The Government is donating £92million of our money to help build a busway which will wreck the existing Cambridge-St Ives railway line.

The taxpayers' money will be handed over to Cambridge County Council which has defied local and national calls for the railway to be reopened and pressed ahead with a stupid plan for a concrete busway, laid over the rail line.

It appears property developers, bus companies and wrong-headed officials in the Government Office for the East of England have won their battle.

BBC TV Look East reported on Friday that it is "hoped to deliver the scheme in two years time".

The busway will "facilitate" house building along its route and is supposed to relieve traffic problems on the A14 road.

The promoters of this ridiculous scheme believe local car drivers will leave their cars at home and use the bus, thus freeing up the road for more lorries.

The same alliance seems to have been successful in blocking plans for an East West rail route.

Giving the go-ahead for the busway will block the East West Rail Link Bedford-Cambridge route option via the former Sandy north curve, Huntingdon and St Ives.

Rail promoters CAST-IRON which hoped to bring trains back to the Cambridge-St Ives route are "extremely disappointed".

Cambridgeshire County Council plans a meeting on 18 July to vote for local funding for the busway.

Edmund Nuttall Ltd has already been selected as the council’s preferred bidder to build the busway. Nuttall are responsible for the "successful" Fastway guided busway in Crawley which did not use a railway route.

Democratically unaccountable and anti-rail officials at the Government Office for the East of England will be pleased at the outcome as they have been trying to get one of these "busways" off the ground for years.

They will be trying to implement similar schemes at Luton-Dunstable and Corby.

The "public interest" members of Network Rail should be protesting in the Network Rail board of directors to prevent disposal of rail assets in this way.

The decision begs many questions. Who will operate the guided buses between Cambridge and St. Ives? Presumably Cambus (Stagecoach) or Whippet.

What about competition issues? How will the road track costs be recovered? If it was a rail scheme, track access charges would be raised by Network Rail.

How will access into Cambridge city centre be achieved (free of traffic congestion)?

The total cost of the scheme is probably about £116million. The Government has "given" £92.5million for the scheme, but the rest of the money comes from "developers".

While it appears that new Transport Secretary Douglas Alexander seems prepared to waste money on the unproved technology of the busway, he is still not providing the cash needed for East-West rail which is the obvious scheme for the future based on technology perfected over more than 100 years.

Of course this is the same government which refused to provide cash for tram schemes at Liverpool, Leeds and South Hants.

The guided bus scheme has been driven by Gallagher Estates' plan to build 8,000 homes at Northstowe. With half-baked "public transport" schemes like this, the car will remain king in Cambridgeshire. Northstowe

A sensible rail option is here: cast-iron

Of course the Cambridge-St Ives line could become part of the East West rail link. It would need to be extended to Huntingdon with a new bridge over the River Ouse, a connection with the East Coast main line, and a short new piece of line between Sandy and Bedford. It would give a wealth of connection opportunities and begin to challenge the supremacy of the car for cross-country journeys.

A map giving East-West rail link connection possibilites can be downloaded from BRTA map 732KB.

The current strategic option however is for the East-West rail link to go from Cambridge to Bedford via Hitchin. East West Rail