Bristol Transport
This week, public transport in Bristol and the overall lack of vision the city has for transport! Strap yourself in, its a personal passion.
Car usage in Bristol has always been very high, with a correspondingly high air pollution level. But the main barrier to reducing this is the difficult to use, disjoined, inefficient public transport network.
Unlike London we do not have the option of cheap and regular buses or magical underground trains. Cars are the only option. But why? Why haven't any part of the Government, or any of our local MPs, local Councillors, or over the last 40 years MEPs and the EU sorted this out? This is the easy question to answer, they're utterly useless.
Given that Bristol was home to Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a visionary genius in terms of transportation and linking the world with cutting edge technology, surely we can keep this legacy going?
Here are my suggestions.
Key Location
Firstly look at the location of Bristol.
80 miles from Exeter and the key route into the South West England holiday destinations. 40 miles/45mins from Cardiff, a capital city, now toll free to get to. 80 miles/1.5 hours from Birmingham, the UKs second largest city. 80 miles/1.5 hours from Reading, the main UK location for inbound American tech firms, 100 miles/2 hours from Heathrow the UKs main airport, but also located the right side of the UK for New York where local flights are re-starting to from the local airport. 120 miles from central London, the 2nd capital city within easy reach. 120 miles isn't far off an average American daily commute so in the scheme of things, its close to London.
Bristol sits at a natural cross roads for these key UK locations.
Rolls Royce and British Aerospace
In the 1970's Bristol was the location of these two key firms who, in partnerships with French companies built the first commercial supersonic jet, Concorde (clearly something you can do without being in a political union with France and other European countries.)
This was in Filton, 5 miles north from central Bristol and right on the crossing point of the M4/M5 motorway, a place where one of the last remaining Concorde is now kept in a museum (not a location I would have picked, I would have it along the Harbour somewhere with one side overlooking the water).
One legacy of this was an over extended runway. One that now is ideally suited to taking the large superliners aircraft being built. When the companies left, this land should have been secured for an international airport. Runway pre-built, perfect location with pre-built transport links.
New Bristol Airport - Filton
With the airport here, motorway links North, South, East and West are literally at the end of the runway. That's if you drive.
But it also happens to be 2 minutes from Bristol Parkway railway station. An electric monorail could take you from the airport immediately to Parkway with another electric train going from there to Bristol Templemeads, central Bristol within 15 minutes after bag collection.
Current journey times from Parkway to London is 1.5 hours reducing to an hour after electrification. An hour and a half from bag collection you could be checking in at a central London hotel without any further fossil fuel use. Templemeads stops at more places but is reducing to 1 to 1.5 hours after electrification.
Current Bristol Airport - Lulsgate
The current airport sits in a field on a windy hill 10 miles south of Bristol with barely any connections to the city. Car is the best way to access it. Coach is currently a £10 return. Better than car parking costs, but still a pain.
This airport also need an electrified train coming directly into Templemeads shuttling back and forth, one which could have linked both airports.
Bristol Templemeads
Both the above points bring us to this. Bristol Templemeads. An absolutely beautiful cathedral of transport. Brunel had the vision to bring people from London Paddington, that he designed, to Templemeads, that he also designed, by GWR, that he also designed, on a track that he personally surveyed on horseback to find the best rail route between London and Bristol.
He then saw Londoners being taken to stay at this hotel in Bristol.
The following morning, they would be taken to the Royal Hotel in Portishead until one of his brand new boats would take you rapidly to New York.
The SS Great Britain slashed travel time from the UK to New York to 14 days. You could leave London and be in New York within the month, maybe closer to a fortnight. Had no other faster travel been invented Portishead would have become the connection to Manhattan with the worlds elite living in both locations.
Fast forward to now. Now we seem to struggle to get a bus from Templemeads to anywhere, even within Bristol.
The original sheds Brunel designed and used are now.... car parks!
Why these sheds cannot be restored and used as a bus and coach station, along with taxi ranks is beyond me. A bus from here going out to every location around Bristol turning Templemeads into a central hub from where every location in the South West can be reached.
The roads around Templemeads could easily prioritise bus lanes into the area, allowing buses priority out of the train station linked with both of my airports, or even just the single real airport we have.
Transforming these sheds with modern stained glass windows would, in my view, create Bristol's very own version of a mini Grand Central Station.
