We need decent public transport alternatives

Y ET again I’ve read more complete gibberish from Bristol City Council and Gary Hopkins – this time about the mooted Workplace Parking Levy.

Introducing a Workplace Parking Levy isn’t that bad an idea if you’ve got decent public transport to attract commuters out of their cars.

Take Nottingham – which will be the first city to introduce such a scheme. There is an excellent, popular and expanding tram network, a very good award-winning bus service and a decent urban train network. Therefore, there are plenty of options for Nottinghamites to get around their city.

Compare that with the embarrassing rubbish that masquerades as public transport in Bristol. A hugely unpopular, expensive, unreliable bus service run by a rapacious monopoly and a practically non-existent urban train network that hasn’t seen any meaningful investment since the Stone Age.

Up until this year our local politicians such as Barbara Janke, Gary Hopkins and Jon Rogers proclaimed that there would be no demand management (workplace charging, congestion charging) until decent public transport alternatives were in place.

Indeed, their glossy document

Well, where the hell are these improvements? They surely can’t mean the handful of bus lanes that constitutes the Greater Bristol Bus Network can they?

Bristol City Council and the equally incompetent West of England Partnership have singularly failed to improve Bristol’s public transport after more than a decade of trying and now they’re attempting to railroad through this ill-thought out scheme that will damage Bristol’s competitiveness without improving public transport one iota.

And Bristol-based businesses will not have to move out to Gloucester or Cheltenham either. South Gloucestershire and North Somerset have no intention of imposing a workplace charging levy – therefore businesses can move out to the fringes of the city and pay their business rates to those councils instead.

The abject poverty of imagination and incompetence at Bristol City Council when it comes to transport never ceases to amaze me.

Steve Collins, Bedminster.