Huntingdon buses

I’ve done a metro-style map of all the scheduled buses that call in Huntingdon.

You can download it as a PDF here.

I used the Metro Designer at tennessine.co.uk/metro to make it. If I was to do it again, I’d decide on how I was going to handle corners and so on right from the start, but I think it looks reasonably good. The difficult bit is Huntingdon train station, Millfield Park, and Huntingdon bus station.

At first glance, this looks like a pretty comprehensive system. Unfortunately, it isn’t.

For instance, auite a lot of buses only call at Millfield Park in one direction and I did originally try to show that, but it became too complicated. For a lot of buses, Millfield Park is the closest stop to the train station, even though they then go past the train station. It shows what a missed opportunity the redevelopment of the train station was – we could have had buses stopping right outside the station. There is a bus stop pretty close to the train station (and in sight of it, unlike Millfield Park) and buses could stop there if their routes were tweaked.

A lot of the frequencies are pretty low. While the B runs every twenty minutes, the least frequent bus on there is once a month – in fairness, it’s intended for people in Bedfordshire villages to have the occasional trip to Huntingdon and St Ives. A lot of the buses run once or twice a day. Bus times don’t line up well. There are bizarre gaps, like the 904 (which comes from Peterborough via Sawtry) not stopping at the Ermine Street Business Park between 0737 and 0907 on weekdays, when people might be wanting to get to work there.

It’s not always an easy system to understand. Some of the routes are effectively two separate runs – the 9 stops at Greenfields and Filbert’s Walk, but you can’t actually get a bus from Greenfields to Filbert’s Walk unless you go to St Ives bus station and wait for it to start again. That would take an hour and twelve minutes to travel less than five hundred metres.

It’s quite hard to get around Huntingdon by bus. There isn’t, for instance, an easy way of getting from Stukeley Meadows to St Peter’s school, or from Hartford to the industrial estate. If you include the nearby settlements of Godmanchester, Brampton, the Stukeleys, and Alconbury Weald, it’s even harder. Stukeley Meadows, the Hinchingbrooke housing and business estates, the Ermine Street industrial estate, St Peter’s industrial estate, and Newtown don’t have any bus stops. If you live at the end of Orthwaite, you’re 800m from the nearest bus stop.

If we’re serious about getting people out of cars, we have to offer good alternatives. If you’re going to work, a bus that connects the train station to centres of employment would seem like a good idea. Similarly, if we want people to avoid driving into the town centre, the bus has to be a realistic alternative. The further people have to walk to the bus stop, the more likely they are to just jump in their car.

This map is not geographically accurate. Quite a lot of Huntingdon is not near a regular bus service. If you live near the B and are going into town (as I do), it’s great – a bus every twenty minutes. I will add here that the B falls between two stools in that it’s trying to be a local bus service and a connection to St Ives and Cambridge, with the result that it takes an hour and a half to get from Huntingdon bus station to Drummer Street bus station in Cambridge.

Another result of not being geographically accurate is how close some of the bus stops are. The bit I know best is near the Coneygear Centre, where there are four pairs of bus stops within 800 metres of travel, but California Road also has lots of stops close to each other.

I do wonder if a local hopper bus around Huntingdon and the towns I mentioned above could work. It might not be economically self-sufficient, but could be socially and environmentally beneficial.

I didn’t include the excellent Tiger On Demand service as I couldn’t work out how to show it – if anyone has any ideas, do let me know!