But does the investment bring about other improvements such as route capacity / frequency too? The headline is often "speed" but the real reason may be capacity, giving an extra payback on the investment as the cost per used seat reduces. Not sure if the vehicles are bigger to do that directly ... but the 'do nothing' option might lead to gridlock as the city grows?
Again, I know the situation in south Bristol better than the north.
In fairness, Metrobus does promise some fairly useful things:
1) It gets the Ashton P+R traffic onto a separate route south of the harbour
2) It gives some relatively deprived areas of south Bristol, a high-quality bus service, converging on the hospital, leisure centre, college and schools, with more housing due to be built.
3) It gives new developments in Bedminster and Spike Island quality public transport into the city.
4) It will provide a circle service around the city centre.
It is also stealthily paying for numerous road schemes, such as the south Bristol link road, bus lane down Hartcliffe Way, remodelling of the centre and the area by Temple Meads. Though we'll have to wait and see how that all works out.
Yes, it should in theory have plenty of capacity, though it's a shame that the Ashton Avenue Swing Bridge is 8cm too short to fit double deckers underneath. But that capacity is only useful if you have enough drivers and passengers to take advantage of it (buses being easy to procure), there currently seems to be a big shortage of bus drivers and it's not certain that the passengers will turn up in droves, so it could be a very long time before that investment pays off.
Leaving aside the question of are there too many flaws, compromises and bodges to make the thing useful, the question is, even if it was only available for buses, could the money have been better spent on projects that would benefit the whole city? For example, bus shelters and displays have made the bus service far more attractive, but an '
Oyster▸ ' style card and free interchanges/automatic update to a travelcard would make it even more so, evening services seem to be dwindling, and perhaps the bus station would be better beside Temple Meads.
