Secret Plans of the WoEP

Here is a bit of Fig 2 on Page 4 of the Executive Summary of the BRT proposal for Ashton Gate, the one that is causing the Prince Street Bridge controversy -the one where it turns out the WoEP have been secretly planning to take one pavement and one lane of the bridge and ban bikes from the bikes+pedestrians area created last October.

Look at the route from the centre to Emerson's Green. That is the railway path. Have the same team that has been secretly planning to take over from a bridge, been planning to run buses down the BRT? Isn't that what they promised to stop doing last year? Well, I don't think we can trust them.

For anyone not involved in that struggle, remember that the WoEP had been secretly planning this for at least a year, made a commitment to focus on the railway path route not because it made economic sense, but because it would be less disruptive to cars. It wouldn't just remove a park from east bristol and destroy the best footpath and bike route in the inner city, it wouldn't solve the congestion problems in/out the M32, and be surprisingly useless. Yet this diagram, seemingly prepared in Jan 2009, shows it is still a dream of the WoEP.

And so it begins -again. Have they not learned their lesson? Do they not know fear? Do they not realise that the protest group hadn't even begun its direct action campaign? In particular, the "let's try and get a bike on a FirstBus bus" event was going to be hilarious, a proposal to show that the claim that BRT+bikes could be combined wouldn't work by having everyone try and get their bike onto buses all round Bristol. Then cycle to the next stop ahead of the bike and try again. Some of us were looking forward to this.