The road to hell (or Bristol, whichever comes sooner).

An old friend of mine, whom I shall refer to only as ‘Martin’ (because that’s his name), complained on a social network today that today it had taken him two hours to drive from one side of Bristol to another. Even by Bristol’s gridlocked standards, two hours is a little exceptional and my heart was genuinely with him. Three days a week, I drive to Warmley and I rarely encounter problems, other than those called by roadworks (so, all the time, basically) and because I am driving against the general flow of rush hour traffic. I have one of those smart Tom Toms that help you rat run your way round the back streets when traffic is bad. I am, I suppose, the lucky one, most, though not all, of the time. Having driven to the south of the city from the north for many years, I know just how awful things can get.

The easy solution is for the bloke in front to get the bus instead. If half of car drivers got the bus, I’d get there twice as quickly. I cannot condemn him enough for his selfishness. Oh, I’m only kidding. I know how awful the buses are in Bristol. The entire experience is one of sheer misery. That’s why we all want to drive.

I blame Margaret Thatcher for nearly of our traffic problems, plus John Major and Dr Beeching. (Three names for the kids to think about there.) Thatcher was the person behind privatising the buses and allowing them run purely for profit, rather than maintaining them as a public service. Dr Beeching hacked away at the railway network to such devastating ends that many towns no longer have railway lines. They either drive or they get the bus, if there is a bus. May I introduce you to the third person responsible at least in part for this shambles: John Major, who flogged off the railways to be run for profit instead as a public service, an idea that even Thatcher thought was completely mad. There are others to blame, I just don’t have the time nor inclination to write about them.

And then there’s Bristol itself, which was not designed at all, never mind designed to accommodate any form of public transport. It’s full of narrow roads, the city is full of hills. If you had been given the responsibility to construct a city worse prepared for any form of vehicular travel, you’d have built Bristol as it is today. And to correct matters will cost a fortune. So it won’t happen.

We don’t just need a few bus lanes here and there and I don’t see how it would be fair to impose a congestion charge on working people who need to drive to work. We need a genuine alternative, an integrated public transport system and we can only do this with a mixture of solutions.

The first thing we need is a light transit system to link outlying areas to the centre. Yes, we need to lay down tram tracks across the city and beyond its boundaries. We need these tram tracks to link with buses in the outlying areas and we need both types of transport to link with the existing train networks, opening and reopening stations as we go. In all honesty, this would be a very easy thing to do. It’s just that it will cost.

There is no solution in Bristol other than the Metrobus project, which is a glorified bus lane and no more. In my opinion, Metrobus is a cross county ego trip for local planners and politicians which will do little to alleviate our problems. A big bus lane is, quite frankly, urinating into the wind. Huge chunks of the countryside are being torn up to build this vanity project which is a pound shop solution and therefore no solution at all.

Some parts of the torn up railways still exist around Bristol by way of cycle paths. Some, not all, could be combined with trams. It would not be easy, but we used to have trams in Bristol so we are not talking about state of the art technology.

Soon, I will be going to Rotterdam in the Netherlands, where they have a well-funded integrated public transport system of trams, buses, a metro and trains. Granted Rotterdam is not exactly mountainous but it’s very crowded, far more so than Bristol, and they have coped easily enough.

Politicians of vision, that’s what we need. Not more men – it’a always men – who seek the cheapest solution money can buy, knowing that the cheapest option will almost certainly be the worst and least effective.

Bristol is not alone in its gridlock, but it’s down there with the worst delays in the land. Unless you spend money, there is no solution. We all know that, even the politicians. The sticking plaster solution of the last 50 years hasn’t worked, has it?