I say "yes" to congestion charge

Anyone else sick of sitting for ages in morning and evening traffic , increasing daily , with most cars only having one person in them . The bloody annoying east road and gonville place , the constant crashes on the A14 , closeing it for 2 days at a time .

The ever increasing LUNCHTIME TRAFFIC .

Fuck it , bring in the conjestion charge .

saying that you're 'sitting' in them makes you sound a little hypocritical, unless you have a full car and towing a trailer full of illegal immagrants behind you.

and you say you drive during lunch too, tut, tut ;)

Congestion Charge is fine providing.
You are only charged for entering the city not leaving.
The charge is say 07.00 to 16.00 so you wont be charged for coming back from work from a village out side Cambridge.
No charge at weekends.
alternatives could be to charge single drivers lots of money, and to credit people with four people in the car, slightly less for three etc....
All this costs money.
Any way all will be resolved when the guided bus comes into play (not)

If this ever goes ahead I will ask my employer to foot the bill as it will cost me 100 quid to drive into cambridge each month. I they refuse I will quit my job and I would give a flying toss if I ever worked in Cambridge again !!

I know why not also charge me for walking the pavement , breathing fresh air and talking to people . Then we can all kiss goodbye to the fucking world !!!

Sake

Take the bus....

What from Ramsey to Cambridge catching 2 buses ? LOL I dont think so either. Besides Ive done my bit for bus travel in my life thanks

i work on the science park which is just about within the congestion charge area so would be paying £100 or so extra a month to drive to work. a lot of people in the office have said they'd spend that money catching the train to london instead. so i s'pose there'll be less cars on the road as less people will want to work in cambridge.

i live 15 miles away from cambridge and have to catch 2 buses and a train to get to work and it takes nearly 2 hours door to door opposed to 25 mins when i drive. public transport just aint a feasible alternative unfortunately.

The only way I could get behind this would be if there was a transparent and effective investment in the bus system, but that hardly seems likely.

In fact, in complete misstep with supposed envoronmental concerns, the price of a dayrider is going up again.

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blow your nose after walking down east/mill road/ regents street in rush hour, yes we need a congestion charge, but we need a better bus and train service first

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When I become a millionaire, I shall quit my job (that requires me to drive - I would rather cycle), move into a house where my kids can have their own bedroom, use public transport or taxis, do all my shopping at small independent retailers - using my new-found wealth and consequent leisure time, and devote my energies into doing good works and being creative. Until then, much as I hate it, I am stuck in the real world of the daily grind to tread water financially, evil supermarket chains, piss-poor woefully inadequate and expensive public transport etc etc

I'm in favour of a congestion charge in general, but not the one proposed. I'll have to switch jobs when it comes in - my other option is to spend two hours getting from my house in Cambridge to my job in Bury St Edmunds on public transport, and at least twice as much money if I travel by train. If Cambridgeshire County Council can make improvements to public transport that also extends into Suffolk, great, but I somehow doubt they can.

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At the city borders, right up to the A14, and they propose to charge people for leaving it as well as entering it.

One of the primary schools near where I live (very close to the A14) has mooted the idea of changing its hours so their teachers don't get hit by the charge and look elsewhere for jobs.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cambridgeshire/content/articles/2007/07/17/cambri...

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Yeah, I don't have a problem with the London charge, but then I never understood why anyone would drive into central London anyway.

I think the sensible thing is to have a big car park on the edge of Cambridge where people can leave their cars, then cycle to work from there. Whats wrong with that? The existing park and ride would even do the job.

If they get the zone right this would work.

I've lived all over Cambridge and have cycled upt o half an hour to get to work- its far quicker than driving the same distance in the rush hour.

The way I see it is, if people want to go gallivanting off to that London with its bright lights and fancy big city ways,they deserve to pay through the nose. Best to stay at home and mix with your own people.

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I thought about it once, when I could have moved to UCL for a job. UCL is convenient in that you can walk to it from Kings X, but it would have cost loooooooooooads.

Thats what the PSP is for though- two hours of gaming a day on the commute. :-)

how much does the rush hour cambridge to london commute cost a month? 500 quidish?

Not including tube about £350 a month

£350 a month for such a pants service..... They should pay you for the suffering

"At the city borders, right up to the A14, and they propose to charge people for leaving it as well as entering it."

I loved the explanation for the charge being levied against those leaving the city. It ran along the lines of :

if we don't charge city residents, it'll make a Cambridge address more desirable and could lead to house prices being artificially increased.

