said: “We have a responsibility to continually improve services for our customers and to reduce the cost of service. We made [previous] changes in the expectation of doing just that, but the fact is that they did not work.
“We deeply regret that we have not given some of our customers the service they have a right to expect, so we have worked around the clock for the Traffic Commissioner to accept these early changes, so everyone will be able to get where they want to go.”
View the new Busway timetables here. Find all Stagecoach East bus times and timetables here.
