Great Western Coffee Shop

Bristol Centre Bus Stops St Augustine's Parade
12 Sep 2015 Bristol
Location:   Bristol Centre - St Augustine's Parade
Cause:   City Centre remodelling
Responsibility:   Bristol City Council
Dates:   12 Sep 2015 to 1 Mar 2017
Bus Stops Ch and Ci on St Augustine's Parade (opposite the Hippodrome) will close for up to 18 months from Saturday 12th September 2015 as part of the City Centre road remodeling.

For customers wishing to catch services 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9 & 72 the nearest stop will be Pa located at College Green outside of City Hall.

For customers wishing to catch services W1, X1, X2, X3, X6, X8 & X9 the nearest stop will be outside @Bristol on Anchor Road. (It is planned to site a closer alternative in coming weeks once space permits)

For customers wishing to catch the 903 Portway P&R a temporary alternative stop will be located in Rupert Street prior to its junction with Christmas Street.

The City council hope to have leaflets and posters to help any affected customers with this major closure in the next few days. In the meantime they have a web page with information and maps to help.

http://travelwest.info/travel_update/bristol-city-centre-stop-changes-sept-2015

No wonder First Customer Services are moving to Norwich. Couldn't get much further east... makes you think why they didn't aim for Lowestoft !

Interesting parallel relationship going on here between First Bristol and Bristol City Council, and between First Great Western and Network Rail.

If only Bristol City Council was in charge of transport matters!

This is a massive piece of work to transform the city centre into a futuristic efficient thoroughfare, which will look a lot like it did in 1977. You have to move with the times, I'm just not sure in which direction.

I think you are actually pretty sure of the direction FT,N. It's only modesty preventing you saying 'backwards'.  ;D

As for First's Customer Services dept. for buses in the east, south east, south, west and south west of the UK, after their move east north east from Southampton to Norwich, I'm hearing that the next move will be to Heligoland.

I am bemused by this thread. Just because MetroBus is a really bad project, we shouldn't assume that everything it brings in its wake is bad.


I remember how it looked in 1977; I used to pick my way across it every day on my way to school. The new layout is some way short of perfect, but it's a great deal better than the foul racetrack of the 1970s. It's also better than what's there now from the viewpoint of cyclists, pedestrians and public transport users, and makes Magpie Park accessible for the first time since the 1930s.

It's a slow process, squeezing the private motor car out of the city centre, but it has to be done - and this is a step in the right direction.

An important general lesson.  I can think of a number of provisions I've worked with in the past 10 years - one or two "really bad" but then they're typically better than nothing at all, there are often some surprise positives that come out, and tuning in little ways in the light of experience - where we have an input if we 'partner' - can bring improvements quite out of proportion to the degree of change.

I didn't mean that the changes will be bad, just that the traffic movement will be similar to that of the 1970's and 80s. It will have greater emphasis on bus movements across the centre, and that is certainly no bad thing. In fact, it should speed up getting from Cabot Circus, through the Centre, and on to Long Ashton and Avonmouth Park and Rides considerably, so making the MetroBust route redundant before it is even built. But why spend ^8 million solving a problem when you can spend ^50 million? As the LEP will will tell you, it doesn't cost anything, because it's "funding".

The previous transformation, with the bus lane between Baldwin Street and the Bristol and West building made to look like the pedestrian walkway, was a disaster. People were hit by buses and died before it was altered. Fair enough, you shouldn't walk along in your own private little world, with headphones and smart phone, ignoring the buses, but that's what people do, so we need to make it safe for them.

I suppose it depends on what you mean by 'traffic movement'... the pre-millennial arrangement was essentially a 3 or 4 - lane roundabout, elongated so that traffic could really get up to a good lick in the few designated places where pedestrians were supposed to try crossing. At least the current two-way scheme shifted the balance away from a very car-oriented space towards something a bit more people-friendly.

(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/dd/Bristol_City_Centre_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1722823.jpg)

All of which reminds me that it's about time I updated my wikipedia article..! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Centre,_Bristol)