Ambitious plans to double number of bus trips in Bristol by 2036

Transport bosses have laid out their vision for a “radical” new bus network for Bristol.

An “ambitious” draft bus strategy, which aims to double the number of bus trips in the city by 2036, was revealed to a council committee last week.

Under the strategy, a redesigned bus network would see several main routes radiating out from the centre and a series of orbital routes linking them together.

The “interchange network” model would open up more destinations but would require some people to walk further to catch a bus and to catch more than one bus into the centre.

And, to run reliably, the bus network would also require cars to have less road space so that more can be allocated to buses.

It would mean reducing the number of direct services from outlying areas to the city centre

The Bristol public will have a chance to comment on these principles when the West of England Combined Authority (WECA) holds a public consultation on the strategy around the end of the year, the growth and regeneration scrutiny committee heard last week.

“It is really, really ambitious and it will take some pretty radical interventions,” Adam Crowther, Bristol City Council’s head of strategic city transport, said.

Crowther told committee members that the consultation will not “specify a whole load of bus routes” but will seek feedback on the trade-offs people are willing to accept in exchange for a more efficient bus service.

He said that WECA wanted to know: “Are they willing to walk further to a bus stop? Are they willing to change from bus to bus? Are they willing to commit collectively to giving up road space for buses and make that network the network we really want it to be?”

Crowther said Bristol’s current bus network was inefficient, and basically consisted of “a lot of services that come in on radial routes, come into the city centre, stop, turn around and go back out again”.

Instead, consultancy firm Arup had suggested a system of radial and orbital routes linked by “well designed and easy interchanges”, he said.

The idea was to have fewer radial routes, but the buses on them running “every five minutes or so”.

Commercial operators would use these “very high frequency” routes to subsidise the lower frequency orbital services linking them.

“The key thing here is that it would reduce the number of direct services from outlying areas to the city centre,”

Crowther said. “And those people would either have to walk further to their bus stop or connect with one of the orbitals to the main radial bus routes.”

Crowther said that bus operators had already told WECA that they would not be able to double bus the number of bus users unless Bristol’s traffic problems were fixed.

“They said you’ve got to deal with congestion,” he told the committee. “We need to make sure bus priorities are fit to ensure operators can run services reliably.

“We need to do something a bit more dramatic and it may not be as popular as we would ordinarily like.”

Councillors broadly welcomed the idea of a bus interchange network but said it would only work if the interchanges were in the “right” place and were safe, weatherproof and equipped with “good” real-time information.

Labour councillor for Bedminster, Mark Bradshaw, said smart ticketing would be essential. “You won’t get it [interchange] until you have a single ticket offer that gives people confidence that they’re not going to be charged twice, they’re not going to have an argument with the driver,” he said.

“So all of these things do hang together, and require the operator either to comply, or to find a way to make them comply. Now whether that’s franchising or some other [mechanism], you need to push it otherwise you won’t get the capacity gains.”

Crowther said the strategy will assess the pros and cons of new bus powers, such as commercial partnerships and franchising options, available to local authorities under the Bus Services Act 2017.

WECA expects to begin a public consultation on its bus strategy around Christmas and to adopt a strategy “some time in the Spring”, he said.

Amanda Cameron is a local democracy reporter for Bristol

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