Yesterday I published a statement submitted to Thursday’s BCC Transport & Connectivity Committee meeting by Jesse Zyla, questioning the biased data collection methods being used to justify BCC’s Transport Department recommendation to make the East Bristol ‘Liveable’ Neighbourhood permanent. If you haven’t yet read it, please do now - it’s short and concise - and share as widely as possible.

The placement of traffic sensors used for the EBLN Monitoring Report is however not the only issue under scrutiny as the committee approaches its vote. Matt Sanders, dogged critic of transport policy at council public forums and contributor to this blog, has also submitted a statement for Thursday’s meeting, examining the (serious lack of) evidence for through traffic in the EBLN area.

Please read on…

THE “THROUGH TRAFFIC” RATIONALE

The DfT’s Statutory Guidance defines a Low Traffic Neighbourhood as:

“An area-wide traffic management scheme aimed at reducing or removing through traffic from residential areas, put in place using traffic signed restrictions or physical measures such as planters or bollards.”

So the RATIONALE for an LTN is to tackle Through Traffic, “cutting through” the neighbourhood.

Other Lovely Things may flow from this — like quieter streets, improved air quality, and a shift towards active travel.

But to achieve any of this — and to acquire funding — Through Traffic must be eliminated.

HOWEVER…

Blocking roads can lead to unfortunate SIDE-EFFECTS — for residents, relatives, carers, utilities, deliveries, emergency services, etc…

To use a medical analogy:

One way to persuade a patient to stop smoking, is to smother them with a pillow. And yes — when they are lying dead on the ground — they have stopped smoking.

But they have also stopped breathing.

So is that a legitimate result…?

THEREFORE…

The EBLN’s modal filters — with their damaging side-effects — are only JUSTIFIED if there was a SIGNIFICANT problem with Through Traffic, in the first place…

THE 2022 TRAFFIC STUDIES

In 2022, the Council conducted traffic surveys at the locations shown on this map:

EBLN traffic monitoring sites

These included ANPR (Automatic Number Plate Recognition) surveys — where Number Plate information from multiple locations can be compared, to establish which vehicles are visiting local addresses, and which ones are “cutting through” the neighbourhood.

In 2024, ANPR surveys were done for the South Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood, and the spreadsheets published HERE.

However, the EBLN’s 2022 ANPR spreadsheets HAVE NOT BEEN PUBLISHED.

Surely — if this data demonstrated high levels of Through Traffic — then it was in the Council’s interest to sing it from the rooftops.

But strangely, that has not happened…

THE ABSENCE OF EVIDENCE

Of course, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. There was bound to be a certain amount of Through Traffic on these roads.

But the vital question is — HOW MUCH?

And the answer is — NOBODY KNOWS.

THE PUBLISHED DATA

The Council’s Monitoring Report used “Before & After” data from 2024 and 2025, to assess the EBLN Trial.

Issues which were monitored include:

• traffic volumes of various vehicles,

• numbers of cyclists and pedestrians,

• bus journeys,

• high-street footfall,

• air quality, etc.

But NONE of the 124 pages contain ANY DATA about Through Traffic.

No numbers from BEFORE the Trial.

No numbers from AFTER the Trial.

No numbers to demonstrate a REDUCTION.

Because ANPR data was NOT GATHERED in 2024 or 2025.

The Monitoring Report DID NOT MONITOR Through Traffic.

THE “KEY OBJECTIVE”

The EBLN’s Outline Business Case — presented to Cabinet on 4th April 2023 — included this text:

“The key objective of the project is to reduce through traffic, improve walking and cycling provision, improve air quality and increase the modal share for walking, cycling and bus patronage for both local and commuting trips.”

This lists several worthy reasons to pursue the project.

But the MOST IMPORTANT “key objective” — the one which MAKES this a Low Traffic Neighbourhood — and wins the DfT funding — is: “to reduce through traffic…”

So the FIRST JOB was to establish HOW MUCH Through Traffic there actually was.

And perhaps the 2022 ANPR surveys did indeed establish high levels of Through Traffic, to JUSTIFY the scheme…?

If so, then surely those results will be highlighted in the Full Business Case…?

THE DATA GAP

The Full Business Case runs to 110 pages.

NONE of them contain ANY analysis of Through Traffic.

This meeting’s Agenda Item lists 20 Supporting Documents — comprising 598 pages.

NONE of them contain ANY analysis of Through Traffic.

— Except for…

THE “SUPPLEMENTARY MONITORING INFORMATION”

Document 18 is Appendix A3 - Supplementary Monitoring Information.

And Page 2 starts with:

“Members of the Transport and Connectivity Committee have requested various data in response to the forthcoming EBLN decision paper due at Committee on 9^th July.”

And regarding Through Traffic, this document states:

“While there is no specific ANPR analysis of through traffic trips across EBLN, assumptions can be made based on the data collected. Traffic remaining within the zone can be assumed to be largely local resident movements, trade and delivery vehicles to residents and some through traffic in the form of taxis and buses etc. Hence subtracting post scheme flows from the monitoring report from pre scheme flows will give an indication of through traffic levels before the scheme was implemented.”

So this ANALYSIS of Through Traffic is based upon tenuous ASSUMPTIONS like this.

The document continues, with this claim about the Total Traffic Volumes measured in 2024 and 2025:

“Overall there was a 72-77% reduction on internal roads…”

But the “72-77% reduction” claimed in the Monitoring Report ONLY applies to the internal roads which were MONITORED by traffic sensors — all of which were located in close proximity to new modal filters, which prevented traffic from using those roads.

OTHER internal roads — which drivers were now forced to use INSTEAD — so which must have seen an INCREASE in traffic — were NOT MONITORED.

This “Supplementary” document implies that this patently MISLEADING figure can now be extrapolated — to conclude that most of the APPARENT “reduction” consisted of PREVIOUS Through Traffic.

The whole thing is a HOUSE OF CARDS!

AND FINALLY…

Before implementing this Liveable Neighbourhood, the Council had NO IDEA how many of the drivers using these roads were “CUTTING THROUGH” — and how many of them LIVED THERE — or were VISITING for legitimate reasons.

Yes — Through Traffic has been eliminated.

But how much was there in the first place?

Nobody knows.

Because NOBODY MEASURED IT.

But without that data, the entire scheme has NO JUSTIFICATION.

And meanwhile:

INCALCULABLE HARM has been inflicted upon the local residents.

Returning to the medical analogy:

Yes, the patient has been smothered with a pillow — so can no longer smoke.

But did the doctor ever actually ask — were they a smoker in the first place…?

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Excellent question, Matt!

To end, I’d like to note that some East Bristolians did make an effort to show the world what the traffic on their residential streets was like before the implementation of the ‘modal filters’. Here, once again, is a video Katie Sullivan made on Victoria Avenue prior to the implementation of its modal filters, to be found on the East Bristol Open Roads Facebook group. Definitely worth a watch.

https://www.facebook.com/katie.sullivan.5203/videos/1588124052074659

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As this Thursday’s Transport & Connectivity Committee East Bristol ‘Liveable Neighbourhood’ vote rapidly approaches, members of the public have been digging into the data presented in the Full Business Case. The facts coming to light in relation to council claims around the achievements of the EBLN road blocks are gravely concerning.

Today we are publishing the first of two highly relevant statements that have been submitted to Thursday’s public forum as well as circulated to all committee members.

Should they go ahead and vote to make these discriminatory mobility restrictions permanent, they will be doing so in full knowledge that the data they are basing their decisions on is grossly biased and misleading.

Please share this post far and wide. Bristolians need to know how underhand their City Council is being, and start to question why…

Over now to local data expert Jesse Zyla, who has detected some breathtakingly audacious use of the traffic sensor positioning used to inform the council’s monitoring report.

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The “77% Reduction”

In order to persuade Councillors to approve the permanent installation of the East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood, the Transport Department has presented a Full Business Case.

Page 25 details the “Trial Scheme Outcomes”.

And when discussing “Overall motorised traffic levels”, a “key headline” is stated as:

“Internal roads saw a 77% reduction on weekdays and 72% on weekends.”

This refers to “before and after” data gathered by VivaCity traffic sensors — in Oct 2024 and Oct 2025 — with the resulting comparisons published in the Monitoring Report.

Page 12 of the Monitoring Report has a map of the VivaCity monitoring sites, and those locations can also be seen here: VivaCity Sensors Locations.

Of the 28 sensors, 16 are deemed to be on INTERNAL (residential) ROADS, while the other 12 are on External (boundary) Roads, like Blackswarth Rd and Church Rd.

Page 23 shows that MOST of these Internal Roads saw a large reduction in Motorised Traffic Volumes.

EXCEPT for Great Western Lane — which saw a 288% INCREASE — due to the Marsh Lane bus gate forcing drivers to use that road instead.

The “77% reduction” quoted in the Full Business Case has been calculated by taking an average of the OTHER 15 roads — excluding the inconvenient Great Western Lane result!

So that is FUNDAMENTALLY DISHONEST, to begin with.

If the 288% increase for Great Western Lane is factored in, then the average “weekday reduction” of these 16 roads was ONLY 54%.

But even if Great Western Lane is ignored, the supposed “77% reduction” only applies to the remaining 15 Internal Roads which were actually MONITORED.

But that is NOT the full picture, throughout the WHOLE AREA…

The Sensor Positions

On page 35 of the Monitoring Report, the VivaCity sensors recorded a 100% reduction in Car Volumes, in Beaufort Road and Victoria Avenue.

But of course they did — because those roads were now blocked by modal filters — and the sensors were placed right next to them!

This is like shooting someone in the head — then taking their pulse — and noting a “100% reduction”!

Obviously there was not a 100% reduction of traffic along the ENTIRE LENGTH of those roads. People still live there — so needed to come and go.

So the result of each SENSOR is NOT REPRESENTATIVE of the full ROAD.

And the SELECTION of roads is NOT REPRESENTATIVE of the full AREA…

The MONITORED Roads

Here is a list of the Internal Roads where traffic volumes were MONITORED — indicating those which had a new traffic restriction in close proximity:

- Avonvale Road - Bus Gate

- Barton Hill Road - Pocket Park

- Beaufort Road - Modal Filter

- Blackswarth Road / Beaufort Road - Modal Filter

- Cobden Street North - Pocket Park

- Cobden Street South - Pocket Park

- Cossham Road - Modal Filter in Wicket Lane

- Ducie Road (x 2) - Modal Filter

- Great Western Lane - no traffic restriction

- Lincoln Street - Modal Filter

- Marsh Lane - Bus Gate

- Morton Road - Modal Filter

- Netham Road - Bus Gate

- Victoria Avenue x 2 - Modal Filters x 2

So, all-but-one of the monitored Internal Roads had a new traffic restriction close to the sensor, and so — surprise surprise! — the RECORDED traffic volume went DOWN.

But at the ONE recorded location WITHOUT a traffic restriction — Great Western Road — the volume WENT UP nearly 300% — due to drivers re-routing, to avoid the Marsh Lane bus gate.

But what about all the OTHER Internal Roads, which were NOT monitored…?

The Roads NOT MONITORED

The following list shows some of the other Internal Roads, which the Council’s EBLN literature told local residents they would now need to use, to access their homes — as shown by the “to and fro” arrows on the Council’s EBLN Map…

- Beaconsfield Road

- Byron Street

- Days Road

- Derby Street

- George and Dragon Lane

- Grindell Road

- Kingsmarsh Way

- Lewin Street

- Morse Road

- Northcote Road

- Richmond Road

- Salisbury Street

- Seneca Street

- Sherbourne Street

- Summerhill Terrace

- The Avenue

- Verrier Road

- Weight Road

- Witchell Road

- Worsley Street

Google Maps indicates that the EBLN area contains 157 Internal Roads.

The ones listed here are just the ones near the perimeter — which the Council told residents to use, instead of their usual routes. So it was reasonable to expect the volume of local traffic using these roads would RISE.

But how many of these roads were actually MONITORED?

That’s right — NONE OF THEM!

Misuse of “Most”

Page 26 of the Full Business Case tells the Committee’s elected councillors:

“Traffic counts

“- There has been a significant decrease in motorised vehicle traffic across most internal roads within the EBLN area.”

WRONG.

The stats show a decrease of traffic at isolated spots close to modal filters — in 15 of the 16 Internal Roads which were actually MONITORED.

That is NOT the same as “MOST INTERNAL ROADS”.

15 is NOT “most” of 157!

It’s less than 10%!

Obviously the Council couldn’t monitor every road. But this wasn’t a representative sample — as all those monitored roads had a traffic restriction near the sensor.

This was the most UNREPRESENTATIVE sample it was possible to select.

And yes — these unrepresentative monitoring sites were SELECTED.

And now their already-distorted results are being FURTHER MISREPRESENTED to the Committee.

Conclusions

The Council CANNOT CLAIM that there has been “a significant decrease in motorised vehicle traffic across most internal roads within the EBLN area”.

The Council has NO IDEA what has happened, on MOST Internal Roads.

Many Internal Roads will have seen significant RISES in traffic volumes — like those at Great Western Lane. But they were simply not recorded.

Because the Council DIDN’T MONITOR them!

