Cambridge South is not your ordinary edge of town railway station. Gone are the hundreds of car parking spaces, limited service patterns and middle-of-nowhere characteristics. Cambridge South seeks to be a centre, and draw in passengers from afar, connecting Trumpington, Europe’s largest biomedical centre, and thousands of proposed homes with the rest of the country. Situated between the Cambridge Biomedical Campus and Trumpington, this new station can be the flagbearer for modern, sustainable public transport.

Many railway stations offer services akin to a stubborn compass. You’ll have no difficulty going east or west, but north or south as well? Don’t even bother suggesting it. Cambridge South however, becomes part of a railway network, not a line – with services going as far as Birmingham, Norwich, Brighton, and even Oxford once East West Rail is built. This connectivity is boosted by the frequency of services – with up to 9 trains per hour between Cambridge and Cambridge South. Want to travel abroad? Direct links to Stansted Airport and London St Pancras International make anything possible. Locally, the station will also be served by several bus routes – connecting with the existing busway and a new proposed busway to the A11 travel hub.

“Cambridge South seeks to be a centre”

In recent decades, many railway stations have become ‘Park and Rides’ in all but name. Cambridge South removes this possibility by not including a general car park – though there will be accessible blue badge parking and taxi ranks available. This has drawn significant criticism which overlooks the fact that Cambridge South seeks to be a transport hub, not a lifesize game of Tetris for SUVs. A glance at similar stations across the country suggest that Cambridge South’s ambitions are justified: London Waterloo, which served 67.5 million passengers in 2023-24, only offers 27 car parking spaces.

If Cambridge South were to provide a surface car park, valuable adjacent land would be wasted. Like Cambridge North, it will offer 1,000 cycle storage spaces. Yet, at Cambridge North, a single car parking space consumes more than 21 times the land area needed for one cycle space. This sea of asphalt would come to dominate the station, removing any sense of place or community. The space that parked cars take up in our urban environments is no less than a tragic robbery. In theory our streets and stations are public areas, but with increased car ownership, they’ve been degraded into nothing more than a car park.

Cambridge South is sustainable in other ways that make the Daily Mail wince – with wildflowers on the station roof, rainwater catchment capabilities, and solar panels. Network Rail even targets a 10% biodiversity increase in the nearby Hobson’s Park, saved from being smothered under concrete by a land-hungry car park. The station will encourage a shift away from car usage toward public transport, cutting air pollution, congestion, and carbon emissions.

“We should be grateful to live and study in a city that promotes and encourages sustainable development”

Despite disruption caused by COVID-19, passenger numbers for Cambridge North railway station are already 16% higher than forecast – indicating that the 1.8 million passengers predicted to use Cambridge South each year may be a severe underestimate. But this is no reason to worry.

A busier station would signal to authorities that similar projects are worthwhile, strengthening our public transport network and encouraging even more riders. Fortunately, Cambridge South is large enough to cope with any additional demand, as other four-platform railway stations across the UK regularly serve millions more.

All this combines to a railway station designed to serve a growing international city. We should celebrate projects that promote and encourage sustainable public services like Cambridge South. In many UK towns and cities, car dependency, strong NIMBY movements, and a lack of political will hamper any ambition.

It seems that Cambridge South is right to be ambitious, but with the rapid growth of Cambridge, and the international outlook of the Biomedical Campus, only time will tell if the station is ambitious enough.