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Mayor Marv's state of Bristol speech last night pledged to build an underground system witnhin 10 years. I thought this one was quietly being dropped but I suppose there are elections in the fairly near distance.

Here's the 'transport' section of Marvin Rees' 'State of the City' address, as reported on the Bristol City Council website (https://news.bristol.gov.uk/news/state-of-the-city-2019-mayor-focuses-on-immediate-changes-needed-for-bristol)

When Marv was speaking on BBC Radio Bristol today, the 10 year timeframe quite surprised me, especially when you consider the time taken so far and the years still to go before the much shorter (and partly extant) Portishead Line is due to be ready.

Indeed, at the very least you need a couple of years to do the planning, couple of years for the consultation/public enquiry, couple of years to get the act of Parliament/TaWA, then you have to build the thing!

And that is of course assuming that the darn thing can be physically threaded through the city. I've said it before, but heading north from Broadmead, the first real opportunity for the line to surface would be pretty much Southmead, and there aren't many easy sites suitable for station buildings/ventilation shafts.

As for the bus plans, where exactly do they expect traffic to go if they ban traffic from the Old City and the City Centre? Said it before, but surely it would be better to leave it, but introduce a workpace parking levy like Nottingham did and earn some dosh to build something more straightforward like a tram system?

Sounds very familiar. For younger readers, here's what this could look like:

(https://zemblanity.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/CCC-scaled.jpg)
Source: Bristol Omnibus Co Bristol City and Country Area Bus Timetable, 1st December 1974 until 11th October 1975

The 1000 cars at Canon's Marsh car park have gone underground and I bet it's rather less than that number now.

Edit: The pedestrian underground car park entrances around Millennium Square always reminded me of Metro Station entrances!

The words seem to be carefully chosen. Were the plan to be the building of an underground railway, I am sure the council document would have said that explicitly. So what is it? Underground MetroBust is asking for trouble. A line from the airport "looping through the south of Bristol" conjures up a vision of a railway joining the main line around Parson Street, but MetroBust arguably loops through the south of Bristol. Similarly, joining up Cribbs and the northern frozen zone to the nearby railway  would be very welcome, but underground?

So we wait with bated breath. Can Marvin start from scratch and build the Corbyn-Rees line in under a decade in a city that started with an idea for trams in 2000 and ended up with three new bus routes and falling passenger numbers 18 years later? And is this contingent on a Labour landslide locally and nationally? My inner sceptic is unconvinced.

Which is sad, because Something Must Be Done. Bristol has tried nothing much, and is all out of ideas.Council bus services weren't the answer, so we privatised them. That didn't work, so we spent tens of millions on new bus lanes, and that didn't work. So we spent hundreds of millions on bus routes, and that isn't helping much.

A petty disagreement, TonyK, Bristol isn't "all out of ideas", it's full of ideas but all out of putting those ideas into action.

I rather doubt that this will happen.
Tunneling is hugely expensive and is likely to get more so due to the safety industry requiring ever wider tunnels.

New underground railways require a walkway beside the track for emergency use, how long until the safety industry require this to be wider than at present ? or provided on both sides ?
How long before conductor rails are banned, even in tunnels ? 25Kv overhead will require larger tunnels.
And of course newts, bats, and nimbys.

Look at Crossrail for some idea of cost overruns and delays.

Last time I heard him talking about this kind of thing Marvin Rees said, sotto voce, '...not necessarily on rails'.

Underground busways are not without precedent: the Lincoln Tunnel XBL is sometimes cited as an example of underground BRT. But this is usually by folk whose politics lie to the right of where one might assume a Labour Mayor's would lie and who, one would assume, could not imagine a world in which their fortunes sunk so low as to necessitate them actually having to use it...

More in Bristol Live regarding the "Bristol Underground" with accompanying video. Once again, rather vague and aspirational. Yes, spring election time is in the air.

https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/underground-station-temple-meads-transport-3858826

What a spooky coincidence  ;D ;D

Two premises:


One potential conclusion is:


Another is;


Now I'm not a professor of logic, but it seems to me that conclusion B is a cloth-eared syllogism.

Not entirely, if you bear in mind that some of the traffic it would interfere with – particularly during construction – would be buses, cycles and pedestrians.

What about option C - build an elevated monorail?

You mean an elevated maglev monorail..?

Good thinking if we have those interesting boring machines on the go, less so if cut and cover is the preferred option. A friend told me that he lived in Newcastle during the construction of the underground tunnels, remembering it as chaos for three years, with new holes opening to replace finished ones. Even bored tunnels need shafts for access and stations. Nottingham city centre was a mess while the tram tracks were laid and Bristol was whilst the Temple Gate Gyratory was finally mended. Whatever option ends up being chosen is going to cause pockets of chaos while under construction, so we should choose carefully, and remember that whenever one demands that a council "does something", there is always the risk that it might just do that.You can't break a few eggs without making an omelette.

It would be interesting to know how elevated sections compare in cost and disruption to the tunneling option. Of course you can mix both along different sections of lines where one option is more suited than the other. Also, as a personal observation, elevated rail in an urban setting tends to look quite cool!

Please - are they interesting, or are they boring?