The False Data Claim

Returning to Page 25 of the Full Business Case — the “key headline” is stated as:

“Internal roads saw a 77% reduction on weekdays and 72% on weekends.”

It does not claim “most” internal roads.

It does not even claim “most” of the internal roads which were monitored, but excluding Great Western Road…

It simply claims that “Internal roads saw a 77% reduction…”

And that is — provably — NOT TRUE.

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More info on how to get involved in keeping Bristol moving can be found here:

https://kbmsite.carrd.co

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On Thursday 9th July Bristol City Council’s Transport and Connectivity Committee will vote on whether to make the trial East Bristol ‘Liveable Neighbourhood’ permanent.

The Green committee members will certainly vote for the scheme, leaving the Tories, Labour and Lib Dem to decide the fate of this extremely contentious scheme.

I suggest you check out recent posts on the East Bristol Open Roads Facebook group, particularly Melissa Topping’s Presentation of EBLN Failures and Evidence (which gives an excellent potted history of events since 2022), as well as her link to the response to her Freedom of Information Request regarding the data.

And then crack on with sending in your objections via questions (by Friday) and statements (by Tuesday), using this form. Choose the Transport & Connectivity Committee from the drop down menu.

It really is your last chance. If the scheme goes ahead, only a legal case can stop it, and that will cost everyone money that BCC knows few people in Barton Hill have. It will cost us double, because it will be our money that is used to take the scheme out again.

If you wish to remind yourselves further of aspects of the journey that has led up to this moment, check out some of my previous posts on the EBLN, linked below. There are a lot, so obviously take your pick!

1. An East Bristolian is basically told to eat cake by her Marie-Antoinette-esque local councillor:

2. BCC refusing to accept feedback in any meaningful way:

3. The day when the council’s intentions became crystal clear: a nighttime raid to install road blocks, re-traumatising war refugees in the process:

4. Political authorities’ use of the very polarisation the Transport Chair wrings his hands over: so important to remain aware of…

5. Reflections from the WECA metro mayor transport hustings. Including how the Transport Chair ignores refugees who are making outstanding contributions to society, and some stats that show there were few problems with road safety and pollution in East Bristol’s residential streets:

6. Council Leader Tony Dyer doesn’t appear to have a clue about, well, anything much to do with the EBLN…

7. A review of the insanity that is the EBLN:

8. A distinct lack of ‘traffic evaporation’:

9. One of the most popular posts on this blog so far: the sorry state of the planters and ‘street art’ in the EBLN, concluding with Martin Tancock’s excellent critique of the scheme.

10. How the EBLN in practice has been failing to square up to its alleged objectives, the abysmal ‘consultation’ process (including a failure to adhere to the Gunning Principles), a look at the use of the Citizens' Assembly to justify the scheme, and how it’s all going to be repeated in South Bristol… There’s a lot in this one so please have a read if you haven’t done so already.

11. What some local people have had to say about the scheme, as well as the local MP:

12. An examination of the farcical October 2025 EBLN survey:

13. Starting to connect LNs with the council’s development policy:

14. Katie Sullivan’s heartfelt critique of the Global Cycling Network video on LNs:

15. And a response to an East Bristol cyclist who didn’t believe Katie’s claims:

16. The council pretend to be listening to residents’ concerns about emergency vehicle access and introduce more cameras instead of bollards:

17. And finally, one resident’s extreme frustrations with the consultation process and the failure by the council to be taken seriously:

Bristol City Council are thoroughly intending to ‘do it anyway’ - this much is crystal clear. It is harder to do this in the face of massive opposition.

If you haven’t yet written to BCC to register your opposition, now is absolutely the time to do it.

Thanks so much for reading!

For more info on these issues, including local Bristol groups you can join and actions you can take, please see https://kbmsite.carrd.co/

Also, should you feel moved to, please consider a paid subscription if you are benefitting from these posts, even if it is just for a month or two. Cheers!

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Why are you not listening to the voices of Lawrence Hill, Redfield and Barton Hill regarding the negative effects of EBLN Road blockages and very poor consultation process?

Why are you continuing to spend such a ridiculous amount of money on this despite a huge majority being against the scheme in an area with such high levels of poverty and low traffic use?

The above questions were posed by Melissa Topping on 9th July 2024 at the Public Forum session of Bristol City Council (BCC)’s full council meeting.

She was referring to her own area in the east of the city, with its particular demographic, but questions are now of course being asked with the same utter bafflement by many who live in comparatively well-off Southville.

Here are excerpts from Teri Bramah’s words to the Council at a Public Forum last autumn:

I suffer with anxiety and depression.

Since finding out about this I have, at times, found myself heading into what I can only describe as a tailspin. The only thing to help level myself out has been and remains involving myself with those who are actively concerned.

(…)

I keep asking folk – neighbours, strangers on the street, ‘have you heard about the SBLN? What are your thoughts?’ And have more times than not been met with faces becoming upset, tension, stress, fear, confusion, panic. People here in Southville are utterly bewildered at how you are imposing this madness. We didn’t want or ask for this.

(…)

You certainly don’t care anything about the mental health of this neighbourhood. You don’t care about carers and those they care for. You don’t care for the disadvantaged, the mentally and physically ill, the elderly. You don’t care about those who work hard, have kids and need to own and use a car for their livelihood, their health; and come home to find Nowhere to park. Supper on the table / takeaway in the car going cold because they’ve been stuck in traffic jams due to traffic forced onto too few roads and now can’t find a parking space and then have to walk some distance to get home after a long and tiring day.

Just stop, Find the sense and decency in yourselves to know this is wrong.

It’s of course no novelty that our elected representatives appear robotically incapable of showing empathy. We are so used to formulaic responses (see my last post, linked below) that many either fail to recognise this obvious red flag regarding our political systems, or just give up trying to get their voices heard.

But what is it about ‘liveable neighbourhoods’ in particular that is leading councillors to behave so unempathetically in the face of so much confusion, anxiety and opposition? Why does a clear ‘NO!’ from so many people have so little impact?

If you control the language, you control the narrative.

One answer lies in the firm conviction of policy-makers that a forced reduction in driving is for ‘the greater good’.

For them, car-free roads are equated with and even define higher liveability, through the narrow lens of the claim that air quality will improve, collision risk will decrease, and people will become more physically active. As critics of LTNs are quick to emphasize, no-one is arguing with these ends as a general objective - it is the local contexts and the means that are the (massive) problem.

I don’t know who coined the term ‘liveable neighbourhoods’, though it appears to have originated in the late 1990s in Western Australia. For more background, see this paper seeking to assess ‘whether neighbourhood design simply facilitates the behaviours of those already predisposed to use active forms of transport or whether it can be used as a policy tool to change behaviour’ - which provides clear evidence that local governments have been meddling in spending taxes on manipulating behavioural change rather than just providing the basic public services we expect for quite some time now. Again, no arguments with being encouraged to live more healthily - but who is doing the nudging, why and how are they doing it, and do we have any real say?

Whoever invented the name clearly did not have the bandwidth or desire to understand that there’s a whole lot more to ‘liveability’ than banishing cars from our lives. Nor did they understand that while such policies might suit some people in some areas, they might cause a whole lotta problems for others that completely cancel out any benefits.

If you strip it to its bare bones, the attractively-named ‘liveable neighbourhood’ is simply a crude strategy to introduce friction into the road network to block flow, thereby forcing behaviour change and micromanaging the movement of people around their own living space.

The choice of language is intentionally manipulative. You are excused from showing empathy to anyone who objects to a council trying to make their life more liveable, no matter how much distress they are in, because you have colonised the meaning of the word. In our current world of strong attachment to identity, you can even label them ‘anti-liveability’, patronisingly treating them as unable to understand what’s best for them.

BCC has now even extended this strategy to its Vision Zero. Who can argue with wanting to prevent any deaths at all on the roads? You’d look inhumane to position yourself against that, right? No matter that the council only appears concerned about deaths when there is money to be made from the attempt to prevent them, through cameras and fines. Other deaths, from collapsing harbour walls, for example, are fair game or can at least be glossed over - because the attempt to prevent them is a drain on council coffers.

And don’t start me on the e-scooters… They deserve a piece all for themselves!

The cul-de-sac as cure-all?

Some of the claims of what these schemes can achieve are positively utopian. According to proponents, these revenue-raising road blocks foster wonderful and harmonious community connection, ending social isolation. They prevent or cure diseases such as heart attacks, cancer, obesity and depression. They enable local businesses to thrive, as well as saving the planet from catastrophic climate change. And they are of course beneficial in pandemics: a whole swathe of LTNs was rapidly introduced around the country from March 2020. This was allegedly to make it safer for people to get their daily outdoor physical exercise - which is very odd when you recall that the shutdown of the economy along with the threat of huge fines if you were caught far from home (remember the Dominic Cummings affair?) had already drastically reduced car usage.

Check out this article for an astonishing example of LTN propaganda.

It appears that we have been suffering all along from a cul-de-sac deficiency!

What is a council supposed to do, but claim the funding and erect those planters and expensive surveillance systems in order to bring a little joy into our humdrum lives?

Preventing the future balloon from bursting

If, like me, you are remaining sceptical, perhaps the ‘Liveable Neighbourhood’ pages on the council website will help us?

Let’s take a look at the following section: Why we think liveable neighbourhoods are needed. Perhaps it lays out more convincing answers to Melissa and Teri’s concerns and questions?

So, is it actually about population growth and the future pressure this will add to the city’s road networks? Both council and WECA literature make abundantly clear that the local population is expected to grow considerably in the coming years.

What do they think is causing this?

According to journalist Angus MacIntyre, amongst other projects,

(t)he council also wants to massively overhaul the way travel is made through the city centre, making it easier and safer to make journeys on foot, by bicycle or using public transport in anticipation of the population of central Bristol growing significantly over the coming decade due to the huge number of new developments planned for the area. (emphasis added)

The ‘huge number of developments’, clearly a response to central government diktats to meet the apparent ‘housing crisis’, is here given as the reason people currently living in the city must already ditch their cars and start walking and cycling instead, in order to avert future traffic chaos and gridlock.

So what is it - a current untenable situation of rat running traffic and unacceptable levels of pollution, or a future one?

Is the implication that the new arrivals will bring with them many more cars, which will be unsustainable, so today’s residents must prioritise future residents’ needs?

If they are not bringing cars, why focus on the future?

If the current situation is already as bad as BCC makes out, necessitating so much disruption to correct it, why are they planning these new developments?

Problem - Reaction - Solution?

Our local councils are thus openly and unashamedly causing the problem that they are claiming to solve.

To borrow a favourite metaphor of Ed Plowden’s, the pressure in the traffic balloon will cause it to burst unless we do something now to deflate it gently. We must pre-empt the foreseeable drastic consequences of the very government policy he and his fellow councillors throughout the region are happily complying with.

So, where is the population increase in the city and consequent pressure on housing coming from, considering the birth rate has reached a record low? Is new housing development the only solution? What about the million properties around the country that are used exclusively as second homes? Does population increase always correlate neatly with a rise in the number of cars on the roads, and what is happening with a mass transit network to meet projected transport needs? Are the areas being targeted for LNs really the areas likely to suffer the most from congestion?

Many questions. For now let’s take a closer look at the demographics.

The Population Question

The stats show that Bristol’s population is indeed growing. According to the ONS, there are two main factors behind this:

1. A rapidly growing student population.

Universities have expanded throughout the UK, driven by government policy on economic growth since at least the 1980s. In 1999 Tony Blair gave a dramatic speech setting a target of 50% of young adults going on to higher education by the end of the 21st century. This target was already achieved in 2019 and a new one set of 70% by 2040.

Considering the dire financial situation most universities are in and the astronomical fees for both tuition and living costs, it is hard to imagine anyone at all attending them by then, but hey!

Bristol, along with many other UK cities, is currently building student accommodation like there’s no tomorrow. Tellingly, we find once again it is all about economic growth, including the raising of taxes.

From the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change:

Looking ahead, our analysis suggests that if seven in ten young people completed HE, this would significantly raise the rate of productivity growth and boost the size of the economy by almost 5 per cent over the next generation compared to allowing educational attainment to stagnate. As well as meaning higher incomes for individuals, this would also generate substantial extra taxes for public services.

2. Net international migration

Spoiler - this also has to do with the students!

According to Tristan Cork of the Bristol Post, writing about the landmark of half a million inhabitants being reached in the summer of 2025:

[m]uch of this international migration into Bristol can be attributed to the city’s growing universities, who have increasingly spoken about the need to attract more and more foreign students to keep their institutions going, as the level of funding from the UK Government, both directly and in the form of student loans, either decreases or is frozen.

But do students bring in many more cars?

Well, no, of course they don’t. Most are already cash-strapped through the sky-rocketing tuition and accommodation fees and interest-bearing student loans, and know their debts are already going to be astronomical. Cars just bring a whole lot more financial pressure - as well as the expectation of running an amateur taxi service for your mates! Bristol’s universities are certainly not encouraging car use. And indeed, why would they, when for young and fit people living within a reasonable distance of where they study, it really is easy enough to walk or cycle? They are generally exemplary ‘active travellers’.

If students are causing the population explosion, then, how can this lead to a ready-to-burst balloon of traffic congestion? What else is going on?

