On Saturday 08 May 2021 Dr Nik Johnson was elected as the new Mayor of the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority. We congratulate Dr Johnson on his election and wish his predecessor James Palmer well.
Prior to his election, Dr Johnson diagnosed the “CAM Metro”, flagship of James Palmer, as suffering from a number of serious conditions such as ‘expensive’, ‘unrealistic’, ‘unproven’, ‘high risk’ and ‘undeliverable’. Dr Johnson’s prognosis, perhaps offered after consideration of surgical options, is that the patient’s condition is terminal.
We concur with Dr Johnson’s diagnosis.
We supported the patient in its early development, with the original Cambridge Connect / Railfuture proposals for a general metro network and tunnel broadly adopted by the Combined Authority and the Greater Cambridge Partnership after the Mass Transit Options Study in 2018. At this point the CAM Metro literally went off the rails, adopting an unproven experimental form of rubber-tyred bus as the way forward, and expanding its network to ~150 km, 12 km of complex tunnels with four portals and two underground junctions, all to be delivered within nine years by a new company called “OneCAM”.
We decided to focus our own efforts on continued research and development of our more pragmatic proposals based on light rail.
We applied laser surgery to matters of cost, practicality and deliverability in the new light rail scheme we published in early April 2021 , while still ensuring that the scheme was transformative. Now that the CAM Metro seems likely to be quietly laid to rest, we hope that the trauma of the experience will not dissuade the new Mayor from considering more viable and more healthy options for the future.
