Bristol’s rail network is currently underused. A relatively small investment in increasing train frequencies and improving the facilities, including reopening a few stations, could make rail a far more attractive choice for significantly more people.

Better services on the Severn Beach Line have lead to an 80% increase in its use over the last four years, and hopefully we can see similar improvements on the other lines too.

Click map for bigger version

One of the problems in the past is that decisions about rail investment are split between lots of different agencies. Local councils have some say but not much money for infrastructure. Network Rail maintains the tracks and other assets and are involved with all major engineering. Rail franchise operators run the trains and determine train time tables. And Department of Transport pays for most of big infrastructure projects.

Currently the local councils are working together to influence the other parties to spend the money necessary to make rail work better in the region and have set up the Campaign for Greater Bristol Metro Rail.

What you need to do

The purpose of this campaign is to get people like you to show your support for these improvements to these other agencies. This will enable the councils to guide the process and deliver the better rail services that people want. Here are steps you can take to help:

1) Sign the petition – This petition asks the Department of Transport to make the improvements set out by this campaign part of the terms of the next rail franchise agreement that will run from 2013 until 2028. If you do nothing else, sign the petition but please also do the others on this list.
Sign the petition

2) Visit the campaign website Campaign for Greater Bristol Metro Rail – This gives you more in depth information about the issues and what needs to be done. (I have summarised the content of the campaign below in the “What you need to know” section.)

3) Sign up to the campaign mailing list – This will mean you get emails to remind you when to do things and updates on progress of the campaign. Just type your email into the blank in the right sidebar of the Campaign for Greater Bristol Metro Rail site.

4) Write to the Department of Transport before 31 March 2012 to show your support. It is more important to write something than to make a huge technical argument. Explain why you want these improvements or how it will help you in your own words.

Send your statement to GWconsultation@dft.gsi.gov.uk or follow this link to the Department of Transport for a postal address and to read the consultation document for technical background if you are inclined.

5) Keep in touch with the campaign – At the end of March 2012 the campaign will switch from the focusing on the rail franchise to getting the “four track” improvements, so doing the right thing at the right time is important.

6) Get your business involved – If you are a business owner or if you work for a larger company, send a letter to the Department of Transport explaining how better rail services would help your business or organisation.
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What you need to know

Step 2 above is to read the information on the campaign web site, however to give you a quick start, this section summarises some of the key points from the campaign.

Four Track

The section of track between Bristol Temple Meads and Bristol Parkway is called “Filton Bank”. This used to have four tracks but in the 1980s this was reduced to two. This means that the two lines give priority to inter-city services and local services have to be squeezed in between them. If there were four tracks then the local services could be run more frequently and would not be affected by the inter-city trains. It would also be good to extend the four track down to Parsons St station to allow more frequent local services from there too.

The “four track” upgrade is absolutely key to this campaign because if there isn’t capacity on the tracks you simply cannot run enough local trains and won’t have any flexibility for the times of local trains.

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More Trains More Frequently

If there are more trains and they come more often, carriages won’t be so crowded at peak times and people won’t have to wait so long at other times. When services are more frequent, missing a particular train is less of a problem as there will be another one soon after. It also helps with connections so that there is less waiting time when changing at the bigger stations.

When lobbying it would be good to give personal examples of how more frequent trains would make travelling by rail more pleasant or more viable for you. Explain the problems that infrequent trains cause currently and how extra services would make you use the trains more often.

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Reopening Stations including Portishead

There are a number of stations and sections of track which exist but are not in use. Reopening these will make rail available to areas that are currently not served. Portishead is the station that would make the most difference as many people commute into Bristol from Portishead where cars or buses are the only options. There is currently a freight line that runs most of the way to Portishead and stations could be opened at Ashton Gate and Pill. The line from Pill to Portishead has not been used for decades and would require significant engineering to bring it back into service but this is well worth doing.

There could also be stations at Saltford and Ashley Hill as there are already passenger services on these lines. Building new stations would open up rail travel to people living in these areas.

A station could be opened at Henbury which is currently a freight only line. It is likely that the amount of freight on this line will increase over the coming years which would make it more difficult to run frequent services without also increasing the capacity of the line so this station may not give as significant a return as opening the other stations listed above.

When lobbying explain how opening any of these stations would help you in your journeys and how it might change your travelling habits.

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Great Western Electrification

The electrification of the Great Western Main Line (GWML) between Cardiff, Bristol and Didcot is already happening, so this is not something we need to campaign for. But it does have good implications for rail use in Bristol. It will reduce travel times to London by 20 minutes which means more people will use it. So it is even more important to have frequent reliable local services to connect with the inter-city services.

The better inter-city service will bring more investment and more people into Bristol which helps to justify the upgrades to local serives.

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Working Together on the Big Picture

The purpose of the Campaign for Greater Bristol Metro Rail is to help everyone work together to achieve bigger goals rather than small groups or individual councils lobbying for minor local improvements.

Rail improvements are not cheap, but they have a proven track record (pun intended) of delivering social and economic benefits and the government is willing to make the investment. But we have to let them know where that investment will have the biggest effect.

Please follow the steps above and get involved with the campaign. Now is a key time and decisions made this year will affect rail travel around Bristol for the next few decades.

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The RAC has made a press release saying that four in five households is in “transport poverty”. This has been duly copied and pasted by the media without much thought.

