It has taken little over four years to begin providing greater Bristol with bus infrastructure that can deliver some of the benefits of the expensive rail-based rapid transit projects mooted in the past that stalled at the planning stage. DAVID JENKINS explains what is being built and how it should look
Advanced Transport for Avon — a 1980s private sector scheme — even managed to obtain parliamentary powers to build part of a light rail network. Its financial collapse saw the mantle picked up by the public sector as Westway, which planned a six-line network.
A lot of stops are on dual carriageways, with poor pedestrian access
Its end was brought about by the abolition of Avon County Council in 1996.
There was even a proposal by Badgerline Rapid Transit (managed by one James Freeman) for guided busways based on the Belgian GLT model, which used a central guide slot, sometimes referred to irreverently as the Scalextric method.
In the early 2000s, Bristol & South Gloucestershire Rapid Transit — popularly called Bristol Supertram — proposed a £101million scheme partly on a rail corridor, then reaching farther north on new routes. But South Gloucestershire Council shillyshallied on the routeing in its se…