New Towns

In a recent article I recommend you read, Cork connects active travel policy in Bristol with the government’s drive to ‘build baby build’ ‘new towns’ on the outskirts of cities rather than with city centre development. He writes:

Bristol is at the forefront of this new wave. … (M)etro mayors came to London to meet with the Prime Minister and the message was clear - go for more, bigger new towns, and override any local councils who try to stop it.

Fortunately for WECA mayor Helen Godwin - though not for wildlife, biodiversity, the human need for nature connection, and oh what was it - the climate - all the local councils, whether Labour, Lib Dem or even Green, are fully on board with these massive new developments.

Following on from ‘Mayoral Development Zone’ Brabazon in Filton, with its up to 25,000 new homes, there will be at least four more such mass developments around Bristol, with a total of at least 40,000 houses, many built on green field sites.

Seb Loyn, director of planning and development at YTL Developments, has said that Brabazon will be ‘a model for sustainable growth across the UK’. A government report on New Towns celebrates them as part of ‘a high value research, advanced engineering and technology economy’. WECA mayor Helen Godwin is excited that it will help ‘drive economic growth’. Green Party BCC leader Tony Dyer also welcomes the New Town project.

Where are these prospective New Town dwellers to come from? Immigrants, couples keen to have children but currently lacking the space, grown up kids desperate to leave home, people in need of social housing, the homeless? How much of this new housing will actually be ‘affordable’ to any of them? And then there’s this, from the EBLN Objection Report p152:

Are these New Towns going to be populated by the elderly? Why do all these retired people want to come and live in sterile new housing estates? Are they actually the only ones who could afford it?

If you have any thoughts on all this, please drop them in the comments!

Regardless of who inhabits them, we are back to that traffic balloon. These developments would presumably create a massive amount of pressure on the transport system, if people are to travel into the city for work, shopping and leisure.

Says Tristan:

Transport and what the developers and planners call ‘connectivity’ is a major issue for all the new towns - how do you build tens of thousands of homes, create new communities, and not substantially increase the number of private cars on the already congested roads around the city.

But maybe the whole point of the new towns and the ‘transformation’ of how we travel is that we actually don’t travel much anymore, unless it is mostly within that 15 minute active travel radius from where we live?

Godwin is promising a mass transit system, but this currently seems to equate to a mass cycle network. All WECA councils are already spending vast sums on narrowing roads for motor traffic and widening them for bikes. Cars are being banned from more and more streets, or heavily discouraged from driving through them or parking on them. Roads are being left to fall into disrepair. The Broadmead shopping area in central Bristol is being replaced with flats. Local high streets are dying and we are being heavily nudged to shop more and more online.

I think we are starting to see the implications of infinite growth on a planet with finite resources play out. Growth for growth’s sake demands restrictions in order to be sustainable, and it is never the wealthy and powerful who feel them first. It is no surprise that people with disabilities, being one of the most vulnerable groups in society, are currently acting as canaries in the coal mine.

Returning to Melissa’s and Teri’s questions: does the answer come down to our elected bodies, regardless of political affiliation, not being able to step off the linear capitalist treadmill of economic growth? A treadmill that is rapidly filling up the balloon of the entire economy - not just transport networks - to the point at which it is itself going to burst and create a helluva mess in the process?

We probably all need to be aware of how complicit we are ourselves in this mechanism and where it is heading.

I will leave you with my question to the Transport & Connectivity Committee, 5th February 2026:

The committee is anxious that a rising population in and around Bristol will make driving so impossible by 2035 that it believes all it can do is try to discourage people from driving is to force more congestion on major roads at busy times of day as a result of blocking residential streets to through traffic – as a kind of homeopathic prophylaxis.

This projected rise in population is a result partly of an ever-increasing number of students, who are far less likely to drive than the working population, and partly of immigration, which in Bristol’s case probably mostly refugees, who, as the council points out, have a low rate of car ownership.

So the projected runaway motor traffic problem is in fact much more likely to be caused by the vast increase in property development encouraged by WECA and its individual councils in their pursuit of economic growth, drawing more people to the city and its outskirts in order to work, regardless of where they come from. This means BCC is itself instrumental in causing the problem it is then trying to resolve by removing freedoms from those to whom it is accountable.

Note that property development is also a major cause of carbon emissions.

Have you considered NOT allowing so many new houses to be built, and instead focusing on the well being of those who already live here, as well as thereby causing much less pollution?

The Officer response:

Not only is the city legally required by government to respond to national planning policies including expectations to plan for housing and other needs, we also need to tackle the scourge of homelessness.

In response to this expectation, the council’s plans for new development in the city are set out in Bristol’s emerging Local Plan which is currently being examined by inspectors appointed by Secretary of State. Bristol will also need to start preparing its next local plan from summer 2026 due to the significant shortfall in housing provision in comparison to the amount set through the standard method in the National Planning Policy Framework.

It is not within the gift of Bristol City Council, or any other local planning authority to determine that it does not need to plan for growth, and we have a raft of policies to ensure that our transport goals are maintained or supported by development.

Sustainable development is needed across the city to meet citizens’ needs for new homes, including affordable homes, for investment in business and workspace and to support facilities and services. Growth in Bristol is supported by new and improved infrastructure such as schools, parks and transport facilities. New development is expected to contribute to these requirements.

Thanks so much for reading! For more info on these issues, including local Bristol groups you can join and actions you can take, please see https://kbmsite.carrd.co/

Also, should you feel moved to, please consider a paid subscription if you are benefitting from these posts, even if it is just for a month or two. Cheers!

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Although it’s already a month ago, I am today bringing your attention to May’s Transport & Connectivity Committee public forum session, which you can watch from timestamp 3:20 in the above video. It is around 35 minutes long.

We all know that a public forum is more about allowing people a public space to let off steam regarding their concerns and grievances than actually enabling us to influence policy.

Nevertheless some of us tirelessly turn up with our questions and statements, sometimes the work of hours of research. Even if for the time being we are duly fobbed off with inadequate and often dismissive responses or remarks, we know at least that it will all be on the public record for future reference.

Still, the level of non-answering can at times be astonishing, and this is what I am highlighting in this brief post.

So on 14th May there some of us were again, attending for our half hour or so chance to Say What We Think and attempt to eek out a little more clarity from Transport & Connectivity Committee Chair Ed Plowden and the associated council officers.

A Question of Data

A couple of weeks previously, Bristol 24/7 had published this opinion piece by Matt Sanders, where he concludes:

1. Bristol City Council has no “traffic data” to confirm any quantity of vehicles “cutting through” the Southville zone – let alone “high numbers”. So those claims on the council’s website are a bare-faced lie.

2. Senior transport officers and the transport chair are well aware of this fact, and have repeatedly approved evasive and disingenuous responses to all enquiries

3. Without the claimed “traffic data” there is no justification for modal filters in Southville

4. So the modal filters have only been proposed in order to meet specific funding criteria and not because of proven issues within the Southville locale

By the time of the meeting the council had responded to this public scrutiny of the data by publishing two more data sets. The first (see here) was from Arup, a global consultancy company with a focus on ‘engineering the future’ of the built environment, and the second (see here) from The Floow, another global company, this time concerned with ‘nudging’ drivers into ‘safer habits’. Despite many questions to council and a FOI request from Robert Harakis this data had not previously been released, and appeared to be a hurried attempt to try to prove that the problematic traffic did indeed exist.

Dismissive Responses

Along with many other issues, this publication triggered many questions to the May meeting. And many of these (often very specific) questions were sadly given generic copy and paste responses, completely failing to provide actual answers.

You can read them for yourselves here on the council website.

Here is just one example of many:

This copy-and-paste response, or parts of it, occurred 14 times, sometimes as the blanket answer to three different questions by the same person. It is propaganda for the schemes instead of an answer to the question.

Prior to the start of the forum, Executive Director of the Growth and Regeneration Directorate John Smith had attempted to ward off concerns by stating that public questions are taken seriously, with 126 having been answered in preparation for this meeting. He implied that this was quite an achievement considering the ‘tight deadlines’ they are faced with.

I chose to address this issue in my spoken statement - noting that nevertheless the non-answers were not honouring the spirit of, well, basically answering the damned questions members of the public had made the effort to ask.

Transport Chair Ed Plowden responded:

We do take these very seriously. We are determined to be publicly accountable and to enable scrutiny but it is very difficult when these come in on a Friday and we need to answer them within a certain amount of time, so we’ve done our best.

Katie Sullivan was also concerned, as well as prepared, asking as her first supplementary question:

I asked AI to analyse the answers to the public forum after I read every answer to the questions you gave, and its verdict was 75% of questions failed to receive answers; heavy reliance on repetition with 56% of answers using identical copy and paste text; frequent circular referrals back to the data pack that residents had already deemed insufficient that led them to ask their question.

Why do you believe it is acceptable to provide dismissive responses that fail to answer questions rather than answer them properly in good faith?

To which Ed responded:

We make every effort to answer the questions. Sometimes the volume of the questions means that we provide something of a generic response…

So how seriously exactly is ‘very seriously’, and what does ‘every effort’ really mean? We know that council officers, like most of us, have a lot to do. We also know that the bureaucratic machine is so clunky and inefficient that vast amounts of time and resources are dissipated uselessly into the ether.

But still, to so blatantly not answer so many very clear questions did not even have a semblance of taking them ‘very seriously’, or putting ‘every effort’ into the exercise. If that is really the best they can do then it is not only immensely disappointing but very disrespectful towards the very people the council is meant to be serving (if we are still under any illusions that this is how it works…). We are basically being told that our concerns and desire for transparency are not the priority.

After responding to Katie’s question, Ed then appeared to offer a solution, suggesting people submit their questions again as soon as possible, via email, because the longer they have to answer them the better the quality of the answers will be - though there was no indication as to the form these answers would take or the exact timeframe involved.

If anyone reading this submitted questions that received unsatisfactory responses but has not yet already done so, please do email them to democratic.services@bristol.gov.uk, mentioning Ed’s clear invitation to do so at this last T&C Committee meeting.

If anyone has already followed up on this please let us all know what responses, if any, you received in the comments below.

The debacle is in any case a clear admission that the current system of enabling democratic scrutiny via the ‘democratic service’ of the public forum is not fit for purpose.

The more important an issue is for the public, the more submissions committees will receive. “We ran out of time so had to copy and paste” completely fails to acknowledge and honour this fact.

If you don’t have time, as you indicate, then what is the point of the public forum ritual, and why is it included under ‘democratic services’? ‘We don’t have time’ is basically saying, ‘you - the people we are accountable to - are not a priority’.

It is particularly ironic coming from a committee concerned with “connectivity”.

There needs to be a robust and transparent structure for providing satisfactory answers to urgent questions on contentious policy issues.

This would surely be in any council’s own interest if it wishes to move forward with as little friction as possible.

Postscript

I’ll hand this over to Judith Worthington, whose written statement (number 4), may resonate:

Title: No to Victorian times in 2026

I’m getting really tired of hearing this argument that because Southville’s streets were built in Victorian times, we should all just 'go back' to how it was then. It’s a total romanticisation of a time that was actually pretty miserable for most people.

Back then, people only 'walked everywhere' because they had no other choice. It wasn't some green utopia; it was an era of coal smoke, zero street lighting, and practically no access to doctors or dentists unless you were wealthy. If you got ill or had an emergency, you were basically stuck, as going to hospital back then was a last resort.

We’ve spent over a hundred years moving away from those conditions for a reason. Society has moved on, but these 'Liveable Neighbourhood' plans seem to ignore how people actually live in 2026.

We don't have a doctor locally anymore—our hospitals and specialist clinics are miles away, and you can’t exactly expect an elderly person or someone in pain to hop on a bike or walk miles to get there.

Southville is serviced by only one bus twice an hour which is inadequate for most people’s needs—in particular the elderly and those with mobility restrictions. For most people in Southville, a car isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity. I’m thinking specifically about women travelling home alone late at night who don't feel safe walking through dark streets, or our elderly and disabled neighbours who would be effectively housebound without car access.

These schemes might look nice on a map, but they risk turning our streets into posh prisons for anyone who isn't young, fit, and able-bodied.

We need a transport system that works for the 21st century and looks after everyone—not one that tries to force us back to the Victorian ages.

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Introduction

Both the EBLN and SBLN projects have been in the news recently. Here’s a synopsis:

EBLN

Protesters in Barton Hill have once more been active. Ed Plowden has been urging residents to inform the police when fellow residents vandalise road signs. After a flurry of activity yesterday it seems that the new EBLN measures are now nearing completion on Marsh Lane and Avonvale Road and relevant surrounding streets. For more information see the East Bristol Open Roads Facebook group. As members there note, the council sure is desperate to get these ‘modal filters’ installed in a hurry.

Melissa Topping and Katie Sullivan, residents of Barton Hill who are well-known to our readers, have announced they will be pursuing legal action if the EBLN is made permanent this summer. The barrister who successfully represented the challenge against Croydon Council’s implementation of LTNs at the High Court believes there are grounds for bringing a case against BCC.

SBLN

Readers will also be very familiar with the serious questions which have arisen regarding the council’s interpretation of their own traffic data in Southville, the chosen area for their second ‘liveable neighbourhood’. Since these concerns were published on this blog they have been aired more widely in the local press. See here and here.