If you are wondering where cars could be parked while we are still using them, surely this space by Templemeads could be a large multi story car park?
Roads
There have been some improvements in road layouts in Bristol in recent years in my view. Thought has been put into getting the traffic into the centre and pushing it straight out. It does cause congestion, but congestion is unavoidable anyway due to the volume of cars on the road and we can no longer increase road capacity, so the next best thing is to push people straight out and encourage them not to drive, but this brings us back to needing an alternative, which at present, there isn't much.
The Old City
The closure of the old city is working in my view, reducing traffic within the area and hopefully bringing an increase in air quality (remember that poor air quality kills more people every year than Covid ever has, including young people and young people with asthma, but for some reason we don't care about this as we do with Covid.)
The quiet brought by the new bus gates into the old city:
Pink Frog Street
Another road closure I would make is Frog Lane and part of Frogmore Street which runs underneath Park Street close to Banksy's "Well Hung Lover":
In Lisbon, Portugal they have a street painted pink which is closed to traffic and used for bars and restaurants. Its a big Instagram point in Lisbon:
I think we could do something similar in Frog Lane. The street is already home to a number of bars. The street could be partially covered from the weather allowing it to become an outdoor drinking and eating space. Covid safe fun for the future.
Trams
As this article from the Bristol Post in 2017 explains, Bristol used to be the home of electric trams. Given that Bristol is a hill city, like San Francisco, we should look to reinstate them, going from Templemeads, up Park Street and Whiteladies Road, then out to Cribbs Causeway. The other direction to Bristol airport. And eventually, perhaps a loop like this taking in Gloucester Road:
The Bristol Post article mentions politics with South Gloucestershire Council about trams running to the shops at Cribbs Causeway. I do think that a £5 parking charge should be compulsory for these places that rely on and encourage a fossil fuel journey to reach and perhaps the Councils should merge to ensure the revenue from Cribbs is not a disincentive to more fuel efficient travel.
Bike Lanes
Bike lanes used to be cursory white lines painted in gutters but Bristol has improved these in recent years. Now in many cases there is separated lanes from road, and specific lanes away from traffic. Having Sustrans HQ in Bristol helps with the volume and quality of bike lanes.
I can cycle 13 miles from central Bristol to Portishead without being on any central Bristol road, and not having to use the road until around 6 miles in, when I will have to cycle less than a mile through houses in Pill, then another 6 miles later when I hit Portishead. Out of 13 miles nearly 11 miles are not on road, which is pretty incredible infrastructure.
There is a further point that needs to be solved to make bike lanes make work better and that is education. Schools have been pressed into obsessing over league tables and have dropped fun and practical things like cycling proficiency. Cycling and bike lane usage should be compulsory in schools. Every British child should know the following:
Bike lanes are for bikes and scooters.
Pedestrians should look out for and stay out of bike lanes.
If a pedestrian strays into a bike lane they should expect a bike to ring a bell and they should then leave the bike lane immediately.
This is the policy adopted in Netherlands and it works in cities like Amsterdam, bikes know they can use the bike lanes without pedestrians straying all over them.
Electric Scooters
Bristol has been trailing electric scooters provide by Swedish company Voi. On balance I support this initiative. They are not perfect, but we need to change and adapt and move away from fossil fuels, so this is a small step thats worth taking.
The downside is that they can be left around the city. The company should ensure that individuals are held accountable for this to minimise this.
I have no sympathy with drivers who don't like being behind them on the road. Given that Bristol is a 20mph zone, these scooters are not much slower than that. Be patient and accept that you have to drive slowly through the city. The city belongs to people, not to cars.
I don't think that scooters and people colliding should lead to scooters being banned any more than we are prepared to ban cars for killing people, rather people should be educated on how to use and stay out of bike lanes.
The Future
My personal view of the future for cars is that their days are numbered. We already know that Governments have announced the end of fossil fuel engines. We all think that we will replace them with electric vehicles and the infrastructure needed will just evolve over time. I don't think this will happen in the medium term. Instead, I think AI will combine with electric vehicles and replace drivers altogether.
At present, we own cars. 90-95% of the time it does nothing other than taking up space on the planet just in case we want to use it. When we do, we sit it in alone and go somewhere, as does everyone else, individuals in large metal boxes. This is a huge waste of resources, whether its the wasted plastics needed to make us all a personal box to sit in, wasted electricity making them go, and wasted space as they all sit on the road or a drive doing nothing most of the time.
