Our response to Bristol City Council's consultation on its Broadmead Placemaking Plan.

View Bristol City Council's Broadmead Placemaking Plan here.

Our response:

Executive Summary

First West of England expresses broad support for Bristol City Council's (BCC) city centre development plan, recognising its potential to enhance Bristol's vibrancy and accessibility. As a key player in the local economy, First West of England underscores the importance of a reliable bus network, which has seen notable growth in recent years due to investments and effective bus priority measures.

The company welcomes many aspects of the development plan, particularly the proposed bus priority measures around Bedminster and Bond Street, which promise to improve journey times and reliability. First West of England also appreciates BCC's responsiveness to their feedback, leading to more practical bus routing solutions.

However, the company raises significant concerns regarding certain elements of the plan. Specifically, they object to the proposed removal of the right turn out of Bristol Bus Station, arguing it would negatively impact passenger journey times, increase operational costs, and pose safety risks. First West of England also highlights the potential issues with Union Street's re-routing plans, which could undermine the established high-frequency bus corridor serving Northwest Bristol.

Furthermore, the company stresses the need for improved bus stop capacity and infrastructure at Broad Quay and The Centre to accommodate increased bus traffic, as the current setup is already at capacity. They advocate for enhancements to kerb space and road width to ensure smoother bus operations in these critical areas.

In conclusion, while supportive of the overarching goals of BCC's development plan, First West of England urges careful consideration of the potential adverse impacts on bus services and calls for further collaboration to refine the proposals to better serve public transport users in Bristol.

Introduction

First West of England is broadly supportive of the city centre development plan proposed by Bristol City Council (BCC). As a company, we are proud to support the vibrancy of Bristol city centre. We are a local business run by local people so naturally support any plan that aims to transform our city centre into a more desirable and accessible space. We are proud to play our role in supporting the city centre economy, and every day we bring tens of thousands of workers, students, shoppers and leisure seekers into the city centre, who all benefit from a bus network that gives great connectivity and access to key city centre destinations.

Prior to the pandemic, Bristol was one of the few bus markets in the UK (outside of London) to buck the trend of long-term decline in bus use, and we have continued to see growth over the past two years, with more customers using the network and more journeys being made.  This is a sign of clear modal shift and reflects not only investment in services and the benefits of the £2 single fare (launched by us in September 2022 and since maintained under the nationwide £2 fare cap), but also the efforts of Bristol City Council and other neighbouring authorities’ in the space of bus priority, which has improved journey times and reliability. There is still much to do in that area to reduce journey times and make bus travel more reliable on a wider scale, but where great strides have been made – such as with the metrobus network – we have seen the results in terms of strong growth and positive customer feedback.

Whilst elements of this plan represent a large amount of change and potential disruption for our business and customers (the Horsefair and Penn Street being the 9^th and 11^th most busy stops in Bristol respectively, boarding over 1,005,000 passengers last year), we are able to take a long-term view and recognise that city centre redevelopment is critical for the continued success and vibrancy of Bristol, and as a result, for the long term success of the bus network. Accordingly, we warmly welcome many aspects of the DDP plan, particularly the proposed bus priority measures in Bedminster and around Bond Street, which build upon a great deal of progress in this space in recent years. We are grateful that BCC has taken on our initial feedback in adapting the plan, however, we remain concerned with certain elements of it and we would like to see parts of the plan developed or amended in the interests of the travelling public.

First West of England’s Involvement with DDP

We have been engaged in discussions with Bristol City Council since the early stages of the DDP consultation, starting in October 2023, and it has been encouraging to witness the plan evolve in response to some of our feedback.

Initially, the DDP plan was more extensive, proposing further pedestrianisation within the Broadmead core and the relocation of all bus traffic to Bond Street and Broad Quay. We raised concerns that this would exacerbate road and bus stop capacity issues, which are already evident in the densely packed inner core of the city. We also raised concerns around the lack of a west-east corridor through the central core and the need for eastbound buses to operate via the foot of the M32, thereby exposing them to extreme congestion and indirect routes.

We were therefore pleased to see the DDP evolve and a new route through the city centre – via Christmas Street, Nelson Street, and Fairfax Street – introduced. This change helps maintain directness and stop access for many services, particularly those heading eastward, such as the 41, 42, 43 and other "40s" routes.

