Greater Cambridge · the greenway network · 2016–2026
Twelve routes were planned.
One is open.
This site is for building the greenways. Greater Cambridge is being asked to absorb tens of thousands of new homes and jobs. The villages around the city already send most of their traffic into it on roads that cannot take more, and the people who would cycle in — including most children travelling to secondary school — have no safe way to do it.
A connected network of traffic-free routes between the villages and the city is one of the few pieces of infrastructure that is cheap, popular, and deliverable within a decade. It was planned in 2016. Ten years on, almost none of it exists. That is an argument for getting on with it, not for giving up on it.
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. Waterbeach is five miles from central Cambridge and closer still to the Science Park. 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. The Shelford to Biomedical Campus path carries very large numbers. Where the infrastructure is genuinely good, demand follows.
Build the routes and people use them. The problem was never demand.
Two of the busiest cycle routes in Cambridgeshire — the busway path and the Shelford to Addenbrooke's path — are exactly the kind of long, traffic-free, properly surfaced corridor the greenways were meant to extend across the county.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. 97 items across twelve corridors.
- Built and open14
- Under construction1
- Approved, construction due6
- In design or planning31
- Delivered differently6
- Paused on cost5
- Not in current programme34
- Interventions tracked97
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 the A603 path into Cambridge.
- Comberton's city end — Coton village and Adams Road, England's first cycle street.
- Chisholm Trail phase 1 — the cross-city spine, opened 2022.
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.
The case in six 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.
Fourteen new bridges and underpasses were proposed. Ten years on, not one has been built.
Three were replaced with crossings at road level. 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 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."£22.9 million is budgeted for next year alone. Money is not the constraint.
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.