We have yet to experience cars driving themselves, but the technology is already here. Its already proving itself to be safer than humans. It can and does crash, and it can an will kill people when it does. But as soon as the research shows that automated cars kill and seriously injure say, just 10% less people per year than humans, then why would we ever let a human drive a car again? We actually already have this evidence, we just need to hit the tipping point when we accept the transition from human drivers to computers.
Once this point is reached, the argument for personal car ownership is lost. In fact, the argument for trams, trains and a good bus service are also all lost.
Instead of personal car ownership, we will have an algorithm, that will know our movements based on previous patterns and our emotions that it picks up from our phones. Fleets of electric self driving pods will disperse around cities and the country to meet that demand at the right time. We will order the pod on our phone and the closest one stops and collects us, there will not be a wait as there is now for a taxi, it will be much more instant. Quicker than walking out to the car on your drive, so more convenient than our current form of private car ownership.
The pod will know your mood and arrive playing the exact music to improve your wellbeing and scented in exactly the way you like it. You will be able to recharge any devices, use the bathroom, when you are in the vehicle and if needed, sleep, or stream video, or speak to someone. Or, you may decide to share the pod if you decided, reducing the cost to you.
The pod will take you to your destination at a decent speed. It will not need road rules like speed limits because it will always take the appropriate speed to avoid death and injury for the circumstances. So travel in the countryside between cities may be at speeds similar to current Bullet trains, say 200mph. Cities may still be close to 20mph.
Instead of these pods waiting being unused for 95% of the time they will be being used 95% of the time. This would slash the number of physical pods needs greatly when compared to wasteful personal car ownership. This in turn declutters our streets and cities.
Firstly our streets will declutter. Self driving pods do not need white lines on roads or at junctions, nor do they need curbs between roads and pavements, nor speed limit signs or any signs at all. All road signs and directional signage can be removed. Perhaps trees would get planted in their place. Perhaps some streets can be turned back into grass and track as it was when horses were the main form of transport.
Based on where people are travelling to the algorithm will be able to produce revised road network plans on where routes need to be, where bridges are needed, or not needed, and which roads no longer make sense for transport use.
Then each house with a drive, garages, NCPs, basement car parks, office parking space, petrol stations, repair garages, none of these things would be needed. Even depots for the pods would be limited given that they would be being used to their peak efficiency, so perhaps at night time when charging may take place (assuming they are not self charging during the day from say, sunlight) there would be a depot of sorts, but even this would be far more efficient than our current car storage.
The volume of space needed for roads and motorways would be radically reduced. Everyone on the equivalent of the M4, firstly being taken efficiently to their location, secondly without any human stupidity which creates traffic jams, and lastly, being taken at speed but without contact with any other pod, so centimetres from pods around it, but still travelling independently, means that perhaps motorways would only need to be 2 or 3 lanes.
Houses and living space can be put in place of car parks. Driveways could turn back into allotments or wildflower meadow. Trees planted. We worry about rising population, but there is actually plenty of space for us to live and grow the food we need, and there is even more if we stop storing our pointless metal boxes next to us.
We would no longer need to travel to shops as our shopping will travel to us, collect us in the pod and take us home. Planes would no longer need to be weighed down with the weight of luggage as pods could take our luggage to our location the night before we travel when traffic is light and no one is around, rapidly reaching a destination just at the point we arrive.
But perhaps planes will be gone by this time as well. Perhaps drone technology would be such that sitting in a pod in London requesting a return to Bristol may travel along what was the M4, the algorithm may decide that ground travel is not the most optimum form of transport so as the journey starts a drone is requested which catches you on route home, lifts the pod from the ground and continues the journey in air space.
Perhaps this becomes the future of international air travel as well. It certainly solves the terrorism problem as you only have yourself to blame if you get into a pod with a friend who decides to destroy that pod during your journey.
This gives vast opportunities in land saving and improving our environment, not to mention air quality.
So perhaps large scale transport schemes are no longer needed to solve the transport problems we have. We just need to use then improve the technology that's already there.
So that is my view of the future, and one that could well be within my lifetime, and that is my disappointment with the lack of vision for Bristol. Its disjointed and difficult public transport and its poor air quality.
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