Excellent!
what year were those forecasts for? And what year were the actuals that you quoted?
Are you one of those people that would demand evidence that a parachute can protect against injury from hitting the ground? I feel like I'm in danger of having to explain to you if and why grass is* green. If you're interested then go find out, it's not difficult! And once the upper range of a passenger forcasts like those you can find here:
https://www.parlamaid-alba.scot/cha...-questions-and-answers/question?ref=S3W-37086 (not quoting as big table) have been exceeded within seconds of a line opening AND this is then sustained, it's not really relevant when it was for; the point being demonstrated already stands! However the actuals are an average of the published figures for the three years before the line opened and for the three years prior to covid; as fair a before and after as is available.
Why isn’t Aylesbury Vale comparable?
It's a station built about 4km away from the existing station that actually served the town, and was built to serve an area that essentially didn't exist as at the time it was opened. St Neots & Cambourne on the other hand very much exist (if you require proof of this please refer to Google maps or something; please don't challenge me to provide it!) and don't have within a couple of km rail links on the corridor (you can also verify this from Google Maps or the National Rail website) where East West Rail would provide them (you can verify this from the maps on the East West Rail website).
as the busway goes past your window, you presumably see how frequent the buses are, and how busy they are.
Correct; I do. I see that they're the busiest and most successful buses in Cambridge (you can verify this because it's the only bus route in Cambridge that has a higher level of service than around 2005, where very few even have the same level of service as at that time). Most remarkably it's a route that gained an unsubsidised Sunday evening service that didn't exist before, which I suspect^ must put it into a very select group indeed. I often see people standing on them off peak, I often see them full at peak hours, and I often see them bunched.
And how full the park and ride car parks are at, say, St Ives, and the types of cars parked there. Do you really think everyone who uses it is “desperate“? If so, why?
It's a terrible way to travel, and I'm lucky to be close enough to Cambridge that I can cycle instead. I use it when I'm too ill to cycle, if I'm carrying too much to cycle, if the weather is too bad to cycle, or when about once a year I make the mistake of thinking that as it is raining it would be more pleasant to take the bus than cycle (it's not). It's horribly unreliable (you can verify this by looking at a live bus tracking app at rush hour) and on the way back it's hard to work out which is the best stop to wait at to reduce your risk of peak time A buses passing you full (you will likely never be able to verify this because any full bus you would ever see only proves that single bus was full...). You will struggle to find a regular user with much good to say about it other than that it exists. I used to commute from Huntingdon in pre-busway times, moved to a much smaller more expensive property because that was a nightmare, and on considering moving back once the busway opened had changed my mind somewhere between St Ives and Huntingdon.
*or at least, is commonly accepted to be by people that aren't shouting "prove it prove it" at anything that isn't convenient to their argument. Sometimes it isn't. But usually it is.
^I have no proof of this. It's just a suspicion, but one that I believe is reasonable in all the circumstances.