Additionally, provisions were made to allow services 1 and 2 to access Union Street, which was previously designated exclusively for the new M32 Park and Ride service (though we would like to see this concession go further: see the “Union Street” section below). We are also pleased with the plans to address severe congestion on Bedminster Bridge and Bond Street, where peak journey times are routinely 3 times longer than those during off-peak times. The addition of bus lanes on Bond Street and Redcliffe Roundabout is a welcome development that builds on existing impactful bus priority measures, promising to significantly improve the consistency and speed of bus journeys for hundreds of thousands of passengers each week.

However, we remain concerned about certain aspects of the DDP, particularly the banning of the right turn out of Bristol Bus Station in favour of a cycle lane, and the general restriction of Union Street to a future, yet uncertain, Park and Ride service, especially as Union Street has an established and well-used high-quality and high-frequency bus provision for Whiteladies Road/Westbury Road on services heading northwest. The plan also increases our existing concerns about capacity for buses in The Centre/Broad Quay, with more services needing to operate through here as part of the proposals.

Bristol Bus and Coach Station – Banned Right Turn/Filter onto Rupert Street (Southbound)

We strongly object to the DDP plan to remove the right turn/filter out of Bristol Bus and Coach Station as we believe it presents a significant detriment to customers and presents a commercial risk to marginal services. This small but important element of bus priority allows many interurban services to move through the city centre inner core quickly and efficiently, without adding unnecessary time and mileage to operators and passenger journeys by going around the “Bearpit”/St James Barton roundabout. Our objection to this change is threefold, with concerns relating to the impact on passenger journey times, financial harm to bus services and finally safety concerns:

1. Passenger Time Penalty

• The alternative routing around St James Barton Roundabout would represent a time penalty of at least 3 minutes to all services leaving the bus station. This is based on real world testing.
• Taking a typical week in September 2023, we carried 18,505 people out of the bus station on approximately 1,652 trips. This would represent 925 hours of wasted passenger time every week, or 47,187 hours a year.
• This passenger time penalty runs counter to the significant investment in highways schemes undertaken by North Somerset Council to reduce journey times on the X1 and X4 services. These services are also receiving ongoing investment of BSIP money that has enabled increased frequencies to make them more attractive and generating increased patronage. It would be perverse to undermine this by implementing this change and increasing journey times.
• Whilst we support improvements to cycling and the benefits it brings, we feel that the benefits in this location are unlikely to outweigh the disadvantages to the volumes of bus passengers who would be inconvenienced by this change.

2. Commercial Time Penalty

• We would need to pay an additional 82.6 hours a week of driver wages to compensate for this change, as well as incurring additional, mileage-related costs for things like fuel, which would lead to total additional costs of over £100,000 due to this change.
• For some services, this may require us to adjust service levels or cut journeys to recoup these costs and ensure services remain viable. The cost per day would be equivalent to around 10 average length bus journeys.

3. Highways/Road Safety Concerns

• 180-degree movements are not favoured at signalised roundabouts, which was confirmed in our real-world test where we ended up at red signals before crossing over Bond Street and onto The Haymarket.
• The swept path of the bus when taking up the inside lane of the St James Barton roundabout encroaches into the neighbouring lane, slowing traffic down and reducing throughput. The nature of this movement also presents a high blind-spot collision risk, with car drivers in the middle lane not necessarily aware that the bus may need more space to navigate around the corner.
• The current problems of queuing general traffic on The Haymarket before the start of the bus lane, which is a consequence of the kerb line kicking out and blocking the buses progress to the bus lane – will only be exacerbated with more buses per hour needing to access it. A solution to this problem – which we would like to see under any circumstances – would be to remove the extended kerb line and to make the Bond Street bus lane transition seamlessly into The Haymarket bus lane.
• We already run circa 30 buses per hour outbound on the St James Barton Roundabout. This proposal would see that number doubled to around 64 (not including other operators’ services) and would create issues with buses getting in each other’s way, particularly around pinch-points.