Claiming they have been listening to Southville residents, BCC has made some changes to the plans, which don’t quite look like the ‘U-turn’ the press has announced them to be. It has simultaneously published two new sets of traffic data which it had previously withheld for unknown reasons. On the surface they appear to show the claimed high percentage of through traffic in the area, but under inspection once more completely fail the test. (More to come on that in a future post.)

Transport and Connectivity Committee Meeting

With all this activity, this afternoon’s Bristol City Council (BCC) Transport and Connectivity Committee meeting has evidently drawn more attention than usual. Although the public forum has not yet been published, there are indications around 125 questions have arrived in Ed Plowden and Adam Crowther’s inboxes. Interestingly, my statement has been redacted because one phrase was ‘possibly defamatory’. Others have had whole questions not just redacted, which is the standard procedure, but actually disallowed - for the same reason. One has to wonder why?

Today’s piece addresses one of these questions.

So now over to Matt Sanders, author of The Fundamental Lie, on his efforts to bring more puzzling facts about the council’s own traffic data - this time in support of the introduction of a swathe of new 20mph speed limits around Bristol.

Please note the link at the end to the council’s consultation on the changes, which closes in just a few days on 17th May. Feel free to refer to Matt’s research in your responses.

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I was recently looking at Bristol City Council’s 20mph Speed Limit Consultation — and noticed that, once again, the Council is playing fast and loose with its facts and figures…!

On 8th May, I therefore submitted a public forum question, for the following week’s meeting of the Transport & Connectivity Policy Committee.

However, on 13th May I was advised by the committee secretary, that this question has been rejected,

“… as it could be defamatory.”

No attempt was made, to explain which part is “defamatory”, and why.

No attempt was made, to redact “defamatory” words or sentences.

Instead, the entire question was rejected — so does not appear in the meeting’s published papers.

To draw your own conclusions about the Council’s motives for rejecting this question, please read on…

A QUESTION from MATT SANDERS:

“20mph Consultation — Misleading Statistics”

The Council is consulting on proposals for new 20mph speed limits on over 100 roads, as seen here: https://www.bristol.gov.uk/20mph/whats-changing

Some excellent generic reasons are put forward, for reducing speed limits, and I agree with many of them.

However, as with the SBLN Consultation, this one is fundamentally compromised, by the publication of false statistics, and misleading interpretations, which will undoubtedly skew the results.

— Coronation Road

The page relating to Coronation Road includes the following two claims:

“The average daytime speed along this section is 16mph. This means a 20mph limit should improve safety without adding to journey times.”

Let’s gloss over the sneaky cherry-picking of “daytime” speeds — which tend to be lower than night-time, due to congestion — and address the second point first:

— “Without adding to journey times”

If ALL the vehicles on Coronation Road were going at 16mph all the time, then yes — changing the speed limit to 20mph would have no effect on journey times.

But they are not.

Vehicles are travelling at all different speeds on this 30mph road, depending on the time of day, and the amount of congestion, etc.

To make the maths easy, let’s first assume that half of the vehicles are going at 6mph, and the other half at 26mph. The average speed is then 16mph.

But if a 20mph speed limit is imposed, then half of the vehicles will have to go slower.

So this DOES add to the journey times — for HALF of all drivers.

— The Fundamental Fallacy

The claim is therefore a fundamental fallacy.

It is plausible enough to trick most people — including me, when I first read it.

But it is NOT TRUE.

Either the Transport officers understand this point, and are deliberately presenting misleading information — or they do not understand this point, so aren’t qualified to do their jobs.

— So what about the numbers…?

In June 2024, the Council placed Automatic Traffic Count devices (rubber strips on the road) at numerous locations throughout South Bristol.

ATC Site 9 was on Coronation Road, and shows that two-thirds of vehicles were legitimately driving at speeds in the 20-30mph range.

ALL of those vehicles would be slowed down by a 20mph speed limit,.

So TWO-THIRDS of journey times would become longer.

— “The average daytime speed…”

But how can this be true, if the “average daytime speed” is only 16mph?

Well…

In this ATC study, the Two-Way 7-Day Speed Summary for 7am - 7pm has a Mean Speed of 22.23mph.

For the full 24 hours, it is 23.40mph.

In layman’s terms, that is known as “faster” than 16mph.

— Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics.

So — according to this data, collected by the Council in June 2024 — the daytime average of 16mph is a LIE.

And even if it were true, the claim about not affecting journey times is also a LIE.

— Other Roads

Here are some more claims, being made in this Consultation…

“Bishopsworth Road: Average daytime speed along this section is around 19mph. This means a 20mph limit should improve safety without adding to journey times.”

“Parson Street, Bedminster Down, and Bedminster Down Road: Average daytime speed along these roads is below 18mph. This means a 20mph limit should improve safety without adding to journey times.”

“Winterstoke Road: Average daytime speed along this section of Winterstoke Road is around 17mph. This means a 20mph limit should improve safety without adding to journey times.”

If 16mph was wrong in Coronation Road, how can we trust any of these other claims?

(I’ll ask my data-friends to investigate further, using the SBLN ATC data…)

But the bottom line is that the entire Consultation is fundamentally flawed — and everybody is being tricked into supporting these measures, on false pretences.

— QUESTION:

Please explain EXACTLY which counters, which filters, and which methodology produced each of the average speeds quoted above.

So that was my Question, to the Transport Dept of Bristol City Council.

And surely — if they were able to demonstrate the provenance of the Consultation’s quoted average speeds — then it was in the Council’s interest, to provide a full and frank response to this question.

Indeed, such a response would have easily debunked any “defamatory” claims which I may have made.

But the Council didn’t do that.

Instead, they rejected the entire question, and refrained from publishing it in the committee papers.

However, in the days since this question was submitted, independent data analyst Ali Bin Shahid has examined several of the June 2024 ATC traffic data spreadsheets, published on the Council’s website, to establish the real statistics for additional roads, including Redcatch Road…

In every street which was examined, the current “average daytime speed” is considerably higher than that which is stated in the Consultation.

In some cases, the real speed is 50% faster than the fantasy one!

Yet for many participants in this Consultation, the assurance that journey times would not be increased, will have tipped the balance, and won their support.

In this Consultation, the “without adding to journey times” claim is made for 106 roads, throughout the city.

Yet regardless of the “average” speeds, all of those roads will have some proportion of vehicles driving faster than 20mph. So imposing a 20mph cap would obviously “add to journey times” for those drivers.

So the entire Consultation has been fatally compromised, by this misleading text.

To end with, we have to ask just one fundamental question:

If there were to be no increase in journey times — then there would be no decrease in speed.

So why do it?!

To have your say, go to the Consultation NOW!

It closes on Sunday, 17th May.

Matt Sanders

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In February I published a response by Katie Sullivan to the Global Cycling Network’s film on Bristol’s ‘liveable neighbourhoods’:

Her words found resonance with many Bristolians.

But an anonymous truth-seeking ‘Local Resident’ had some probing questions in the comments, writing:

I'd really like to know the sources of the various claims made in the response as I'm concerned that many of them are factually inaccurate.

The truth matters. And if someone is going to publish a comment full of claims about the EBLN then they should be able to back them up.

Below is my response.

Dear Local Resident,

I am truly grateful for your query. It represents a healthy attitude towards communication that can prompt us all to be more careful and precise with our words.

The buck starts here, as they say.

Neither side is going to gain a listening ear and the trust of the other if they cannot get their facts right. And no neighbourhood (or city) can be truly liveable and thrive without trust.

I would add that the same applies to a willingness to understand and empathise with the position of those we disagree with, particularly when they are being asked to make sacrifices for your own benefit.

In the spirit of transparency and honesty, I have done my best to respond on behalf of the author, as she has a lot on her plate. Perhaps she will add her own thoughts in the comments.

Before I begin, however, I want to highlight that this search for truth has been the exact subject of several of our most recent posts here on the Keep Bristol Moving! Substack.

An avid truth-seeker such as yourself will have no doubt been gravely concerned to read the following four posts:

I am certain you will agree that the factual inaccuracy of Bristol City Council’s claims regarding the existence and dangers of cut-through traffic in Southville is completely unacceptable.

As you say, truth matters.

It matters above all from those who have chosen to exercise power and authority over others, and cannot do so with integrity whilst claiming they have data which they do not in order to justify the imposition of unwanted changes.

It is, after all, in the first instance our elected representatives who must justify themselves to the people they represent and are accountable to, not the other way around.

But now to your questions.

You asked for the sources showing the following five points.

1) That BCC broke the law

This refers to the following statement by the author:

You didn’t find out that BCC broke the law by failing to carry out disability assessments prior to installation.

The short answer is that there has until now been no court case against Bristol City Council to prove it has broken any law regarding disability assessments with the EBLN. BCC remains innocent until proven guilty and Katie has therefore misapplied the expression.

Yet she did not pluck the accusation out of thin air.

If she had written ‘BCC may have broken the law’ it would be a different matter.

So bear with me, as I would like to take this opportunity to investigate why there may indeed be grounds for a legal challenge.

From the perspective of many people with the protected characteristic of disability it is abundantly clear, despite BCC'S claims, that they were not adequately consulted, nor were their needs properly taken into consideration, before the EBLN was implemented.

All public authorities have a legal obligation under the Equality Act 2010 to comply with public sector equality duty. This is in order to:

• Eliminate discrimination, harassment and victimisation, and any other conduct prohibited by or under the Equality Act

• Make sure people with a protected characteristic have the same opportunities as other people

• Make sure people with a protected characteristic have good relations with other people1

The council has consistently denied a failure to adequately consult people with disabilities, having carried out and published the required EqIAs (Equalities Impact Assessments).

Yet many of those affected in East Bristol are clear they were never asked for their views before implementation, and have been consistently ignored when they have tried to make their voices heard. To them the EqIAs have simply been box-ticking exercises.

To insist otherwise is to gaslight people who are often already dealing with a lived experience of levels of discrimination and stress that many of the fit and able-bodied can find hard to imagine. It is also in direct contradiction to ensuring the good relations described in the third point above.

And there is legal precedence. BCC’s alleged failure to consult adequately has drawn comparisons with the case of Lambeth Council in South London. In 2025 a high court judge ordered the removal of the West Dulwich LTN, and refused to grant the council leeway to appeal the verdict. The council had been found to have acted unlawfully, having failed to take into account the substance of objections submitted during the consultation phase.

In June 2025, Baggator, a community organisation in East Bristol, undertook a review of the EBLN, Changing The Future: An Analytical Review of the East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood Implementation in Light of the Lambeth Judicial Review, making a detailed comparison with the experience of West Dulwich.

The following are passages from this review, which, inter alia, refers to BCC’s apparent claim of having consulted a ‘Barton Hill Disabilities Group’.

The existence of an EqIA and the subsequent implementation of mitigations like exemptions demonstrate Bristol City Council’s formal acknowledgement of its Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED).

However, the continued and significant criticism from various community segments regarding disproportionate impacts, coupled with serious allegations about the failure to consult legitimate, existing disability groups and the potential fabrication of a consulted group, suggests a fundamental flaw.

This could arise if the initial assessment did not fully capture the depth or breadth of certain impacts due to inadequate or misleading consultation, if the implemented mitigations are perceived as insufficient by those affected, or if the communication regarding these mitigations has not effectively reached or reassured concerned groups.

This situation underscores a critical challenge for local authorities: it is not merely about undertaking an EqIA as a procedural step, but ensuring it functions as a dynamic tool that robustly and transparently addresses concerns, based on genuine engagement with actual representative groups, and is perceived by the community to do so. The PSED is an ongoing duty, requiring continuous attention to the actual effects of policies on protected groups.

(Pages 14-15, emphasis added)

While the Lambeth judgment did not specifically turn on deficiencies in an EqIA, the overarching public law principles of fairness and the specific statutory duties under the PSED demand that councils give due regard to equality considerations.

If Bristol's EqIA was indeed compiled without adequate consultation with representative, existing disability groups, or by referencing a non-existent group, or if the subsequent mitigation measures are perceived by affected groups as failing to adequately address substantive, evidenced concerns about disproportionate negative impacts, this could represent an area of vulnerability.

This vulnerability might not align precisely with the narrow grounds of the Lambeth decision (which focused on the failure to consider a specific submitted document), but could be challenged under the broader PSED or general public law duties of fairness and rationality, especially if credible evidence of severe, unmitigated impacts on protected groups was presented to the council and not adequately addressed in the decision to proceed with the trial.

(Page 23, emphasis added)

As you are aware, the Chair of the Transport Committee, Ed Plowden, subsequently apologised for what he said was a misunderstanding around the consultation of a disabilities group. The informal meeting with council officers, mentioned in email correspondence, had apparently been requested by a ‘small group of disabled people’ from Barton Hill, and the capitalisation was a regrettable typo.

The members of this small group have never come forward to clarify the situation so we only have Ed’s word for it, without any further sources or records.

