“From big schemes to little projects, nothing ever seems to actually work out successfully”
06:00, 26 Apr 2026
You know how, when you watch a random video on YouTube just once, the algorithm then thinks this is what you’re apparently obsessed with now, and so proceeds to show that kind of video to you every three seconds for the next ten years….?
This, before you ask, is how I have become endlessly gripped by watching the many, many videos – more than you’d think, believe me – where people from all over the world, but mainly the USA or Britain, visit Bristol and film themselves being tourists for a day or a few days.
There is also a spin-off of this genre, where people who have properly but recently moved to Bristol give their guides to the city, or tell the YouTube world what they have learned, and what people considering a similar move need to know.
For me, it’s a fascinating insight into what people who are outside our Bristol Bubble see and think about the city, although it does get a bit samey after a while.
Yes, they all go on a boat down the harbour, look at the Suspension Bridge, eat street food at St Nick’s Market and if I’ve seen one Japanese tourist point at Banksy’s Well-Hung Lover I’ve seen 50. But you know what the other thing they ALL do is? Complain about transport.
It might be complaining about the traffic, the congested roads. It might be complaining about the transport connections from Bristol Airport, or why Temple Meads is a mile from the city centre and it’s really confusing to get a bus from it or to it.
Or if they are wizened veterans reporting from the trenches of living here for three months, then their more nuanced takes will lament the lack of a bus across Bristol from, say, Clifton to St Andrews or Bedminster to Brislington, the lack of a decent suburban railway, or any kind of mass transport system that cities all over the UK and Europe now have as standard.
It’s something we all know. It doesn’t matter if you’ve lived here seven weeks or 70 years. It doesn’t matter if you only ride a bicycle, or if you have to drive around the city a lot every day, commute by bus, try to travel by e-scooter or navigate the Avon Ring Road twice a day.
And yet, the city and its people are hit by multiple reasons why no one appears able to do anything about sorting it out.
There are lots of things constantly going on with roads, roadworks, making new bus lanes, changing roundabouts, creating ‘Liveable Neighbourhoods’, school zones, and so on. It’s not like nothing is happening and Bristolians and their transport woes are being neglected or ignored.
But, from big schemes to little projects, nothing ever seems to actually work out successfully.
The council – and I’m lumping in all local authorities, councils and metro mayor administrations in this sweeping generalisation and definition – seem to have good ideas to make things better for people who might not want to drive a car everywhere, but not the actual courage to do it properly.
So cycle lanes are installed for a quarter of a mile but then abruptly stop at a main road junction, for example, leaving cyclists – and motorists – wondering what the point was.
Those in charge embrace the e-bike and e-scooter hire scheme, but haven’t got the cajones to create proper parking spaces for them. You could fit 10 e-scooters in their own segregated little zone, just by painting a few markers on an on-street parking space taken up by one car, but that hasn’t happened, because those in charge appear too frightened to do anything to challenge people parking their cars.
The upshot of that is, the e-scooters are unpopular because they have to be left parked up on a pavement, getting in people’s way. That failure also means there are nowhere near enough places to park an e-scooter or e-bike legally out in the wilds of Bristol, leading to hefty fines for lots of people, and the scheme not being as successful as it could be.
It’s been nearly six years that this scheme has been in place in Bristol – you’d have thought they could have sorted this by now, but no.
READ MORE: Little black boxes appearing on Bristol lampposts – everything you need to know
Perhaps the most bizarre example of a lack of courage came this year with a great new scheme that has seen lampposts fitted with electric car charging points. There’s loads of them around Bristol now, and it’s a trial period yes, but that trial will undoubtedly see hardly anyone using them because the parking space on the road next to the lamppost hasn’t been marked just for electric cars.
Anyone with an electric car who wants to charge it up with a lamppost can’t get anywhere near the lamppost to use this great new facility – because those in charge are cowards who just do things like this half-heartedly.
It’s all about getting grant funding – yes, obviously this has come from taxpayers’ money – ticking boxes and meeting criteria to make it look like you’re doing something, rather than actually creating something that will bring about meaningful change or be useful.
The box-ticking exercise phenomenon has had its fingerprints all over Bristol’s transport woes for decades. The lamppost thing is just the latest, but it’s the big projects too.
Remember the Metrobus debacle? We spent north of £220 million on the last great attempt to bring about meaningful change in Bristol’s transport system. What did we get? Four new bus routes, a bus lane and bus only junction on the M32, and a strange and very expensive rollercoaster flyover next to Ashton Gate.
READ MORE: Exclusive: Metrobus ‘never meant to be’ for fans visiting Ashton Gate – because there aren’t enough special buses
The Metrobus project was only eligible for Government grants of millions of pounds because it originally promised something ‘new and innovative’ – guided bus rails. That qualified it for the investment from Westminster, but it turned out guided bus rails are next to useless, pretty pointless, and actually not only slow buses down but it means you have to have special buses, which are more expensive.
By the time the Metrobus was a reality, the amount of guided bus rails in Bristol’s grand project was reduced to just a few hundred yards near Ashton Vale, and the only reason this was kept in at all was so that the entire project still qualified for the original Government money.
Anyone looking for a tangible example of how ridiculous Metrobus was – and still is – should look at those guided bus rails, and also the fact that this grand transport project passes Ashton Gate but was specifically and intentionally designed not to serve big events or matches there.
This same phenomenon seen with Metrobus – of transport chiefs chasing the money from upon high and designing projects to fit the grant criteria to get it, rather than designing something people want and will actually work – is now in play with the Liveable Neighbourhoods.