Ah, Tony, if you'd lived in Bristol for as long as I had you'd know that its City Fathers are more than capable of breaking eggs without ever coming close to anything that resembles an omelette. Remember the 550 houses they knocked down in Totterdown for the Outer Circuit Road? Actually, for that matter, remember the Outer Circuit Road?

Not that I'm a big fan of urban motorway omelettes, you understand...

By my reckoning, incidentally you'd have to knock down about 20 houses to make a through route of the Bristol and North Somerset railway to Radstock. Odd, isn't it, that we consider that impossible?

Underground Bristol is, of course, full of old mine shafts, with the tunnels from the East Bristol and South Bristol coalfields meeting right under Temple Meads station. That should offer both opportunities and challenges for an underground system to be developed.

I remember the Inner Circuit Road but don't think I've ever heard of the Outer Circuit Road.

Here's a map I drew for a Wikipedia article about road schemes in Bristol. Apologies for my wobbly cartography! The red line is the inner circuit road; the blue line is the outer circuit and the grey lines are arterial links. Only the section from the M32 to Lawrence Hill was completed, though large areas along its route were blighted. If you want to try to imagine the vision, picture a 6-lane motorway from Clifton to the M32... the grade-separated interchange at Queens Road would have been a particular highlight.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ec/Map_showing_proposed_road_network_from_Bristol_City_Centre_Policy_Report_1966.svg/800px-Map_showing_proposed_road_network_from_Bristol_City_Centre_Policy_Report_1966.svg.png)

And I agree entirely. More than that was CPO'd and demolished for Metrolink in Manchester, including a funeral parlour and a Baptist church in Oldham. Houses in the way were bought as soon as the authorisation to build came through, by negotiation I believe, and were then rented on short-term lets to people on the housing list. The Baptists got a nice new church, and there have been no complaints from the customers at the funeral parlour. Nor from anyone else for that matter.

So just about the only part of the OCR actually built was Easton Way and St Philip's Causeway? I understand the elevated section of the latter is now facing major works or potential demolition due to weakening concrete. Guess that was intended to be a flyover over not quite Nugent Hill, or were they actually going to demolish Kingsdown? (best not to know, sometimes)

I didn't know that. It used to be my route to work, and by coincidence, while in Bristol yesterday, I almost went over it to drop in on a former neighbour. Almost, because from traffic from Lawrence Hill was at a standstill at 4pm. I didn't bother. If that has to close for any length of time, or even have a lane closed, the effect on Bath Road and the few rat runs by the Netham Road bridge will be awful.

St Philip's Causeway isn't part of the OCR; it was built ten or so years after the OCR plan was abandoned. The first couple of hundred metres of its northern end use the planned alignment of the Lawrence Hill - Totterdown leg, but after that it swings well to the east of the OCR route.

There are other bits and pieces if you know where to look:

The section of St John's Lane between Wells Road and St Luke's Road;
The bit of dual carriageway where Jacobs Wells Road meets the Triangle was a link road;
Sheene Road, and the odd road layout to the south of the railway.

The large area to the east of the A38 in Bedminster is still blighted by the planned elevated dual carriageway which was to connect to the A38 near Parson Street. This was not part of the OCR but is sort of related.

St Philip's Causeway was planned and bulldozed through by the Bristol Development Corporation, which the Government of the time foisted onto the local community with the specific intention and getting this road built. It was not supported by the local authorities or much of the local populace at the time. The BDC had no democratic structure, so there was no way to effectively oppose their plans short of direct action, and was wound up as soon as the desired goal (the Spine Road) was built.

41 years? I remember the last couple of houses to be knocked down in Totterdown. I slept in one of them, then derelict, during my aimless meandering around this and other countries around 1973.
I also seem to recall signs for the outer circuit road, but not the actual road. I was not motorised in Bristol until 1979, so can presumably be forgiven.

I'll take your 41 and raise you 19.

The two coalfields never quite met, I am told, but it was close. The tunnels will be of little benefit to any putative underground system. Bristol lost out to South Wales because the coal was in such small seams comparatively, and a lot more dross had to come to the surface with it. It also wasn't as good coal.

I would think that the main problem will come when the boring machines hit patches of fossilised bats and newts.

The problems will come when they hit the first rills (drainage channels) that have been happily draining water away from where the coal faces were for the last 500 years, and nobody will know about them until the borings get flooded...

Perhaps we should dig up Marc Brunel - he had a few water breakthroughs on the Thames tunnel.

It wouldn't be without precedent, with the Severn Tunnel being at the extreme end of the examples in Britain. Work on the big long sewer from Hanham to Avonmouth encountered quite a few springs and underground waterways. A friend who plastered my walls in the house we bought in 1985 had worked on it, and was briefly famous in an anonymous sort of way when the tunnel he was digging broke through into a shaft outside the then HTV studios, and his was the hand that shook the hand of the waiting reporter. You don't get telly like that any more. A grout made of mainly power station fly ash, and costing ten times the price of normal grout, was used because it would go off under water if need be. They were not so deep in places - a hundred feet or more below Totterdown, but in Hill Avenue by Victoria Park, they started to find bricks dropping from the foundations of the houses above. Nobody above knew, and the houses were left left much stronger than when they were thrown up.

All of which beggars the question as to why tunneling should be such a problem or so expensive, if Wessex Water were able to drill something big enough to drive a Mini through with little disruption, and in a short timescale.