Melissa Topping followed up on this with a question to Full Council on 9th September 2025:

Extensive Engagement and Disability Discrimination

The council has now backtracked on its claim of consulting the "Barton Hill Disabilities Group," now stating it was a group of "disabled people" rather than a formal organization. This raises serious concerns that the council's consultation on the EBLN trial was not with established, representative groups, but with a handful of unverified individuals who may not be reflective of the wider disabled community's views. In light of this, and the council's legal obligations under the Equality Act 2010, can you please provide a list of the specific, non BCC, verifiable disability organizations—not just individuals—that were formally consulted on the EBLN trial, the dates of those consultations, and a summary of the feedback provided? This is crucial to demonstrate that the council has not breached its Public Sector Equality Duty and is not discriminating against disabled residents.

The officer’s response was:

Examples include a briefing with Bristol Disability and Equality Forum on 08/02/2022, a briefing with BCC Disabled People and Older People Pavements and Roads Advisory Group on 13/09/2022 and a meeting with WECIL on 29/11/2024. The council has also recently commissioned WECIL to complete an independent access audit report of the trial area.

Melissa attended the meeting and put the following supplementary question to Mr Plowden verbally:

With regard to your response to question one, the BDEF engagement took place with one person, not many people. The BCC Older Person’s Pavement Advisory Group doesn’t seem to exist, although the Older People’s Advisory Group does and is council run, so doesn’t count. And again, WECIL were not consulted until after I alerted them, and also after implementation had started. The current audit taking place should have been done at planning stages, and cannot replace that that wasn’t done.

It is unlawful for public authorities, including highways to discriminate in the exercise of public function. There is a duty to make reasonable adjustments, therefore will you admit you have breached the Equalities Act 2010 with EBLN, in planning and implementation?

Plowden’s response was:

No

Well, he was hardly going to say, ‘It’s a fair cop gov’nor’. But this complete refusal to consider the council may have acted negligently towards vulnerable people according to the Equalities Act is there on the record should there be future legal proceedings.

You can watch the interaction in the above video, timestamp 27:50.

Note that Melissa’s original question also addresses your additional comment on the ‘Barton Hill Disabilities Group’:

Ah yes, the erroneous inclusion of a capital letter on the words ‘Disability group’ which was wilfully misrepresented by opponents of the scheme as an attempt by the council to create a fictitious disability group. Yes, this does concern a truth seeker like myself because I don’t like to see the truth distorted in this way. The council are hardly angels but pretending they did that was pretty beyond the pale.

Regardless of the truth about this group of people with disabilities, the fact remains that no satisfactory response could be provided to Melissa’s question asking for details of the official disability groups involved in the consultation.

Ed Plowden was not able to back up his claims with accurate facts - but was let off the hook through a question which he used to shut down the debate with a yes/no answer.

I am a little disappointed to see you are reluctant to apply the same rigorous standards around truth-telling to politicians as you do to the people they represent.

I would be interested to know your reasons for this.

2) That 70% of people opposed the scheme

This refers to the statement;

You didn’t report that BCC went ahead with this scheme despite 70% of residents objecting.

There has been no referendum to prove conclusively how many residents object to the EBLN, so both sides are reliant on the various surveys which have been carried out.

The council’s December 2025 EBLN Engagement Report polling showed around 50% do not want the scheme, contrasting with a third who do.

But Katie’s claim refers to a May 2025 Bristol Cable survey. Residents were asked how they felt about the scheme and the results indicated that 69% of 968 did not want it. 25% did.

A third survey was carried out by the Lawrence Hill Neighbourhood Forum through its EBLN Community Survey, which was circulated widely in the East Bristol area. Two thirds of the respondents were EBLN residents. Below are the very clear results.

It is also worth noting that the Halt the EBLN Scheme petition on Change.org has to date 7,311 signatures. The Back the Continuation of the EBLN Project petition, started by another (?) Local Resident, had 10 signatures and has now been closed. Neither requires residency in the area, but then neither do most council consultations.

3) That residents are ‘cut-off’ from Wellspring (it’s still accessible by vehicle, just longer journey)

This refers to the following:

You also failed to talk about the GP in the centre of the EBLN that is now cut off from two thirds of its patients by the two bus gates. It has made a public statement about its concerns about harm to the public.

I have been unable to locate the precise source of the author’s claim here. As far as I know you are right: the Wellspring Surgery has remained accessible by car, but with much longer journeys for many, as evidenced in this Bristol Post article from December 2025.

Local resident Lisa Gillard said access to the GP surgery in Barton Hill was still a huge issue for many and hadn’t been dealt with by the council changes.

“It makes no difference,” she said. “If you live on Avonvale Road and need to go to the doctors you have still got to drive ten minutes out of your way. If you live on Marsh Lane and want to get to Church Road it’s the same thing - remove all of it,” she added.

I would note that for some infirm people reliant on motor travel the longer journeys might be off-putting enough to give up the attempt - which after all appears to be the council’s aim - and in this sense they may feel cut off from their GP, because they cannot walk or cycle there.

The public statement referred to is almost certainly this one issued by The Wellspring Settlement (which includes the Surgery), criticising the consultation process and calling for BCC to listen constructively to feedback from the local community. (Switching round bus gates and installing ANPR cameras instead of bollards does not represent constructive listening to the many people who just want the whole scheme removed as soon as possible so they can get back to normal.)

4) That the fire service asked for removal of planters

Katie wrote:

You didn’t bring up the Fire Service request for the immediate removal of planters and bollards as areas of the EBLN are considered inaccessible to fire engines…

Here I can find no proof of this request from the Fire Service centrally, but it may be contextual to a particular emergency situation. In any event, it took a Freedom of Information Request for BCC to finally admit their modal filters were causing issues for the emergency services - something which people had been trying to tell them for months.

This Bristol Post article outlines the situation. The Fire Services spokesperson played down any difficulties, but there is plenty of evidence the fire crews themselves were unhappy with the obstructions:

Fire crews also provided specific details to their bosses of what was delaying them, which have been repeated in the internal report with the names and details withheld.

One crew, attempting to reach Morley Street in Redfield, reported three ‘blockages’ in their way. “As a result of these obstructions, fire truck was unable to reach the scene and crews reached address via foot. Fortunately the fire was minor, and crew were able to extinguish it without the use of firefighting equipment from the truck,” the report said.

Other fire crews reported that they had issues opening the bollards that have been dotted around roads near the Wellspring Settlement. The bollards stop private vehicles, but emergency service personnel have codes to open them, but that requires stopping, getting out and manually opening the bollards, before returning to their vehicles.

“We encountered a problem on Ducie Road, there are two sets of bollards to go through, the first one was fine but on the second one the padlock is broken and you can not get it off,” one fire crew reported. “We have informed Control and they are going to put an alert on the area and also informed the council. If this were an incident we could of cut it off but it would of taken a while,” they added.

Other fire crews said that, even when they avoid the modal filter planters, their way is often blocked by parked cars and narrow streets, and the modal filters mean they have no choice but to go down those roads.

The council has now taken these complaints seriously enough to remove some of the blocks.

5) That the fire service failed to reach a house fire

The claim was that

they failed to reach a house fire right in front of those planters you filmed yourself in front of

The source for this is in the Post article I have already quoted above:

One crew, attempting to reach Morley Street in Redfield, reported three ‘blockages’ in their way. “As a result of these obstructions, fire truck was unable to reach the scene and crews reached address via foot.

Perhaps it’s okay that a fire crew can only reach a location on foot if that is how the area in question is already laid out. Perhaps it’s not if they are only having to do so because the local council has erected physical barriers in their way.

With that, dear Local Resident, we’ve reached the end of your list. I hope this has helped clarify matters for you, and also that I have done Katie justice. She is an incredibly hard-working, intelligent and principled woman who walks her talk. She cares deeply about her local community and has a strong sense of justice for those who struggle in life. I find her inspiring.

As a self-confessed truth-seeker will you now join me in a rallying call for all parties involved in this search for the truth to move forward in integrity, admitting where they may have been wrong, responding to concerns openly and honestly, and not seeking to impose agendas upon those who are negatively affected by them?

That way maybe we have a chance of creating truly liveable neighbourhoods.

All the very best,

Helen

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The following is a short four minute read: Katie left this comment on the East Bristol Open Roads Facebook group after reading Matt Sanders’ statement to WECA, ‘SBLN: The Fundamental Lie’.

I thought it well worth drawing to your attention. She highlights the classist nature of low traffic neighbourhoods, as well as how Bristol City Council is trying to force people to live in an imaginary city, ignoring the hard reality of so many people’s lives. Instead of providing viable alternatives through properly investing in better and cheaper public transport as well as ensuring essential services are within reach without having to drive, BCC believes all they need to do is spend money on forcing people out of their cars.

Read on:

As always, follow the money.

Both the EBLN and SBLN are giant keys, being created by the council solely to unlock millions of pounds in money from Central government.

The fact they can dress these schemes up in environmental concerns, net zero targets, and active travel ideology just helps them sell the schemes onto the unwitting public. The council clearly has chosen to have an overwhelming cycle and active travel agenda, as befits a GREEN party, and I’m sure they are actually well-meaning at heart.

But the fact is their policies are supposed by law to serve their entire range of constituents evenly and fairly.

And these policies don’t.

These policies closely align with a certain well defined subsection of the population, who are relatively more affluent, more likely to be homeowners, more likely to have the space and means to purchase and store bicycles, more likely to be able to financially afford the high bus ticket costs in Bristol, more likely to have flexible employers and to be able to adjust start times or to work from home to avoid the worst of Bristol’s traffic, more likely to be physically capable of active travel and more likely to be ideologically supportive of harsh measures to force an outcome against the will of a wider population.

The fact is that the majority of people in the city are just trying to survive in a world where the cost of living is far too expensive, where bus travel is limited, time-consuming and expensive, and within a city that for 30 years prioritised private car ownership over public transport to avoid having to bear the expense of maintaining a well-functioning public transport network. That city has therefore been designed to concentrate services in out of town centre areas where parking is far more easily available and where land is far less expensive. Therefore, the average family needs a car if it is to be able to go to B&Q, go to the hospital, travel to work, travel to school. The vast majority of places people need to go within the city are no longer close by.

The city that the council wishes Bristol to become is at the moment a purely aspirational idea. It’s not actually a bad idea necessarily, but at this moment this city does not have services and employers in places where people can live within a 10 minute walk of all of it and easily excess everything without a car. It does not have a cheap, reliable, and comprehensive public transport network that would easily allow people to travel in every direction at every time of day or night that they need to do so, at a price that is affordable.

What the council have essentially done is try to force the population to behave as if they live within an imaginary city rather than the one that actually exists. They’re trying to force people out of cars, without having a City that’s capable of accommodating vast swathes of its population switching out of their cars and travelling by other methods.

They’re trying to force ideology over reality and in the process they are seriously harming a multitude of vulnerable groups within our population. Their policies are seeing the centre of the city dying. They are seeing our main roads saturated with standstill traffic which is not flowing, because they have failed to accept that the alternatives that all the city’s car drivers would need, to be able to leave their cars behind, simply aren’t there.

Change the city first. Spread out essential services back into all areas of the city. Take back control of the bus network and successfully expand the train network. Increase the number of services and their capacity, and finally make public transport free, as so many European cities have done, and you will find that it will work and the people will leave their cars.

The path we are currently on is only going to lead to Bristol slowly dying. Endless student housing is not going to solve anything. Because all the other demographics also live in the city and it needs to work for them too.

Katie Sullivan

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Our last three guest posts have presented clear evidence that Bristol City Council has been painfully economical with the truth in its desperation to implement a ‘liveable neighbourhood’ in South Bristol. The claim that the area is so dangerous that through traffic must be prevented through millions being spent on the installation of ‘modal filters’ has no basis whatsoever in its own data. At best, it relies on the ‘perceptions’ of some residents who would like their roads to become cul-de-sacs.

If you haven’t yet caught up, please see here:

and here:

and here:

The evidence collected in these pieces has now been distributed to WECA mayor Helen Godwin along with every Bristol City councillor.

It remains to be seen if being caught lying makes any impact at all on the decision the Transport and Connectivity Committee will take regarding the adoption of the SBLN full business case. If they vote it through at the end of the summer, it will be crystal clear that the members are unconcerned about truth, integrity and honour.

Further, no-one will be able to hold onto the tiniest wafer of conviction that these schemes are about our health and safety, as it would be ridiculous to spend millions of pounds on such an upheaval to people’s lives based only on the perception of danger when the hard data shows its absence.

In this post I’d like to highlight some more research which adds further evidence of this lack of council credibility, this time undertaken by Bristol’s unsung hero of the data crunching world, Chris McEvoy. Chris writes the Bristol Uncovered blog, where he has recently published two very interesting pieces.

I’ll summarise his finding here, but please read the pieces in full to get the complete picture.

Will Low Traffic Neighbourhood schemes make our roads safer?

In the first, to be found here, he analyses the STATS19 data on traffic collisions Bristol-wide from 2020 to the first half of 2025, and speculates on ‘the likely impact of the LTN schemes on safety related to vehicle collisions’.

During this time period 8000 vehicles were involved in 4260 recorded collisions, leading to 5000 casualties. Notably, some of the areas most affected were roads such as Redcliff Hill, Baldwin Street, St Augustine’s Parade, Old Market, Prince Street and Park Row, i.e. clearly not residential streets but the busy city centre.