The invented term “transport poverty” has been coined to parallel “fuel poverty” which relates to households spending over 10% of their income on fuel mainly to heat their homes. Fuel poverty affects 4 million out of the 26 million households in the UK. Because these households have low incomes, the cost of fuel to heat their homes is a larger proportion on their income.

But if four out of five households (which is 80% or 21 million households) spend more than 10% of their income on transport, this is not a problem of a small disadvantaged group, but rather a general spending habit. More to the point is is not the poorest who are spending the greatest proportion of their income on transport but the better off. The more people earn they more they spend on transport because they make more journeys and they tend to use private cars and bigger cars rather then public transport.

While the four in five statistic applies to users of all forms of transport it also shows that almost all car owners spend more than 10% of their income on transport. The RAC press release shows this in the breakdown of spending among car users where the clear trend is that poorer households spend less (9%) on transport and the richest spend most (15.5%) on transport.

So unlike the fuel poverty transport poverty appears to be a problem for the rich. This only helps to underline the importance of public transport for a fairer society.

I came across these (one above and two at the end of this post) animated ads for a Belgian bus company De Lijn. They are great cartoons and obviously take their inspiration from Pixar’s “Bugs Life” and “Finding Nemo” as well as Warner Brothers “Happy Feet” movies. The basic story in each is that a group of animals work together to fend off a predator, and the motto shown at the end is “It’s smarter to travel in groups. Take the bus”.

Initially I thought they were funny but felt the analogy of the group fighting off a common enemy did not have much in common with people getting from A to B on the bus. But then I thought about it less literally and it began to make more sense and have more relevance.

Many people see travel decisions as simply personal choices no different than choosing what to wear or what have for lunch. But in reality travel choices have an impact on other people too.

There are many valid reasons for choosing to drive a car such as when there are multiple passengers including infants, or people with disabilities, or where larger or heavy objects need to be moved. But when there is a single occupant in a car and there are available buses, then the rest of society gains no benefit from that person choosing to drive rather than taking the bus. It uses more fuel and causes more air and noise pollution. But most importantly it adds to congestion.

Congestion is a real problem which lowers people’s quality of life. It causes stress and anxiety, and it wastes people’s time, including all of the other drivers caught in the traffic jam.

Roads are what economists call a “common good” (“good” as in “goods and services”). A common good is defined as something that everyone can access freely but which becomes worth less as more people use it. If fewer people drove cars on a road then the remaining drivers would have more space and there would be less congestion.

Each person who chooses to ride the bus in effect is contributing to the “common good” (this time in the sense of the benefit to everyone) by not congesting the road.

A double decker bus can have 76 seated passengers and 8 standing passengers. Even if it was only half full that is still 42 people not driving. Next time you are in a traffic jam, count 42 cars and and imagine what it would be like if all of those cars were replaced by a single bus.

In the cartoons, they were working together for the common good, and riding the bus rather than driving is a way to work with others to make things better for everyone.

This version is, in many ways, what I originally wanted to do with the site, but could not due to various technical limitations at the time. It also includes social media aspects which reflect the increasing willingness of people to connect and interact on line.

BristolStreets has always had transport information at its heart because transport is a big quality of life issue. Most people spend quite a lot of time travelling and commuting but roads, traffic and public transport also impact people and places they pass.

This new version offers bus information like never before. It is now possible to see all bus stops and all bus routes at the same time and to quickly see where you can go from a location simply by clicking on the map. The reach of the bus data has also increased thanks to the “open data” that the government has made available. Bus routes are shown over a much wider area now and almost any conceivable bus journey you would want to take to or from Bristol is covered.

Cycling is a very important and popular travel mode in Bristol. Many of you have generously added comments to the Cycling City layer that has been on BristolStreets since 2008. This layer has been frozen to new comments but all of the input is still visible in a new format in the new version. There is however a new layer to help Bristol City Council formulate its 20 year plan for improvements to the cycle network.

There will be many more layers coming in the near future, but it just made sense to get this new version out.

BristolStreets has started lots of conversations and created opportunities. But I realise there has been far too little dialog with the people who use the site every day. The real hope with the latest version is that there will be an ongoing conversation by lots of the site users, on the map, through the other social media channels connected with the site and through direct contacts.

Bristol City Council needs your help to define the strategic cycle network and help to identify the priorities for investment over the next twenty years.

All of our existing road network (with the exception of the M32) is important for cycling but we need define what roads and paths are more important to you for your everyday journeys in order to:

• Inform future investment in cycling; and
• Maximise benefits through planning activities, other transport projects and neighbourhood initiatives.

To date Bristol City Council has invested in the radial route network– the routes in and out of the city centre. We now need to define other key routes that link the many destinations around the city.

A new cycle network tool has been added to BristolStreets.co.uk. Through this online mapping facility we have defined the main journey attractors around the city (such as local centres, stations, workplaces and schools). We have then joined these centres up into a spider web of possible links. For each of these links we are seeking to define the best route possible and get an idea of what improvements need to be made. This is where we need your help and local knowledge.

We need you to identify where improvements need to be made on the ground. The tool lets you draw new routes, leave notes and comments and allows for discussion similar to a social network.

This website will be taking comments until 31 March 2012. We will then use the information you provide to define the cycle network. We will then be able to identify and prioritise the works that are needed over the next twenty years.

For more information, contact betterbybike@bristol.gov.uk

Please note that you are currently on the BristolStreets website and not the Bristol City Council website. Facebook comments below are not part of the consultation. The contact form goes to BristolStreets and not to the Bristol City Council.