Recent discussions with BCC have invited exploration of moving some services out of the bus station to mitigate some of the above issues. While we welcome these discussions and are happy to keep an open mind for future network developments, in recent changes we have already moved services out of the bus station and onto city centre stops where this made sense and space was available. However, we feel that we are reaching a point where we can no longer do this, and anymore that we could do would only marginally improve the situation. In addition, there are several benefits offered by the bus station that would not be achievable were we to move service ‘on-street’. These are:

• Electrification – the imminent electrification of North Somerset services relies on good ‘opportunity charging’, whereby these high mileage routes that require buses to run long distances each day can benefit from charging whilst the buses are sitting on the bus station bays between journeys. This would of course not be possible if services were removed from the bus station.
• Driver relief – bus station routes are long-distance by nature, which means that drivers are in need of additional relief facilities that can be provided by operating out of the bus station. We would not be able to accept the deterioration in working conditions for our staff that removing services from the bus station would entail.

• Lack of stopping/layover space in Bristol generally to successfully move services out of the bus station, we would need to rely on good layover facilities being present at sites within the inner core of the city and at desirable destinations. The bus station currently presents extremely valuable parking and layover space, not just for the services that start and finish there, but for City buses that need to be moved away from the on-street stops to promote flow.

In summary, we believe that removing this element of bus priority would undo a lot of progress made within Bristol and other areas with regards to bus priority. We appreciate the role that improved cycling infrastructure plays in reducing overall congestion and promoting sustainable travel, but we do not feel that it is right that bus service customers should be penalised in the course of promoting cycle use. Buses represent by far the predominant form of sustainable transport in terms of journeys made – including by those who are unable to cycle – and whilst we fully support efforts to encourage greater use of all forms of sustainable travel, we must not lose sight of that fact.

Union Street    

We welcome the construction of two-way access and improvements to the urban realm along Union Street as well as expansion of the bus network with new ‘bus mass transit’ corridors. Developing better access on foot between Broadmead and The Haymarket is also a positive development.

However, we do have concerns around the implied lesser importance of existing bus services in the proposals, and feel that complete closure to Union Street to non-mass transit services would not maximise the investment and benefits for Bristolians, both for existing bus users but also for those that we need to tempt out of cars in order to drive modal shift.

We therefore welcome the decision to allow services 1 and 2 to share the new Union Street corridor with any mass-transit service with the proposed new routings, however we feel that with uncertainty around the planned M32 Park & Ride taking place and what that means for any mass transit route, further consideration needs to be given – and opportunities left open – for further refinement. For example, services 1 and 2 are only one half of an already well-established high frequency bus corridor for Northwest Bristol. Currently, there is an unbroken corridor stretching from Broadmead (Union Street) and the White Tree Roundabout on Westbury Road, with services currently scheduled to run at intervals of every 5 minutes during the day, and every 10 minutes into the late evening. We have seen significant growth over this corridor in the past year, largely thanks to the coordinated planning and common access points throughout the city centre.

Service frequency and simplicity are the biggest drivers of patronage and modal shift and we feel that continuing to allow the use of Union Street by Whiteladies corridor services, not necessarily just the 1 and 2, will benefit many people, will reflect a better value of investment for the Council and help to produce an overall better outcome for the city’s transport strategy, all whilst still giving space for a new mass transit service to grow.

Public consultation documents make references to buses laying over in the city centre as a negative thing. We would strongly argue that buses play a key role in the city and that their existence should not be thought of in negative terms. Layover is an essential part of running reliable bus services, and not all services in Bristol can be cross-city ones due to its geography.

Bus Stop Capacity

We also feel compelled to reiterate concerns over the follow-on impact to the Broad Quay/The Centre area from more buses needing to route through Broad Quay/The Centre. We are in regular contact with the Transport Operations team at BCC to avoid issues of stop overcrowding, illegal parking/loading and bus-on-bus congestion in this area already. To mitigate and avoid exacerbating this, we are cautious when it comes to planning routes through this gateway, and have reduced the number of buses laying over through Broad Quay in our latest service change. Nevertheless, the narrow width of the road and general traffic layout in the area will continue to pose challenges.

More of the inner core of Broadmead and Cabot Circus being inaccessible by bus would mean more buses having to instead operate through Broad Quay and The Centre. Services 39, 172, 349, 374/375/376, 522 and X39 are assumed to run via Broad Quay in the modelling, and we concur that this would be the only realistic alternative routing for these services. Although BCC’s consultants modelling suggests that this is okay, we are told by BCC’s transport operations team that Broad Quay is already at capacity – a point with which we agree based on our day-to-say operating experience.