The EBLN

Of these 4260 collisions, 64 were in the EBLN area, with 4 of these listed as ‘serious’ but none as fatal.

Chris concludes that the ‘data does not show a real problem with collisions in the EBLN area’.

The SBLNs with a focus on Southville

323 of the 4260 city-side collisions were within the SBLNs area as a whole (a much wider area than just Southville). Of these, 5 were fatal and 41 serious. Just one of these serious collisions was within Southville’s boundaries. Chris and I have ascertained that this occurred in a location where there is already a modal filter in place (on the junction of Raleigh and Upton Roads: planters were installed on Upton Road pre-2020 to calm traffic outside a primary school).

The majority of collisions have occurred on Southville’s boundary roads - the ones onto which the modal filters would push even more traffic. ‘Rat runners’ neither here nor there, if the LN is implemented those living in Southville will be forced onto these very roads - North Street, East Street and Coronation Road - if they want to exit and enter their own streets.

According to Chris,

Almost all of the Fatal/Serious collisions take place on roads that will not be impacted positively by the SBLN proposals. As more traffic is likely to be displaced onto these most dangerous roads, then it is likely that more collisions will occur on these roads.

He asks:

Why don’t the council concentrate in reducing collisions on the most dangerous roads, rather than looking at making changes in the EBLN and SBLN areas that are very unlikely to reduce the collisions in those area, and could even make them worse.

And he comes to the following conclusions:

The justification for changes proposed in the EBLN and SBLN are primarily based on making the area safer for people living there. But, the objective collision data does not support this, and actually provides evidence that the changes might actually increase the number of collisions.

The justification for these changes mainly comes from subjective surveys that can easily be manipulated by people submitting multiple survey responses as it is not verified that the person is using a real identity or actually lives in the area.

If Bristol City Council really want to make our neighbourhoods safer, then why don’t they analyse the collision data in a similar way that I have analysed the data.

Perhaps it is because BCC are actually just anti-car and are not primarily concerned about real safety.

Of further note in Chris’s research is the high number of collisions involving e-scooters - vehicles that BCC appears to think are a Splendid Thing, despite being so dangerous - as well as those involving Honda delivery scooters. Perhaps the council could also focus on these two vehicles, both of which can get through modal filters, if they are really keen to improve road safety?

SBLN Modal Filters - Collision Analysis

In his second post, to be found here, Chris delves more deeply into the data on collisions in Southville - information that the council failed to include in its published data on the SBLN proposals. He looks at collisions that took place within 50 metres of the proposed locations of modal filters, one-way roads and school streets.

According to Chris, since 2020,

(o)f the 13 proposed changes, 10 of them have not had any collisions recorded within 50 metres of those locations.

He goes on the analyse the six collisions that occurred near to the other three modal filter proposals in detail, concluding that only one of them may have been preventable with the proposed measures.

In conclusion he says:

The only way to definitely know [how much traffic will be displaced and how much will ‘evaporate’] is to monitor the area consistently before and after the LTN is introduced. So the answer is “only time will tell”.

But BCC should consider these changes in an objective manner and base their proposals on all the data, not just the data they “cherry pick”. It is surprising that collision data did not form part of their analysis.

No wonder Ed Plowden drew derisive laughter when he tried to tell Liz Newton off for allegedly cherry-picking data to support her statement at the Transport and Connectivity Committee meeting on 5th February, after the SBLN protest march she had organised. Surely the onus is on the council to produce accurate and comprehensive data in order to justify drastic changes to our mobility, not on the residents who are happy with the status quo in order to keep it that way?

Many thanks to Chris for his hard work, and please do read his analyses in full. Here are the links again:

https://bristol-uncovered.uk/will-low-traffic-neighbourhood-schemes-make-our-roads-safer/

https://bristol-uncovered.uk/sbln-modal-filters-collision-analysis/

You can also subscribe to his Substack, where he provides links to his Bristol Uncovered analyses:

Chris McEvoy

Just a bloke working in IT trying to make sense of the world.

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This is an updated version of a Public Forum Statement submitted by Southville resident Bobby Harakis, to the Joint Committee of WECA (West of England Combined Authority) on Friday 27th March.

It follows on from our last two posts on the complete absence of traffic data proving Southville is used by ‘cut through’ traffic.

Bobby delineates his attempts to extract this data from Bristol City Council since December 2025, and how BCC has not only consistently failed to supply it but has also apparently attempted to suppress his enquiries.

It is evident that more and more people are seeing these grave issues with the claims BCC is making in order to access funding for ‘liveable neighbourhoods’.

Should any WECA representatives, Bristol City councillors or other relevant officials read this, and have either access to the data Bobby has been requesting or a credible explanation of why it has not been forthcoming, please let us know in the comments.

Discussion is welcome. Please remain polite and constructive!

Read on…

Council’s Website Claim

Proposals for the South Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood include dividing Southville into four zones, separated by “modal filters”.

This will cause enormous disruption for residents, utility services, emergency vehicles, taxis, tradesmen and delivery drivers — and make most journeys longer — and deflect more traffic onto boundary roads — so increasing congestion and pollution.

Bristol City Council must therefore have a very good reason, to JUSTIFY this scheme.

The SBLN Proposals for Southville are outlined on the Council website, which makes the following claim:

“Traffic data show that high numbers of vehicles from outside the area use residential streets in Southville as a cut-through to other destinations.”

The December Transport Committee Meeting

At the 4th December Transport Committee, I asked officers to explain WHAT DATA this is, how it has been gathered, what the specific numbers are, and how the Council is actually able to discern which vehicles are demonstrably “through traffic”…

The Officer Response included: “Baseline data has been and is being collected…” and: “Monitoring of current movements is being undertaken at present…”

But they provided NO FACTS, and NO FIGURES, and NO EVIDENCE to support the Website’s claim.

NO Traffic Data…?

Residents may SUSPECT that certain individual vehicles are “through traffic” — but they have no way of knowing if that is really the case. Many of those drivers may simply be visiting addresses within Southville.

Certain councillors and officers may WANT there to be high levels of through traffic, to justify the measures which they propose, in order to access WECA’s funding — which is ONLY available to projects which obstruct “through traffic”. But that does not mean the hoped-for “Traffic Data” actually exists.

If any relevant statistics exist, then — as requested — they should have been quoted in this Officer Response. Indeed, it is IN THE COUNCIL’S INTEREST to bring such statistics to wider public attention.

The fact that they did not do that, suggests that NO such “Traffic Data” exists.

The Freedom of Information Request

On 4th December, I submitted a Freedom of Information Request, for the specific “Traffic Data” to which this web-page refers.

An FoI Response should come within 20 working days — so the deadline was 6th January 2026…

The Freedom of Information Response

The FoI Response eventually arrived three weeks overdue, on 28th January.

But despite taking eight weeks to reply, the Transport Engagement Team made no attempt to address my specific requests, and instead fobbed me off with exactly the same irrelevant text as the December Officer Response.

Instead of providing me with any specific “Traffic Data” which was relevant to my enquiry, they directed me to a page of the Council Website, which has a link to download SBLN Traffic Survey Results from 2024, which contains 94 complex spreadsheets.

But the FOI response made no attempt to inform me WHICH (if any) of these 94 documents was relevant to my enquiries.

If the Council DOES hold the claimed “traffic data”, then officers have CONTRAVENED THE FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT, by failing to provide it.

And if it DOES NOT hold that information, then officers have WRITTEN PROVABLE LIES, on the Southville Webpage.

The Request for an Internal Review

As the FoI Response was patently inadequate, on 8th February I requested that an INTERNAL REVIEW be conducted…

The response would eventually come in March.

But meanwhile…

The January Full Council Meeting

For the 13th January Full Council, I submitted a Public Forum Statement on this subject, outlining the failure to provide the requested data in December, and the then-overdue FoI Response.

But my Statement was MYSTERIOUSLY OMITTED from the committee papers which were published at lunchtime on 12th January.

I protested to the Democratic Services team, and the papers were re-published that evening, along with eleven other Statements, which had also been omitted.

So this appeared to be a case of incompetent maladministration, rather than a deliberate attempt to stifle my contribution.

However…

The February Transport Committee Meeting

I submitted Questions for the 5th February Transport Committee, criticising the dismissive non-responses from the December meeting, and the use of identical irrelevant text in the FOI Response.

But my 800-word Introduction/Preamble was MYSTERIOUSLY OMITTED from the published papers — which only published the three short questions which followed.

And I was then fobbed off for a THIRD time, with exactly the same irrelevant waffle used in the December Officer Response, and the January FOI Response.

In subsequent correspondence with the Transport Committee’s Secretary, she claimed that the omission of my Preamble was an accidental admin error — and on 8th February she re-published the papers, with my Preamble reinstated. (But disregarded my request that all Public Forum contributors and councillors who had been notified of the original publication, should now also be notified of this REVISED publication. So the revision went mostly un-noticed.)

I requested that, now that the preamble was reinstated, I should receive proper responses from the officers. But NO REVISED RESPONSES were forthcoming.

The March Full Council Meeting

As officers had now failed FOUR TIMES, to state WHICH “Traffic Data” supported their website claim, I re-submitted my questions for the 10th March Full Council.

But when the Public Forum papers were published, my questions were — yet again — MYSTERIOUSLY OMITTED.

I was not notified of any reason for this, so queried it with the Democratic Services team — who eventually claimed that they “had reason to believe” that I was not a real person, who lived in Bristol!

They demanded that I provide a utility bill, to confirm my address, which I duly did.

They did not explain why they did not seek this confirmation BEFORE rejecting my questions. But having received the utility bill, they promised to seek answers to my questions…

The March Transport Committee Meeting

As officers had now failed FIVE TIMES, to state WHICH “Traffic Data” supported their website claim, I re-submitted my questions for the 19th March Transport Committee.

My FIRST QUESTION was:

“Which Traffic Surveys are relevant?”

“Please state (with hyperlinks to the relevant published documents) exactly WHICH specific completed (not current) traffic surveys have demonstrated the SBLN web-page’s claim that: “Traffic data show that high numbers of vehicles from outside the area use residential streets in Southville as a cut-through to other destinations.””

The published Officer Response was:

“Thank you for your question. As you reference in your question above (the hyperlink you provided) you were provided with a link to the 2024 survey data that had been captured. This data pack has a folder clearly labelled ANPR Surveys which include files that contain the origin destination (OD) data that has been recorded by the ANPR cameras. The file also provides links to maps to show where the count sites are. There are 25 count sites across the SBLN area. ATC data and views from local residents also inform the understanding of traffic movements through the area.

“This data requires some interpretation and this will be provided as part of the Full Business Case along with further data releases in the coming weeks from counts carried out in December 2025 that are more granular in detail.”

So, in this response, officers SPECIFICALLY CLAIM that the published ANPR Surveys DO include data which confirms “through traffic” in Southville.

But, as they here confirm, the “25 count sites” in the 2024 survey were spread “across the SBLN area”. NONE of them were actually WITHIN the Southville Zone — so they could not possibly record evidence of vehicles “cutting through” that area.

The response refers to “views from local residents”. But any such views are unsubstantiated hearsay, and absolutely NOT the “Traffic Data” claimed on the website — as no individual can possibly know whether a passing car is “cutting through”, or going to a destination within the Southville Zone.

The response claims that “counts carried out in December 2025 are more granular in detail” — which is a confirmation that the 2024 counts WERE NOT granular in detail. But it is the 2024 traffic surveys, which are being employed, to “confirm” the website’s claims about vehicles “cutting through” — and to justify the modal-filter design.

While the December 2025 surveys have used a large number of sensors within the Southville area, NONE of them are ANPR cameras. So they are just recording numbers of vehicles passing by, and not WHICH (and how many) specific vehicles are using which specific routes — ie “cutting through”.

My SECOND QUESTION was:

“How was the Data compiled?”

“Please explain in layman’s terms exactly HOW and WHEN and WHERE the relevant data was collected and compiled, and how the resultant spreadsheets should be interpreted.

“DO NOT write generic waffle about the different types of traffic survey. Clearly explain EXACTLY how evidence of “cutting through” has been obtained.”

The Officer Response was:

“Thank you for your question. Please see above, data is collected through ANPR cameras, ATCs and junction turning counts as well as resident feedback and locations for all of these are provided on the link above the survey link. All counts are dated and locations provided on the spreadsheets as well as on the link referenced above.

“This data will be enhanced with more detailed data from December 2025 and released in the next few weeks and will show more detail on traffic volumes and composition through the SBLN area including Southville. The FBC will include analysis of the traffic patterns and through traffic.”

Sure enough, this is just generic waffle, and DOES NOT explain how ANY of this data demonstrates ANY quantity of “through traffic”.

The Late Officer Response for Full Council

On 23rd March, two weeks AFTER the 10th March Full Council meeting, the Public Forum papers were re-published, with my questions now included.

But they received identical responses to those quoted above, from the March Transport Committee.

So — in the December, February and March Transport meetings — and the March Full Council — and the FOI Request — and the correspondence with the Transport Secretary after my Preamble went missing — I asked SIX TIMES what SPECIFIC “Traffic Data” supports the claims about high levels of “cutting through”.

