And, of course, battering one's way into Cambridge is absolutely fine.“The C routes deliver nothing but blight along the corridor” as quoted by Cllr Kindersley.
Cllr Kindersley and the local Parish Councils don’t even try to deny this is not about NIMBYism. It will be of no surprise to learn that according to the the council website, Cllr Kindersley lives in one of the potentially affected villages... Who knew?
Such an apples-to-oranges comparison! Connacht has fewer people than Cambridgeshire (let alone the rest of the area E-W rail serves). And the people in the Varsity Arc are also far more likely to take the train if they can - they are richer, more urban, more likely to be in the tech industry, etc. Rather than linking a couple of lines that see a few trains per day, it links lines that see a few trains an hour (and the 'few' is bigger in every case).
Yes, that was a bizzare comment that doesn't understand the economic geography of modern Cambridge. A trip on the (vastly underserved) Fen Line would easily dispell any myth about lack of shortish train journeys to Cambridge.
Looking at an aerial view it seems that the airport to Cambridge chord could be doubled quite easily, but was the tunnel approach to the station built to only take a singe track? If so then I despair. Only laying the track you can afford is one thing, but stitching yourself up forever by not making provision for a second track somewhere as difficult to upgrade as a tunnel strikes me as shortsighted in the extreme.
It's also about isolating the scheme and making it less complex. It's similar to Crossrail going to Maidenhead - a desire to avoid paying for additional stuff that aren't core parts of the scheme.
Oh dear! Yet again we have a situation of a pressing public transport need and the experts telling us that any solution is definitely in the "too difficult" box. Forget the need for congestion and pollution reduction, or decarbonisation of transport, it just can't be done.