READ MORE: Contractors forced to abandon work to change East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood due to protestREAD MORE: Controversial East Bristol traffic scheme has helped one local ‘sleep through the night’
The money to create nicer areas for people who walk, scoot and cycle – maybe wider pavements, cycle lanes, more crossing points, better street environments, parking controls – will only come from the Government via WECA if it includes the much more radical idea of ‘modal filters’.
For those still blissfully unaware what a ‘modal filter’ is, it’s a neat little idea of a planter or road block which stops up the road for four wheel vehicles and thus create cul-de-sacs for people in cars, while allowing two-wheels and pedestrians through – and they have been by far the most controversial part of this bigger scheme.
There was hardly any attempt to sit down with local residents and ask them what they wanted in East Bristol – modal filters were always going to be a big part of it, because otherwise the money wouldn’t be there for any of it.
Perhaps the point to have a rethink comes when you have to summon 60 police officers and install a bus gate at three in the morning, but then again, maybe not.
In South Bristol, the deception continued. Residents were invited to suggest improvements – maybe pedestrian crossings, wider pavements, parking restrictions, whatever it may be – but in the background, modal filters were always going to be the ‘answer’, because that’s the only thing different enough to bring in the grant money.
READ MORE: ‘Class cleansing’ or safer streets – we visit Bristol’s new ‘liveable neighbourhood’READ MORE: Green-friendly South Bristol suburb turns against Liveable Neighbourhood ‘road blocks’
The council went around South Bristol to ‘consult’ with local residents at drop-in sessions, and local residents emerged pointing out none of the council officers appeared to take any notes of what people said to them.
The Liveable Neighbourhood projects are pretty Marmite – some people hate it, some people living in the same street love it. For many people, having no constant traffic on their road has transformed their lives for the better.
There’s no doubt something needs to be done – especially in areas like St George, Easton, Bedminster, Southville, Brislington, St Andrews – where densely packed Victorian streets contain people who all want to live in roads that aren’t busy with traffic, and clogged up with parked cars, but at the same time want to be able to drive where they want and park near their home – and yes, I’m guilty as charged.
But imposing a template project just to meet the criteria of a grant to pay for everything isn’t the answer. There needs to be genuine, grassroots, door-to-door community-led decision-making. A street should only have a modal filter on it if a majority of people living there want that.
READ MORE: Totterdown demands changes to Liveable Neighbourhood plans
We may well find, if three streets around say yes, that the street that said no change their mind when all the traffic is funnelled down their road.
Driving a car in Bristol is riddled with paradoxes though. We drivers all complain about traffic when we are the traffic, complain about parking while trying to park.
There’s a paradox that residents claim blocking up residential roads with ‘modal filters’ isn’t needed because they are not used as rat-runs clogged with traffic, but at the same time, the same residents warn that blocking up residential roads will see loads more traffic funnelled onto the main roads around an area.
At the same time, that paradox is also the case the other way. The council claim – and that claim is hotly disputed – that blocking up residential roads is needed to stop people rat-running through the area, but doing that so won’t see a damaging increase in traffic on main roads in the area.
This is Schroedinger’s Traffic – simultaneously a problem in one road but not in another, simultaneously existing for one argument but not for its counter-argument. Both sides, as it were, can’t have it both ways.
READ MORE: Woman who tried to save cyclist launches petition for better road safety
In South Bristol, the biggest concerns among residents of Southville and Bedminster are about how dangerous it seems to be to cycle or scooter down North Street, a road which has seen three serious RTC just this year with one being a tragic fatality.
And yet the council’s plans are to block up the side roads, make anyone that may or may not have been driving along the side roads drive on North Street instead, but with no apparent or detailed plans to make that road safer for cyclists.
So what kind of city are we creating here? If there’s a long-term strategy at play here it’s hard to see it.
Every other week the city gives permission to developers to build hundreds of new flats or student accommodation.
The next generation of young Bristolians will be living in build-to-rent flats in places like St Philips, St Judes, Fishponds, Bedminster, the Cumberland Basin, the city centre and Lawrence Hill, and they won’t really be able to contemplate owning their own car – where would they park it?
READ MORE: Bristol all set for its biggest transformation since the Second World War
This, combined with the increased cost, means young people just aren’t driving as much anymore. In the 1990s, almost half of Bristol’s teenagers drove, and three-quarters of people passed their tests and drove around by the time they reached their late-20s.
Now, it’s dropped considerably. In the UK, only around a quarter of 17-19 year olds get a driving licence and drive now, and nationally less than two-thirds of people are driving by the end of their 20s. In Bristol, a big city, that’s even lower.
But if we’re building thousands of new homes for people in areas around the inner city where we expect the residents not to drive, where are the extra buses, trains and the public transport system the city needs?
There have been some new stations and there are plans for more – but will there be more trains?
The metro mayor’s stubborn refusal to consider taking control of public transport in Bristol now means she has to launch a consultation on what people think about the buses so that she can go to First West of England and ask nicely for them to change or improve things.
The lack of any coherent transport system that is fit for purpose in Bristol can be seen in the way the e-scooter scheme works here. Everywhere has these scooters now – from Athens to Dublin. In almost everywhere else – cities with a functional transport system – they are used by people zipping about all over the city on random journeys, and often as a fun method of transport.
Bristol however, has long been the place where they are used the most, and in Bristol they are very much used as an alternative to the daily commute.
The transport system is so bad in Bristol – the roads are so clogged, the buses are so unreliable or non-existent, there is nothing in the way of a meaningful mass transit system – that people travelling in from the suburbs to the city centre in the morning see the fun little e-scooters as the most reliable way of doing that.
It’s why there are hundreds parked up and unused in the city centre every day, waiting for people to ride them home again.