On EVERY occasion, officers were UNABLE to provide an answer.

However, on 5th March I received the following “explanation”…

The FoI Revised Response

Having not received a satisfactory response to my Freedom of Information Request, on 8th February I requested an Internal Review — and on 5th March the reviewing officer provided some REVISED RESPONSES.

They claimed that the 2024 Surveys DID indeed include the “Traffic Data” referred to on the Council Website — but still failed to specify WHICH specific pages of the spreadsheets proved the claims of “high numbers of vehicles” “cutting through” Southville…

Instead, they stated that the claims of through traffic were also derived from “feedback from the public” — and gave a link to a single comment from an un-named individual.

But comments from members of the public obviously DO NOT constitute “Traffic Data”…

Regarding the Spreadsheets, one of my FOI Questions was:

“Please provide whatever data/information shows the total number of vehicles using the various roads in the SBLN’s ‘Southville’ zone each day (or other period of study), and the percentage of those vehicles which can definitely be confirmed as ‘through traffic’, as opposed to residential drivers, or legitimate visitors to addresses in this area.”

The Revised FOI Response was:

“The ANPR data can be used to see how many vehicles entered and exited Southville in fifteen minute intervals, and how many of the entrances and exits were from the same vehicle registration. From this data we can infer through traffic.”

The respondent provided a screenshot of a spreadsheet, and wrote:

“The above screenshot captures data from an ANPR report provided in the above link (document name ID – 0524 – 0183 Bristol City Council Mini-Comp Jun24 - ANPR OD Report – 11.06.2024). The data shows that 67 vehicles entered the monitored zone and 74 exited between 6:00am and 6:14am on 11th June 2024. The ANPR cameras at the entrance and exit points matched 65 of these plates to the same vehicle. From this, we can infer that those vehicles can be classed as ‘through traffic’ as they only stayed in the area for 14 minutes maximum.”

Misinterpretation

So this “interpretation” of the spreadsheet suggests that roughly HALF of all those vehicles recorded at Clift House Road “can be classed as ‘through traffic’”.

But this interpretation is entirely — stupidly — WRONG!

Firstly, the respondent seems to think “the monitored zone” in 2024 was “Southville”. But it was not. The “monitored zone” was the ENTIRE South Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood area — the north-western corner of which was Clift House Road.

The respondent’s screenshot was from the Origin-Destination data for ANPR Camera 01, on Clift House Road. In this 15-minute period, 67 vehicles drove past in an easterly direction, 65 of which were subsequently detected by another camera.

The spreadsheet’s Origin-Destination chart shows that, of these 65 vehicles, 1 vehicle was detected by Camera 7 (Bedminster Parade), 41 vehicles by Camera 7 (Coronation Road, near Bedminster Roundabout), and the remaining 23 vehicles by Camera 14 (also Coronation Road).

So all this data shows, is that a number of vehicles DROVE ALONG CORONATION ROAD — which is the northern border of the Southville zone. They didn’t even enter the Southville zone, let alone “cut through” it.

And many of those vehicles will have been detected by BOTH cameras on Coronation Road — so the 65 corresponding detections at Clift House Road will include many vehicles which were counted TWICE!

So — far from suggesting that HALF of all vehicles detected at Clift House Road “can be classed as ‘through traffic’” — ie driving “through” Southville — this data suggests that NONE of them were!

Dishonesty or Incompetence?

So, is this respondent deliberately trying to GASLIGHT me, and blind me with science, in the hope that I wouldn’t understand the spreadsheet’s true meaning…?

Or are they so incompetent, that they simply DON’T UNDERSTAND the data that they have gathered…?

Neither possibility shows the Council in a good light.

If there really was “Traffic Data” which was so compelling as to justify imposing grossly disruptive modal filters across a large area like this, then it should be EASY TO EXPLAIN in layman’s terms — and it should STAND UP TO SCRUTINY.

NB: APPROVALS

It should be noted that, although Responses to FoI Requests may be written by junior officers, they must be APPROVED by SENIOR OFFICERS within the Transport Dept.

Similarly, all Officer Responses to Public Forum Questions at the Transport Committee must be APPROVED by the HEAD OF CITY TRANSPORT, and the TRANSPORT CHAIR.

So these senior individuals must be WELL AWARE of the lack of evidence to support the Website’s claims of “through traffic” — as they have PERSONALLY APPROVED the publishing of evasive and disingenuous Officer Responses to all enquiries on this subject.

CONCLUSIONS

On THREE occasions, officers “accidentally” failed to include my Questions and Statement on this subject, in the Public Forum papers of Council meetings.

On SIX occasions, they failed to provide ANY explanation about WHICH SPECIFIC DATA proves the website’s claim about “high numbers of vehicles” “cutting through” Southville.

And on the ONE occasion that they TRIED to explain it, they completely MISREPRESENTED the spreadsheet’s statistics.

It really is very simple:

If the Council cannot state WHICH SPECIFIC DATA supports its claims about “through traffic” — then that data simply DOES NOT EXIST.

And if THAT is the case, then there is NO JUSTIFICATION for imposing modal filters throughout Southville.

So it then becomes evident that those modal filters have ONLY been proposed in order to access the WECA FUNDING PACKAGE.

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In our last post, South Bristolian Matt Sanders challenged Bristol City Council’s claim that traffic data shows residential streets in Southville are being cut through by a high volume of vehicles from outside the area.

The veracity of this claim is important for the Council: funding for ‘Liveable Neighbourhoods’ is dependent on the installation of ‘modal filters’ (physical barriers such as bollards and planters, or ANPR cameras) to prevent through traffic. If there is little or no through traffic, the interventions are unnecessary, and funding from the West of England Combined Authority (WECA) should be denied.

Matt refers to 94 complex spreadsheets that can be downloaded from the Council website containing this traffic data. Locating those that contain data generated from ANPR cameras in the area, he shows that they cannot possibly provide evidence for ‘rat running’ through Southville.

If BCC has data that proves its claim, it is not sharing it with the public.

Now a volunteer independent data analyst, Ali bin Shahid, has worked with Matt to complete a thorough analysis of the publicly available data.

He has confirmed Matt’s assertions.

According to BCC’s own available data, its claims have no basis in truth.

Here is Ali’s summary of his findings:

We analysed the data. All 94 spreadsheets.

The council deployed 25 ANPR cameras across South Bristol in June 2024. Not one was placed inside the Southville Zone. The only two cameras on the zone’s boundary — Camera 14 on Coronation Road and Camera 16 on North Street — recorded just 10-11 vehicles per day appearing at both locations.

That’s 0.07% of the traffic at those cameras.

And even those 11 vehicles cannot be confirmed as having driven through Southville. They may have used the perimeter roads. Without cameras inside the zone, it’s impossible to tell.

Where did the traffic actually go? 90% of vehicles at Camera 14 continued along Coronation Road to Clift House Road. 45% of Camera 16 traffic did the same. The dominant pattern is travel along the corridors, not through the residential streets.

Please take the time to read the full independent analysis, together with all charts, maps, and methodology, available to download here:

https://r3genesi5.github.io/bristol-southville-traffic-analysis/

Analysis by Ali Bin Shahid, with contributions from Matt Sanders.

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Matt Sanders lives in the area designated for the ‘South Bristol Liveable Neighbourhoods’. He is an art director who has designed scenery for many well-known TV shows and films, including Wallace & Gromit and Doctor Who.

During the past year Matt has become a familiar face at Bristol City Council public forum sessions, where he has been doggedly pursuing an admission from the Council that the bus gate signage on Cumberland Road completely fails to meet the required standards.

In recent weeks he has turned his attention to the lack of evidence for the alleged justification for the SBLN - the justification on which the funding from WECA relies.

Please read below his recent crystal clear public statement to the Combined Authority, together with the visuals he used to illustrate his points.

1. The SBLN Modal Filters

Bristol City Council is currently developing proposals for the South Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood.

But funding from WECA (West of England Combined Authority) is ONLY available for a liveable neighbourhood, if it eliminates “through traffic” by installing modal filters.

The design proposal for Southville does indeed consist of dividing this area into four “zones”, separated by modal filters, as shown by plans on the Council Website, here.

(Click the tab for “Phase 1 neighbourhoods: Southville”)

2. The Council Website Claim

This page of the Council Website says:

“Traffic data show that high numbers of vehicles from outside the area use residential streets in Southville as a cut-through to other destinations.”

But WHAT specific “Traffic data” actually PROVES this claim…?

When we ask this question, we are directed to this Council webpage.

This has a link to download “Traffic Survey Results” from June 2024, here:

SBLN Traffic survey results 2024 (zip folder, 129.8mb) (zip, 126.71 MB)

And this consists of 94 complex spreadsheets, each with dozens of pages.

However — when we ask WHICH specific spreadsheets support the website’s claim — no answer is ever forthcoming.

3. ANPR Camera Sites

The only way to demonstrate that vehicles are “cutting through” — rather than driving to or from destinations within this area — is to have Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras throughout the streets of Southville — and — simultaneously — more cameras on all the perimeter roads.

Six of the 94 spreadsheets relate to ANPR data, and have this link to a map of camera locations.

This Map reveals that — in June 2024 — there were 25 Cameras in South Bristol — shown by the red and blue tabs.

But NONE of these cameras were WITHIN the “Southville Zone”.

Though TWO cameras were on Southville’s perimeter roads…

4. Southville Camera Sites

This Map has an enlarged view of the Cameras around Southville:

Camera 14 was on Coronation Road, at the top of this map.

Camera 16 was on North Street, at the bottom of this map.

The ANPR spreadsheets show that, on 11th June 2024, each of these cameras saw more than 1,000 vehicles, which were also detected by other cameras within the same 15 minutes.

But only FOUR of those vehicles were detected by BOTH of these cameras.

And there is no way of knowing if they drove around the PERIMETER of the Southville zone, or cut through the middle — as there were NO cameras WITHIN the zone, to identify any “cutting through”.

The vast majority of matching detections related to Camera 1 — at Clift House Road, on the left of this map —

— as the vehicles seen by Camera 14 drove along Coronation Road — the NORTHERN PERIMETER of the Southville Zone —

— while those seen by Camera 16 drove along North Street — the SOUTHERN PERIMETER —

— all WITHOUT “cutting through” the Southville Zone.

5. The Fundamental Lie

So, no — Bristol City Council has NO “Traffic Data”, to prove this claim on its website:

“Traffic data show that high numbers of vehicles from outside the area use residential streets in Southville as a cut-through to other destinations.”

Yet this false claim is being used, to garner public support for the scheme.

And — based upon claims like this — at February’s Transport and Connectivity Policy Committee, a slim 5:4 majority of Councillors were persuaded to approve a £1.32m increase to the then-current allocation of £0.6m, for development of the SBLN Full Business Case.

But without coherent Traffic data, there is NO JUSTIFICATION for imposing modal filters, with the colossal disruption they would cause.

The design has clearly been reverse-engineered — to “solve” a problem which does not really exist — in order to access the WECA funding package.

So the entire South Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood scheme is nothing more than a house of cards — proposed on the basis of this Fundamental LIE.

Matt Sanders

And here is the video of last Friday’s meeting, set so that clicking on it will take you straight to Matt’s presentation. It did not escape him that both Cllr Tony Dyer (Leader of the Council, and Southville Councillor) and Cllr David Wilcox (member of the Transport & Connectivity Policy Committee) both appeared to studiously ignore him.

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The following is a short and passionate statement submitted by Southville community member Amber E. to Bristol City Council’s Transport and Connectivity Committee meeting on 19th March 2026.

All photos also by the author.

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The human body contains thousands of miles of blood vessels, veins, arteries, and capillaries. For the body to remain healthy, they must remain open, with blood flowing freely at the right speed and pressure.

Our cities are no different.

They too rely on open routes that allow the smooth movement of people, goods, and services.

A healthy city is one where life flows - where workers travel to jobs, goods reach businesses, people reach goods, carers reach those who need them, and working families move freely through their daily lives.

Blocking and stalling the movement of a healthy, bustling city is counter to allowing the intricate workings of it to function efficiently.

A thriving city is naturally busy. It buzzes. That activity is a sign of a functioning economy — an economy in motion where people are travelling across the city to sell, to buy, to teach, to care, to repair, to deliver, to install, to maintain, to learn, to study, to build, to design, to cook, to clean, to transport, to trade, to create, to train, to support, to volunteer and to serve.

When a major route in the human body becomes blocked, the consequences can be severe. Circulation slows, pressure builds, and the health of the whole system is put at risk. Stagnation creates decline and disease.

When key streets or routes are closed off, congestion builds up on other roads, delays multiply, and like the body, the functioning of the whole city suffers.

Our city is not sick because it has too many cars: it is sick because council transport policy is creating an unnatural, uneven traffic flow that leads to forced congestion and artificially higher levels of traffic pollution now being artificially condensed onto specific routes.

Everyone can see what is being done.

The transport policies being implemented by Bristol City Council are restricting drivers rather than supporting the natural flow of our working city. Road closures, bus gates, and long detours are forcing working people, those being hit hardest; the tradespeople, carers, and small business owners into unnecessary congestion and extended journeys.

By policy rules, the council is now putting our health at greater risk of stress, burnout and the unnecessary exposure to areas with increased levels of concentrated pollution.

