October 2016 → October 2026 · The case in eight facts ↓
Twelve cycle crossings planned. None built.
54 km of new traffic-free path planned. 6 km exists.
Compulsory powers built the busway. Never a greenway.
Fifteen months in court over a meeting nobody minuted.
Villages consulted three times. Almost nothing built.
Highway land got done. Everything else didn't.
Developers built better routes, faster.
£108m committed. Money isn't what's missing.
A Looking for Growth Cambridge campaign for safe cycle routes between Cambridge and its villages
Finish the Greenways.
Twelve safe cycling and walking routes into Cambridge were planned in 2016. Ten years on, one is finished.
The greenways link Cambridge with the villages around it, from Waterbeach and St Ives to Sawston, Linton and Comberton. Each is meant to be continuous, wide, smooth and mostly away from traffic: safe enough for a twelve-year-old cycling to school, quick enough for a commute. They were planned in a 2016 review for the county council and taken on by the Greater Cambridge Partnership, which funds and builds the area's transport schemes. We're campaigning to get them finished as planned, not watered down.
Is there one near you?
Three asks
Build all twelve routes as planned in 2016
Including the bridges, underpasses and off-road paths that have been cut, using the powers the county council already holds to secure the land.
Faster, and with more built for every pound than the last decade managed. Greater Cambridge is planning for 50,000 more homes; developer contributions should help pay for the routes their residents will use.
What was cut →Put a date on every route
Publish a delivery date for each greenway, with the Executive Board reporting publicly against it every quarter.
What would fix it →Finish the Chisholm Trail
The cross-city cycle route from Cambridge station to Cambridge North. Phase 2, which joins it up, still has no construction date.
The Chisholm Trail →
And when a greenway is finished, sign it. Not before. The 2016 review wanted every route named and signed; a greenway sign should mean the route is done.
Why this network matters
Cambridge has the highest level of cycling in the United Kingdom. The villages around it do not, and the reason is simple: between almost every village and the city there is a fast road with no separate path, and the gap is usually only a few kilometres.
The 2016 review put the case plainly, corridor by corridor. Fulbourn is seven kilometres out and sits beside one of the city's largest employment sites. Barton is within easy cycling distance on a congested road. Comberton Village College draws pupils from a dozen scattered villages, most of whom cannot safely ride there. These are not marginal journeys. They are the everyday trips that decide whether congestion gets worse as the area grows.
The evidence that people will use good routes is already on the ground here. The busway path between St Ives and Cambridge is nineteen kilometres long, four metres wide and sealed, and people commute its full length daily — well beyond the five miles traditionally assumed to be the limit for cycle commuting. On a single autumn weekday in 2023 the county's surveys counted 1,639 cyclists on the busway path at Trumpington between 7am and 7pm. The Chisholm Trail's Abbey–Chesterton bridge carried an estimated 650,000 cycle journeys and 325,000 walking journeys in 2025 — almost 4,000 people on busy days, up nearly a third in a year. Where the infrastructure is genuinely good, demand follows.
Build the routes and people use them. The problem was never demand.
Abbey–Chesterton bridge on the Chisholm Trail: about 650,000 cycle trips in 2025, its fourth year open. Adams Road: up to 3,000 cyclists a day. Burrell's Walk: around 2,500 a day. Busway path at Trumpington: 1,639 cyclists in twelve hours on the 2023 survey day, and 1,175 at the A14 underpass. These are exactly the kind of traffic-free, properly surfaced routes the greenways were meant to extend across the county.Sources: GCP — Chisholm Trail's record-breaking fourth year, December 2025 · GCP — Greenways update, November 2025 · GCP Joint Assembly, February 2025 (PDF) · Cambridgeshire County Council — Traffic Monitoring Report 2023, table 41 (PDF)
Greater Cambridge is planning for very substantial growth. If the transport network between the villages and the city is not improved alongside it, that growth arrives as traffic. The greenways are the cheapest part of the answer, and the part that was supposed to be easy.
Where it stands
Every intervention the 2016 review proposed, tracked to its status today. 98 items across twelve corridors.
- Built and open13
- Built, already needs repair1
- Under construction1
- Approved, construction due6
- In design or planning25
- Scaled back10
- Paused on cost5
- Not in current programme37
- Interventions tracked98
What has been delivered
- Horningsea — finished 2025, the first and only route fully open.
- Linton sections 1 and 2 — Addenbrooke's to Babraham Research Campus, and Little Abington.