I think that boat already left and Cllr Johnson wasn't on it.

With the current bus services (which will allegedly be greatly improved, I know) I calculated that my trip to work (currently 20-30 minutes roughly) would take roughly an hour and a half each way. And a lot of that would actually be spent heading in the opposite direction to where I'm going, simply to double back on myself when I transfer buses. So that's roughly an extra 10 hours a week spent travelling to and from work. And I thought that as a society we were supposed to be readdressing the work/life balance.

The trouble is, we do reeeeeeeeeeeeally need to reduce congestion. How else can you do it but to stop people driving?

I guess they need to really improve the public transport, but you can only do that once the roads are quieter.

they could build a mono-rail

Thing is they're on about improving transport INTO the city, but for people who work outside of the city no extra provision is being made and they're being stung with the congestion charge.

I'm with the mono rail idea, but only if Homer Simpson agrees to be a driver.

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Pedestrianise (sp?) the whole of the historic city centre. That way, peoples behaviour has to change. The proposal as it is has less to do with reforming peoples travelling habits than it has to do with expecting them to carry on regardless but pay more for the privilege. The idea that Cambridges City centre is struggling to withstand a 21st century level of traffic is a no brainer. Of course it is, Cambridge hasn't moved with the time's, that part of it's 'charm'.
Much of the traffic that'll get hammered coming into the zone now, will be commuters coming into the science park and similar developments that are on the very outskirts of the city. Developments that were designed and built in recent years, certainly recently enough that future levels of congestion really should have been a consideration at the time. A cynical man might believe that the congestion charge is simply a nicer little earner thats taking advantage of poor town planning that's failed to address the needs of the city for the last two decades.

Improve the capacity and reduce the cost of Park & Ride. This is at least one simple step that could realistically improve things without the need to spend the next 17 years digging up pavements and grass verges.

And do something about school buses. Make them free, or something. It's so much quieter on the roads during the holidays. Schools generate a lot of human traffic that is possible to manage. All those kids are heading to same location, they will all be starting around the same time, they will all be leaving around the same time. Unlike dealing with vast amount of traffic generated by employee's of business, it's the predictability and the inflexibility if the school timetable that makes it something that can at least be tackled.

"Thing is they're on about improving transport INTO the city, but for people who work outside of the city no extra provision is being made and they're being stung with the congestion charge."

Amen to that.

yeah I agree about people going out of the city. There are two options i guess:

1) Park your car on the edge of the city during the week, and cycle out to it.
2) Move out of Cambridge so you are near your job.

Neither of these is ideal. (2) is difficult when you are a couple and one of you works in the city. You could live halfway between the two jobs though?

"Park your car on the edge of the city during the week, and cycle out to it."

Don't you think that we'll have a big enough problem with drivers parking on every available inch of road in villages such as Milton before walking the rest of the way to get around the charge?
Not that the idea of leaving your car miles from home, overnight, in carparks that don't currently exist should be poo-pooed. The city's car thieves for one would undoubtably give it their full support. A one stop shop. :-)

(2) is difficult when you are a couple and one of you works in the city. You could live halfway between the two jobs though?

Me and simon_b fall into that category - if we moved to Bury, we would have exactly the same problem but in reverse, plus he usually works longer and later hours than me, so it works better if we live here. We could move to Newmarket, I guess, but then we would both be adding to traffic, or would both be struggling with bad public transport. Eventually I will have to find a job in Cambridge, since it's already pretty costly to travel and I feel like a hypocrite every time I harp on about congestion and pollution and all that.

The trouble is, I do think there should be fewer cars on the roads - I just don't really know what the solution is. Free school buses would definitely help though!

"Move out of Cambridge so you are near your job."

This is a bit more workable. Apart from my fear that it plays into the whole 'Cambridge for the wealthy, peasants should know their place and move out to the sticks' sort of conspiracy that I've always thought the University (if no-one else) was capable of.

I just hope that landlords don't cotton on the increased need for accommodation (especially low cost) in the villages just outside the C-zone and sieze the opportunity to drive their prices higher.

I work for a company outside the city which puts on a subsidised bus service for employees. With the congestion charge looming they're looking at adding extra stops to its route. I imagine other companies will need to do the same if they want to keep their Cambridge employees.

Marvellous. The Council causes Congestion by putting traffic lights everywhere, traffic calming measures, (for which it seems to have unlimited funds) And at the end of the day when they seize up every flow of traffic, they want to charge "US" for congestion....The perfect money making scam...