Downslink bus - park and ride?

Bob Bayley (Surrey Ad : letters 18/Mar/16) offers us a pretty vision of a guided busway on the Downslink.  It’s good that he (or Balfour Beatty) has come up with some ideas about how this might be funded, and the suggested £25 million cost.  

This looks low; the nearest similar scheme I could find was the Cambridgeshire guided busway between St Ives & Cambridge, at 15 miles and outturn cost of £180 million.  This is double tracked, so a rough cost per mile of £6 million per mile for single track would give a cost of £48 million for the 8 miles from Cranleigh to a junction point on the A3100.  This is still lower than a tramway, which would likely cost £104 million. 

However, all is not lost - although it might be for the suppliers of guided bus track components.  The big advantage of a bus on this route would be its ability to use conventional roads at each end.  Single track tarmac, suitable width for one way working with passing places at Bramley station would cost around £10 million, and this is well proven technology.

He does not mention what route he proposes to get from the Downslink to Guildford station.  My preference would be to connect to the A3100 south of the railway bridge, using traffic lights to phase the bus into the road traffic there.  Also traffic lights would be needed at the crossings at Station Rd in Bramley and on the A281.    Rising bollards would be needed at the junctions and at start and end of the Downslink section  to prevent other traffic attempting to use the route.  At the Cranleigh end one would need to consider whether there would be enough demand from Dunsfold itself to justify the bus starting from there, or whether it would be better to have a park and ride start point where the Downslink crosses the B2130.  Or possibly both. 

These schemes tend to fall down on the demand side: people are reluctant to abandon their cars for buses, however pretty, they would often rather sit in traffic jams.  However, a park and ride scheme to Guildford rail station, with pick up points south of Bramley and near Shalford station, including a peak hours congestion charge between Shalford & Guildford, would be feasible.  Two 300 place car parks would cost around £6 million to build, ( costs from the South Tay P&R project 2010) and would not involve fencing the Downslink or major civil engineering works in people’s back gardens. The existing park and ride schemes into Guildford are popular and well used: let’s build on that success.

This is not the first time Bob Bayley has proposed such a scheme.  See http://www.cranleighsociety.org/2015/05/17/the-future-of-the-downslink/ , and I quote from there “The reopening of the [rail] line was looked at again ... in 2013, as part of Surrey County Council’s rail strategy and was still not considered to be viable.”