Without changes to the stops and road layout, there is no available capacity for these services to serve Broad Quay and The Centre. If we were to propose all these services to be re-routed that way now, we would expect to be refused because of lack of stop capacity. Ambitious plans (in WECA’s Bus Service Improvement Plan) to double bus patronage in Bristol will mean more frequent bus services running, adding further pressure, which also needs to be factored in from a future-proofing point of view. Creation of new cross-city services will not solve the issue either as even if space were freed up at Broad Quay, there is no capacity on St Augustine’s Parade for services to stop at instead. There are also issues with lack of stopping space on Baldwin Street, including affecting the proposed ‘blue’ bus mass transit corridor.

Therefore, we are concerned that the DDP proposes changes which would involve many more services using Broad Quay/The Centre, but itself does not contain any plans for Broad Quay and The Centre regarding increased bus traffic and necessary improvements to mitigate the effects of this. To fully support the major re-routings of services in and out of Bristol, we would like to see proposals alongside the DDP that improve kerb/stopping space and improve width of the highway at Broad Quay, to allow what will be a significantly increased quantity of buses needing to flow through and access what is a very popular and important gateway for the city and waterfront.

Summary/Conclusion

In conclusion, we support the aims of Bristol City Council to regenerate Broadmead, and see the short-term disruption to services accessing the Horsefair and Penn Street as a reasonable compromise in the pursuit of a more attractive and desirable destination in the medium to long term, which will lift bus patronage and encourage sustainable mode shift in Bristol. We are broadly happy with the alternative bus routings proposed, and are grateful for the opportunity to have worked with the Council towards a refined set of proposals that have taken many of our suggestions into account and which we feel will provide significant additional benefits to public transport users in the years to come compared to some elements of the original proposals.

Proposals for significantly improved bus priority around the city centre, including around Bedminster Bridge Roundabout, are very welcome and we believe will help significantly with punctuality. The Bedminster Bridge Roundabout proposals, as well as the outbound Bond Street bus lane proposals, we believe will have the added value of being ‘statement’ pieces of bus priority that will stand out in their respective environments and mean more people consider their travel options. These measures are essential in an operating environment where we see deterioration in road speeds every year as general traffic grows and becomes “peakier” at certain times and days of the week. As illustrated in our analysis of the proposed bus station change, every minute of additional journey time counts and harms patronage and viability of services. We therefore welcome the decisive interventions proposed by BCC in these congestion hot spots and will see patronage and modal shift grow. 

We are gravely concerned by – and cannot offer our support for – plans for the cessation of the bus station right turn, which we believe would cause a great deal of harm to the attractiveness and timeliness of services using the bus station, with 925 hours being added onto total passenger journey times every week, with no tangible benefit. Many services that use the bus station are marginal, and our fear is that the additional costs would need to be recouped through service reductions. The bus station filter lane is one of the single most valuable pieces of bus priority in the city centre, and we feel it would be a retrograde step in the pursuit of increasing bus patronage, sustainable transport use and modal shift within the Bristol area.

In other areas, we do not feel the plans for Union Street have struck the right balance between exclusive infrastructure and the general welfare of the bus network in Bristol. Union Street is currently a heavily used high frequency bus corridor for Northwest Bristol and current re-routing plans would see this taken away. We would request that Union Street remains accessible for Whiteladies Road corridor services, to allow that well-established and high-frequency transport spine to continue to grow, which in turn offers wider benefits to the unique sections of those routes in Westbury, Henleaze, Southmead, Brentry and beyond.

Although related indirectly to the DDP, the problems already faced at The Centre/Broad Quay in terms of kerb/stopping space and clearway for buses must be addressed alongside the DDP and wider proposals for Broadmead. The proposed re-routing of services through Broad Quay would likely be rejected by BCC’s very own transport operations team if proposed today, so we would like to see significant progress made towards improving and upgrading Broad Quay, to expand stopping space, road width and to allow buses to flow more freely.

We hope that we can continue our good working relationship as plans are further developed, both around Broadmead and also at Broad Quay and around The Centre, and hope our experience and desire to keep our customers’ interests at the forefront have been valuable. We look forward to working closely in the future as plans are developed further at this exciting time for the city.