New radical plans tabled to remove cars from Bristol city centre
Will the new Green-led council mean radical change, or continuity, for transport in Bristol? Ed Plowden, the new chair of the transport committee has a vision to: “deliver some ambitious projects, particularly around the city centre, to put in a lot more bus priority and cycle infrastructure.”
Some roads will be closed to cars, which is likely to enrage some voters while delighting others. A public consultation has now begun on some of these proposals. Other plans – including one to ban cars from Park Street – are likely to follow.
In May, voters elected a new council, with policy committees replacing the mayoral system. The Greens fell just short of an overall majority, so they will need the support of other parties to get things done. Will the other parties support or oppose what they are trying to do?
Plowden recently set out the Greens’ plans for reforming the city’s transport at a seminar at UWE. The list of ideas was long, including improvements to buses and cycling, introducing a 20mph default speed limit and a workplace parking levy, but also constraining or removing car traffic from the city centre.
He said the Greens were inheriting “astonishing levels of congestion, illegal air quality, a collapsing bus market, which is just beginning to recover, not least thanks to the £2 fare that the government has put in, and higher levels of car ownership than other cities”.
New council leaders always face a dilemma: to implement new ideas takes time. To ‘hit the ground running’, as many voters demand, they must vigorously push the plans of their predecessors. People associate Bristol’s first mayor, George Ferguson, with a controversial expansion of residents’ parking zones, but he inherited the plans from the previous council.
The scale of the Greens’ election success has raised expectations amongst their supporters. Some of them were complaining on social media about slow progress after just eight weeks in office. Faced with these demands and constraints, Plowden says his first priority is: “to deliver our current projects. We’ve got time-limited £540m across the West of England [about half for Bristol] to invest by 2027.”
What are the plans?
Among those projects are some far-reaching changes to the city centre, reserving more roads for buses and creating two miles of new cycle routes. The first round of these changes, now open for public consultation, will include: a new north-south express busway, running along Union Street (from Primark to Castle Park), which will be closed to cars and become two-way for buses and bikes. It will then run over Bristol Bridge and turn right down Redcliffe Street, which will also be closed to through-traffic.
One of the two Bedminster Bridges will be reserved for buses and bikes, as the current roundabout is converted into two separate bridges.
The Horsefair (between Cabot Circus and Broadmead) will be pedestrianised, with access for emergency vehicles and deliveries at certain times. Buses running east to west would also be rerouted to avoid the Horsefair and Penn Street.
Several other roads and roundabouts will have new bus or cycle lanes, reducing the space available for cars. These changes will continue the process begun during the pandemic of gradually removing through-traffic from the city centre. Cars will still be able to drive into the centre to park in a car park, but not to drive through it on the way to somewhere else.
All of these plans were first developed under Labour, and the Labour councillors are still supporting them. Labour’s new transport lead, councillor Tim Rippington, said: “There are plenty of areas where we agree and would want to push forward but it’s really down to the Greens to lead on that now… If they bring things forward, we will scrutinise them and if we agree we’ll be happy to help.”
Does he expect the road changes to be controversial? “There are people in Bristol who think that whenever you close a road, you are taking away their freedom to go down that road. I’ve even had people in my ward telling me: you’ve taken away our freedom to drive in Bristol…
“The consultation needs to be done well. It needs to be seen by a lot of people. Traditionally in Bristol, we haven’t been very good at consultation”
At the last Transport Committee meeting on 11 July, opposition came from Lib Dem councillor Nick Coombes, who argued that the council should stick to its usual two-stage procedure: “By removing [that first stage], the committee effectively gave the project team a blank cheque. The only time that an elected politician will ever be able to vote on whether this scheme is a good idea or not will be after the public consultation, after £9.6m has already been spent, and there will be no opportunity for change.”
In response, Plowden said: “If we could go back two years I would agree, but we haven’t got time to do that… The [funding pot] is two years old and we still haven’t broken ground yet. We’ve got a hell of a lot to do by March 2027. Unless the new government changes the rules, the funding comes to a cliff edge.”
As the Labour councillors agreed with him, the fast-track was approved. That centralised control of local funding is particularly extreme in Britain – in other European countries I have studied, councils are able to raise more of their own funds and set their own deadlines.
Stop-start funding creates other problems, particularly for staffing. Before becoming a councillor, Plowden was a manager in Bristol’s transport service, where he had direct experience of this. He said: “There are two parts to the transport service: one manages things as they are and the other changes things. The ‘changing things’ department has over 40 vacancies out of about 120… We’ve filled some of the more senior ones whose first job will be to build up their teams. Our focus at the moment is on building up the service and delivering on those projects.”
Keep the Lights On
Investigative journalism strengthens democracy – it’s a necessity, not a luxury.
The Cable is Bristol’s independent, investigative newsroom, producing award-winning journalism that shines a light into the depths of what’s happening in Bristol. We’re able to do this because we’re owned and steered by more than 2,500 local members – not shareholders, vested interests or press barons.
We are on a mission to become sustainable – will you help us get there?
Join the Cable todayThree future proposals, to put a bus gate on Park Street, to pedestrianise Newgate, next to Castle Park, and to turn the M32 into a local road with bus stops, were also raised under Mayor Marvin Rees.
Plowden says: “To reserve Park Street for buses and bikes – that was a really good headline-grabbing bold initiative from Marvin, which he appeared to be rolling back from. We are going to reintroduce that level of ambition.”
As Labour and the Greens largely agree on what to do about transport, their arguments mainly concern who is doing what, and who is to blame. Each accuses the other of lacking dynamism and acting too slowly when they hold the reins of power.
When you talk to councillors about urban transport you gradually realise that the problems are the same in most cities. Tough choices are unavoidable, whoever wins power.
As Rippington puts it: “The big picture is that Bristol is going to grow by 20% in the next 15 or 20 years. We are already at saturation point with vehicles in our city. If we don’t provide other means for people to get around, then Bristol will totally clog up.
“This is a problem a lot of people don’t realise when they talk about their right to drive cars. They think that everything will be like it is now in 20 years’ time. It certainly won’t be. If you’ve got 20% more cars on the road then nobody’s going anywhere.”
The public consultation closes on 30 September before the results are analysed and published in the coming months.
Report a comment. Comments are moderated according to our Comment Policy.
As you are mainly subject on Central Bristol, or will the outer area, such as South Gloucestershire where I live, be able to put their points across, due to the shortage/stoppages of public transport in the area. No buses between Fishponds & Yate for a long time is one subject.
What about pedestrians? Already walkers and pushers (of prams) are ‘punished’ by uneven pavements – often relaid to accommodate dropped bus steps – in addition to bus stops that reduce walking space..and that’s before pedestrians are routinely inconvenienced by cyclists/illegal kerb parking… Minimum pavement widths, anybody?
Bristol could be a supremely walkable city- most parts can be walked (or pushed..or pulled on foot) within an hour. I often outwalk the bus between The Downs and the Centre or Horsefair, but the exhaust fumes and vehicular noise must put many people off.
Do the ‘new’ plans actually put walkers in the picture?
The plans are great, especially the Bedminster roundabout one is really well-done, since cars will still be able to make a turn in most directions.
Horsefair has already been mostly bus/taxi only, no? (with exceptions for blue badge holders?)
I don’t see the controversy with cycle lanes. Sure, it “takes away space from cars”, just like bus lanes do, but you’d think anyone driving through the city centre would be pleased to have fewer cyclists sharing the roads with them, and a continuous cycle network will likely lead to fewer cars on the road too since people will now be able to safely cycle into the center who might not have been willing to do so before (you need a certain confidence to cycle across the current Bedminster roundabout).