‘Rees needs to take radical action to improve Bristol’s transport’

Bristol’s the place to be once again. We’re now 11th on the National Geographic Cool Cities list, thanks to our leftfield creativity, dockside regeneration, cafe culture and general suitability for the aspiring, young and educated.

Trouble is – as those of us who’ve lived here for a while also know – it’s a nightmare to get around.

Marvin Rees is well aware that radical action is needed. He is mayor with specific responsibilities for, among other things, roads and congestion. Yet he has bizarrely opted to support the provision of an underground rail network under the city, to be delivered within ten years.

He’s already flown to China and Malaysia seeking investment. Beats getting into town on a cramped bus on a rainy day, but I accept that he is mayor and these kind of treats go with the job.

https://www.facebook.com/bristol247/videos/10155539891209807/

I can’t fault Rees’ ambition but I moved here in 1992 and remember then seeing hoarding near Temple Meads telling us about the imminent arrival of the Bristol Arena. And that doesn’t even involve tunneling under the city.

Admittedly there are plans to re-open the railway line to Portishead and make some other piecemeal rail improvements, and a clean air zone proposal that will discourage the dirtiest vehicles from driving around the centre of town.

None of this, however, is going to make that much difference to a city that was revealed to have the UK’s slowest roads after London in 2017.

Bristol has the second slowest roads in the UK

The simple fact is that there’s a better way to get Bristol moving and it’s staring Rees in the face.

I’m talking about a proper congestion charge, of course – conspicuous by its absence in the latest set of WECA proposals.

Before you choke on your coffee, ask yourself how much you hear about the London scheme, brought in by Ken Livingstone in 2003. In his opinion it was the only thing he ever did that actually worked.

I was living in the capital back then, and the expected chaos didn’t happen. Nor did business after business crumble under the increasing costs of driving in the 60-odd square kilometers covered.

Bring the charge in and a number of wonderful things start to happen:

Firstly, people can cycle around town without fearing for their lives. The cycle lanes are getting better by the day, too.

Secondly, the buses will actually start moving – and once we no longer have to pay the driver any more they’ll move even quicker.

It’s a perfect win for Rees, as it’ll cost the taxpayer nothing, and will make large sums of cash for the city. We can ring-fence these, start subsidising electric bikes (we’ll need to: it’s a lot hillier here than London) and distribute the rest to local businesses so they can build bike parks for their staff.

Rees removed the mayor’s official bike space outside City Hall when he came to office

Some of Europe’s more forward-thinking cities are taking things even further.

Authorities in Lyon have got traffic down to the point where they’re turning car parks into actual parks, and are implementing smartphone-based bike and car sharing technology as a key element of vehicular travel around their city – to great effect.

Obviously there will be some opposition, though not as much as you’d think if London’s experience is anything to go by, and also because this will be a money-maker it won’t be something that’s going to come with any serious opportunity cost.

The key outcome of London’s experience is that any genuine opposition in Bristol is unlikely to be financial, despite the fuss that’ll be made by pressure groups. It’ll be ideological. We will, in effect, be teaching the people of Bristol to start doing without cars rather than letting them learn to do that for themselves.

But like a heart scare that makes you change your ways before the real thing ends your life, it’s probably the only way. Cars are as addictive as Class A drugs.

When the Metrobus opens it’ll be the only mass transit system we’re going to get for the foreseeable future.

Let’s not kid ourselves we’re going to build anything more impressive for the time being, and use that pragmatism to bring in some changes of real, lasting value rather than another mountain of consultation papers, wasted feasibility studies and expensive trips abroad.

Given their previous electoral history, Marvin Rees will always be compared with George Ferguson, who wanted us all to get on our bikes and take the bus, but never got further than saying he “wouldn’t rule out” a congestion charge.

It would, by anyone’s standards, take some serious bottle, and result in Rees taking some serious electoral punishment – with some serious redemption a very real possibility a few years down the line.

It could make him a hero and show us why we should have picked him in 2012 and why we really did deserve, among all our other plaudits, European Green Capital status just a few short years ago.

Tim Archfield is a copywriter based in east Bristol. He worked in investment marketing for nearly a decade before taking time out to study music, and then began working as a freelance editor, writer and occasional journalist.