What happened

2016: a plan that was right

In October 2016 Cambridgeshire County Council published a review of the greenway network around Cambridge. It was based on fieldwork across twelve corridors, and it was a good piece of work: it surveyed what existed, identified where the gaps were, and set a clear standard — routes should be "attractive linear corridors away from traffic", at least two metres wide and sealed, and where they followed roads those roads should carry fewer than 2,000 vehicles a day.

It also named the three things that would decide whether any of it happened: securing rights over land, delivering good crossings of roads, rivers and railways, and getting through planning. On the first it was emphatic. Land negotiations were "the priority", and they needed to be run across the whole network at once, because the same landowners recurred on different routes.

The plan was sound. What followed is a delivery failure, not a planning failure.

This matters for how the next decade is argued. The routes were well chosen and the standards were right. Nothing that has happened since is a reason to want less.

2017–2020: adoption, and a slow start

The Greater Cambridge Partnership adopted twelve of the corridors as its Greenways programme. Engagement ran through village halls in 2017 and 2018, formal consultations followed in 2019, and design consultants were appointed in 2020. Over 80% of consultation respondents said they would use their local greenway. In June 2020 the Executive Board approved St Ives, Comberton and Melbourn together, at £7.5m, £9m and £6.5m; Waterbeach and Fulbourn had already been approved.

The routes were named, funded and designed, and the public wanted them — that much was real progress. But three years to get from adopting a programme to appointing the people who would design it is not, in itself, fast. The comparison below shows how slow.

In the three years it took Greater Cambridge to go from adopting this programme to appointing the consultants who would design it, Copenhagen's equivalent partnership of city and satellite councils went from founding the collaboration to opening a finished, seventeen-kilometre route connecting one of its towns to the capital.

Copenhagen's Cycle Superhighways partnership — now 27 municipalities, co-funded by the Danish state through dedicated cycling funding rather than competitive annual bidding — was founded in 2009. Its first completed route, Albertslund to Copenhagen, opened in April 2012. The National Audit Office has separately found that English councils navigate 36 separate, mostly annual, active travel funding streams — a structure that rewards easy, incremental schemes over decisive ones.

Sources: Cycle Superhighways — about the partnership · National Audit Office — Active travel in England · Committee of Public Accounts — Active travel in England

2021–2023: the ambition starts coming out

Then the deletions began, and they followed a pattern. Anything requiring a structure, or land outside the highway boundary, got reconsidered — and reconsideration almost always meant removal or a cheaper substitute at road level.

The Ditton Lane underpass on the Bottisham route was investigated and abandoned: utilities, flood risk and land acquisition cost meant it "would therefore represent poor value for money", and signalised surface crossings were substituted. On the Linton route, the recommended bridge over the A1307 near Hildersham became an at-grade signalised crossing, which was built. On Comberton, the grade-separated crossing of Long Road that the 2016 review had assumed — noting that a concrete box could be installed relatively quickly — became a parallel crossing on the surface.

Meanwhile the Waterbeach route was replanned. The railway alignment was abandoned in September 2023 because the earthworks needed to raise it above flood level would cost too much, and the riverside towpath was ruled out as flood-prone and indirect. The Haslingfield route was replanned more drastically still: the Hauxton bridleway, the new River Cam bridge at the former treatment works and the Trumpington works all disappeared when the alignment moved to run through Grantchester instead.

2024–2025: litigation, inflation and descoping

Grantchester objected — 73% of village respondents against, while the consultation overall ran 64% in favour — and after the Executive Board confirmed the route on 4 January 2024, the parish council filed for judicial review. The claim was heard over three days in March 2025 and dismissed in full on 14 April 2025. Fifteen months had passed and nothing about the scheme had changed.

Cost inflation did the rest. The Cambridge South East Transport busway — which by now carried the Linton route's A11 crossing — was deprioritised and remains without confirmed funding. The Sawston greenway's disused-railway link, the entire reason for realigning that route, was paused. The St Ives spur to Over was suspended. In February 2026 the Swaffhams Greenway was descoped into the Swaffham Greenway, and Swaffham Prior fell out of the programme.

2025–2026: delivery, of a kind

Real things have been built, and they should be acknowledged. Horningsea was completed in 2025 — the first route fully open. Barton got its A603 path widened and a village-wide 20mph limit. Coton and Adams Road were finished, the latter as England's first cycle street. Three full business cases were approved on a single day in July 2026.

But look at what those schemes consist of: footway widening, raised tables, resurfacing, street lighting, 20mph zones, and improved crossings at road level. All of it useful. Almost none of it the traffic-free corridor between villages that the word "greenway" was meant to describe.

Ten years, twelve routes, thirteen budget lines — and one finished greenway.

The delivered schemes are overwhelmingly work that could be done inside the existing highway boundary. The parts that needed a field edge, a landowner's signature or a bridge are, with very few exceptions, still on paper.

Where that leaves the network

A greenway network is only worth what its weakest link is worth. A village route that stops at a river it cannot cross, or ends where the highway verge ends, does not deliver the journey it was designed for. The 2016 review understood this — it warned specifically that building the Cam bridge at Baits Bite Lock without the Horningsea to Lode path, or the reverse, would sharply reduce the benefit of either. In the event neither was built.

That is the situation the next decade has to fix, and it will not be fixed by consulting the same villages a fourth time.