- Barton — village works, and a new 3m A603 path from the M11 roundabout to the city edge.
- Comberton's city end — Coton village and Adams Road. The Coton path to the M11 bridge, widened earlier, is already cracking.
What was quietly removed
- Every new river crossing — the Cam at Baits Bite Lock and at Hauxton, the Great Ouse at Holywell.
- The eastern links that would have joined three corridors into a network.
- Swaffham Prior, descoped in February 2026.
- The Sawston railway corridor, paused on cost.
- Fenstanton, which the review gave its highest priority of all the St Ives links.
One route doesn't appear in either list above: the Chisholm Trail, the cross-city spine that would connect several greenways to the station and Cambridge North, isn't actually one of the twelve Greenways — it's a separate scheme with its own, even longer history. Campaigner Jim Chisholm first proposed it in 1998. Phase 1 opened in December 2021, twenty-three years later; phase 2, which closes the loop to Cambridge North, still has no start date. More on the Chisholm Trail →
The case in eight facts
Each of these is sourced and checkable. None of them is an argument against building the network — they are the argument for finishing it.
New bridges or underpasses were proposed at twelve places. Ten years on, not one has been built.
Between them those twelve places needed fourteen structures. Two crossings were downgraded to road level: the A1307 at Hildersham, where signals have been built, and Long Road on the Comberton route, where a parallel crossing awaits planning. Two survive in live schemes but remain unbuilt. The rest — including every crossing of a river — are paused, unfunded, or absent from the programme altogether. The full list →About 54 km of new path away from the roads was proposed. About 6 km exists.
Of that, about 2.6 km was built by the programme after 2016; the rest was already under way when the review was written. Almost all of what is missing needs land outside the highway boundary. Every off-road route →The best cycle route in Cambridgeshire was built with compulsory powers. Every route built by negotiation is unfinished.
The nineteen-kilometre busway path exists because the Guided Busway's 2005 Transport and Works Act Order assembled the corridor compulsorily. The greenways were left to voluntary agreement, and landowner consent is still the stated blocker on Waterbeach, Swaffham, Bottisham and Haslingfield.Fifteen months in the High Court over a conversation nobody wrote down.
The Grantchester route was approved in January 2024 and challenged in April 2024. Judgment came in April 2025, dismissing the claim on every ground. The case turned on conflicting recollections of an undocumented meeting in October 2022.We asked the same villages the same questions three times, and built almost nothing.
Most corridors were consulted in 2019, again in 2022 or 2023, and several a third time since. Consultation without delivery does not build consent — it spends it.Highway land got done. Everything else did not.
The 2016 review predicted this in terms: "The temptation will undoubtedly be to prioritise schemes that are easily deliverable and particularly those where all the work can be done in highway land. There is however a danger that these will not be the best routes in terms of anticipated numbers of users."A housebuilder delivered a better cycle route into Cambridge than the transport authority did, on the same corridor, in a fraction of the time.
Waterbeach New Town's developer built a new bridge over the A10 and upgraded the historic Mere Way byway to Landbeach as a condition of planning — open in 2026, a few years after the new town's masterplan got going. The Greater Cambridge Partnership's own Waterbeach Greenway, whose job this was meant to be, has been in design since 2019 for the equivalent leg into central Cambridge. Marleigh, a 2016 housing permission on the city's eastern edge, did the same: wide cycleways through the estate and a new path to Ditton Lane, open by 2023. There it stops. An underpass at Ditton Lane, put forward since 2016 as an improvement, was investigated and rejected in 2023 as poor value for money. We think it should be reconsidered.£22.9m is budgeted for next year alone, and roughly £108m is now committed to the twelve routes — 30% more than was approved for eleven of them in 2020, for a programme that has since lost every bridge. The constraint has not been money. It has been how slowly and inefficiently money turns into infrastructure.
Sum of the "agreed budget" column in GCP's 2026/27 budget papers — our addition, not a published GCP total. Finishing the whole 2016 network will now very probably cost more than is committed; it would have cost far less had building started in 2017. How the budget grew as the scope shrank → The Greater Cambridge Partnership passed its government gateway review in June 2025, unlocking the final tranche of a City Deal worth up to £1bn over fifteen years.News
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Looking for Growth Cambridge launches Finish the Greenways
Twelve greenways planned. Ten years. One finished. We're launching a campaign to get the rest built, and we need your name on the petition.