What will be the long term result of this? A population so tired and sick and increasingly impoverished they’ll become dependent on social welfare?

For a builder working long hours across the city, an additional hour spent navigating extensive detours is not just a minor inconvenience —it costs him more in fuel and takes precious time away from his family and loved ones. There are many thousands of residents like this who all require their vehicles out of necessity to transport heavy goods; cement mixers, tools, cleaning supplies.

Interestingly, Bristol’s own monitoring data shows that despite there being more cars on the road now, both NO₂ and CO₂ levels have improved significantly since the 1990s.

This raises an important question about whether increasingly restrictive road layouts are the most intelligent and logical approach to improving a city’s health? Isn’t open and flowing movement of traffic far more advantageous than cars that are stuck, blocked… a city system that has been artificially gridlocked and constipated by design?

Cities are ecosystems in themselves. Blocking even more through-routes while chopping down even more mature trees reminds me of the expression of “chopping off one’s nose to spite one’s face.”

You have already done this to East Street, Bedminster.

Is it a thriving hub?

No.

Has it been beautifully transformed?

No!

Have the shops economically benefitted from the changes?

No.

Ask any shop keeper there. The street has effectively become a rundown dump by day and a no-go zone at night.

Restricting traffic in this way makes streets too quiet. Too isolated. Too lonely. It increases the likelihood of delinquency and opportunistic crime.

You have effectively killed that high street and no one I know feels safe walking there after dark. Taking away the two remaining bus stops on East Street will be the final nail in the coffin.

I think that’s the part where the unscrupulous property developers step in to buy up vacant shop buildings to build even more tall, hideous, overpriced, rabbit-hutch, single view flats.

That’s not the city I want to live in.

That’s not liveable.

When evidence from Bristol and across the country shows that LTNs inflict increasing levels of economic damage on thriving communities, how can Bristol continue to justify policies that risk making things worse? Instead of supporting them, these measures make life even harder for working people — the very people who keep this city moving.

To claim that such policies create a vibrant, accessible, and economically healthy city while simultaneously restricting movement and opportunity is such a stark and paradoxical contradiction.

Bristol is fast becoming a city where people feel increasingly oppressed, fined, restricted and punished for using cars - when in the majority of cases they all do so out of necessity.

Bring in calming measures, absolutely. Please bring in efficient, regular and affordable public transport services - but Bristol must remain open, vibrant, accessible, and functioning for it to thrive.

For it to survive.

In closing, I ask the committee: please show me ONE part of the city where this imposed LTN has been a thriving SUCCESS and has made life BETTER for the local people and shop keepers.

Better still, let’s go and ask the people that live there. Let’s go with a camera crew and record the views of 100 random people about how the road changes in Barton Hill and St George have impacted them.

The people on the street will give truthful answers, and lived experience of the EBLN, unlike those who sit in council offices, gas-lighting the concerned and twisting survey results to suit their own rhetoric.

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For those affected by the EBLN, don’t forget to respond to the current consultations regarding the installment of ANPR cameras on the streets where you live - it’s going to be a very slippery slope if BCC presume they have consent for this.

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Bristol City Council would like you to think that the East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood scheme is a progressive, inclusive, community-led success story. I live here and I’d like to offer a different perspective from a local resident.

The EBLN scheme — a network of road filters, bus gates and traffic restrictions across east Bristol — has been in “trial” since 2023. I use the word trial loosely, because to me it looks like the conclusion was written before the experiment began. The Council’s own website lists exactly one agenda item for 2026 regarding EBLN: a decision on whether to make the scheme permanent.

The consultation that wasn’t

The original Equality Impact Assessment (see Appendix 4) at the proposal stage referred to what looked like a formal disability group being consulted, which didn’t actually happen. Whether this was intentional or just a mistake, the result is the same: it gave the false impression that disabled residents had been properly consulted when they hadn’t. An informal walk around the area with a few unnamed residents is not the same as sitting down with an established disability organisation like BEDS (Bristol East Disabled Society). A misleading entry in an equalities document does not fulfil the council’s legal duty through the 2010 Equality Act to genuinely engage with people who may be (and now have been!) affected by the scheme.

The exemptions that don’t work

The council allowed Blue Badge holders to apply for exemptions.

Except only 90 out of 114 Blue Badge applicants were approved. When queried, the council explained that most of the rejections were admin related issues with the application. Rejection due to administrative issues is still a rejection and it isn’t clear whether unsuccessful applicants were given any help or advice to resubmit.

On a personal note, I’m recovering from cancer and I still need to get to hospital appointments. When I can’t get a cab to my door because drivers are avoiding the area due to traffic issues related to EBLN restrictions, “Have you considered cycling? :)” is an insult. Barton Hill also has a huge Muslim and Somali community, who usually have large families. I wonder if the council thought of the logistics of mums in abayas trying to get their 6 or 8 kids to school on bicycles or bus?! The council’s alternative travel ‘offers’ seem designed with one very specific type of resident in mind - middle class people who work from home, and can afford all these extra costs.

The fobbing off

When residents complain, the council responds – with a masterclass in bureaucratic deflection. Lengthy reports, copy-pasted condescending paragraphs, language so dense it would take a planning lawyer to decode. The message, buried under all that paper, is always the same: we’ve considered your concerns and we’re proceeding anyway.

I’ve been raising specific, evidenced concerns such as the emergency vehicle delays reported by the Bristol Post and BBC. Over a six-month period, more than half of fire crews responding to emergencies in the scheme area experienced delays getting through. The council’s response is to talk about ‘average delays being minimal’, and how there were ‘a very few examples of more significant delays.’

In July 2025, a resident within the scheme reported being unable to get an ambulance to reach them for 45 minutes. They lost three litres of blood and were taken directly to surgery. That is not a statistic — that is someone’s life! Given that delays to ambulance response times can have life-or-death consequences (seconds count), I wonder how many such cases does the council consider acceptable? And how many are there that residents never heard about?

A community coming apart

St Patrick’s RC Church in Redfield has lost around 100 parishioners in a year — Sunday attendance and community event attendance is down considerably. Where the church previously had four entrances and exits, it now has one. St Patrick’s School, oversubscribed every single year since 1933, now has vacancies across almost every year group.

The parish priest described it as the church becoming “a Catholic ghetto.” That’s not hyperbole: it’s what happens when you cut the arteries of a community and then tell residents the circulation is fine.

What needs to happen

Bristol City Council needs to answer some straightforward questions: What independent assurance is there that emergency vehicle access is no longer compromised? Was there ever going to be a genuinely open resident consultation, or was it always designed to produce the answers the Council wants? These are not difficult questions, they are the minimum residents deserve before permanent changes are imposed on their lives.

Because that is what this is - an imposition. We did not ask for this scheme, we do not want it, and we have never wanted it. Making it permanent is not progress, it’s a stitch-up.

(From a concerned resident, BS5)

Thank you so much to this person for sending me this piece to publish. If any others in either East or South Bristol wish to have their voice amplified here, please get in touch.

Please also respond to the current EBLN consultations: BCC have not given us much time. See here:

Also please follow and subscribe to https://substack.com/@stopeblnbristol for latest updates on the EBLN.

Let’s keep Bristol moving for all.

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“When I was in justice, my ultimate vision for that part of the criminal justice system was to achieve, by means of AI and technology, what Jeremy Bentham tried to do with his Panopticon. That is that the eyes of the state can be on you at all times.”

Shabana Mahmood - The Home Secretary

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On 5th March the next chapter of the East Bristol ‘Liveable Neighbourhood’ saga arrived in our email inboxes. It takes the form of two separate but related consultations on proposals that are allegedly a response to public concerns. Once again public money is being spent on the insistent attempt to force through the permanence of a scheme the majority did not ask for and do not want.1

If you are directly affected by the EBLN, are short of time and wish to respond, I recommend reading this post from Stop EBLN Bristol. It takes you through the consultations and gives pointers on how to give your feedback.

The deadline for the TRO consultation on Proposed Changes to Modal Filters, which is the more complex of the two, is 27th March.

Responses to the Moving Traffic Enforcement consultation must be completed by 15th April.

Stop EBLN Bristol

*TAKE ACTION on EBLN* - Your Voice Can Stop the EBLN Disaster from Becoming Permanent

Hello, Stop EBLN subscribers. This is an urgent email which will be sent out multiple times over the next few weeks. Below are 2 ways you can take action against the EBLN road blocks by submitting your opposition to Bristol City Council…

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4 months ago · 3 likes · Stop EBLN Bristol

Mistrust in council consultations

Note that the time allocated for the TRO consultation is just the statutory minimum of three weeks. According to the Local Government Association (LGA), in order to ensure you have sufficiently raised public awareness of what you are doing,

(b)est practice suggests you should plan for up to six to 12 weeks for a consultation exercise.

The LGA also states:

Consultation is technically any activity that gives local people a voice and an opportunity to influence important decisions. It involves listening to and learning from local people before decisions are made or priorities are set.

People sense when a consultation is purely a box-ticking exercise. In East Bristol many are convinced that the EBLN is a done deal, despite transport Chair Ed Plowden stating time and again that everyone’s views and all the data they have collected are being fed into the decision-making process.

Why is this?

There are just too many clear signs that local people’s views are not being listened to if they do not support the scheme. These include the facts that the funding is only available for typical LTN infrastructure such as planters and cameras, and that their installation was by night under the watch of a huge security force in order to prevent protestors getting in the way. Priorities had obviously already been set with no genuine attempt to first learn from local people about their real needs.

A further clear demonstration of this can be seen in Shaban Ali’s article Lawrence Hill Needs Better Ambitions in the Bristol Post from December 2025. His plea for positive support for the local community in the form of apprenticeships for young people, business support, real co-design and a community hub - instead of the EBLN - has fallen on deaf ears.

The consequences, to name just a few, have been:

• the suffering of local businesses and religious congregations

• taxi drivers refusing to enter the area

• the elderly and people with disabilities feeling they are now stuck in their homes

• much longer journey times, for example to medical appointments or schools outside the area

• issues with emergency services accessing properties.

All of these were foreseen by local people but ignored by the council. In the case of local businesses it was even asserted that the EBLN would increase footfall, and regarding emergency service response times that the scheme would make no difference.

The new proposals

Having apparently only been able to learn at the public’s expense what the public was telling them would happen - by implementing the scheme - the new round of consultations proposes some changes in the form of the removal of some bollards and one bus gate, plus the installation of more cameras.

Yet streets like Victoria Avenue, where bollards are to be removed, were not busy and dangerous in the first place. This is despite the implication from the consultation that it was used incessantly to ‘bypass queuing traffic’ on Church Road - traffic that has apparently improved despite Victoria Avenue having been blocked as a through road. One would think that if all the rats running along this street had been pushed back onto Church Road then the opposite would have occurred. BCC has interpreted this to mean that their predicted ‘traffic evaporation’ has really happened, and all the naughty rat runners have got on their bikes or stayed home instead…

The bus gate with cameras on Marsh Lane is to be removed, because now the council is admitting traffic didn’t just evaporate but, at least in this case, was displaced onto other streets. The bus gate on Avonvale Road is to be relocated to the other side of the Marsh Lane junction, and here it is straightaway admitted this will cause more congestion on the already over-stressed Blackswarth Road. Jiggling the ‘filters’ around like this will just move problems from one area to another.

The appearance is indeed of a scheme that the council is determined to make permanent come hell or high water. Painfully over-the-top and severe restrictions on private motor travel were imposed so that now public consent can be more easily obtained for what is being made to look like their relaxation and compromises.

Part of this leverages the sustained and justified public outrage around emergency vehicle access to legitimise the replacement of bollards and planters with the first ANPR cameras systems - complete with fines - on residential non-bus route streets in the area. Now the council is quietly admitting it was wrong when it asserted the EBLN would not affect emergency vehicle response times. Instead of just removing all the physical blocks, however, they are saying that in two out of three cases they must be traded for cameras. I wrote about and predicted this in this blog’s series on ANPR, which I recommend you read before giving your consent to such proposals.

There are no buses travelling along Ducie Road or The Avenue, where cameras are being proposed. Exemptions will only apply to emergency vehicles, taxis and blue badge holders. There has evidently not even been any consideration of Labour’s slightly more humane but still surveillance-happy suggestion (see here) that cameras could allow all residents to return to their former easier and quicker routes through their own neighbourhood through exempting them all.

Curiously, the Moving Traffic Enforcement consultation regarding the replacement of bollards with cameras has been enabled through powers which appear to relate to six specific sites in Bristol. None of these are Ducie Road or The Avenue. I hope to obtain a clarification of how these ‘powers’ work through questions I have submitted to the Transport and Connectivity Committee for its meeting on 19th March.

What happens if BCC interpret consultation responses as assent to the proposals?

It is important to understand that if these proposals are accepted, the public will be interpreted as agreeing to ANPR camera surveillance on their residential streets. If they are consented to on these two roads, this could start the ball rolling for cameras to be installed on any and all such streets, in the name of our safety and the promotion of ‘walking, wheeling and cycling’.

We are already some way down the very slippery slope into the normalisation of such surveillance and the control it offers over our daily lives. Not only will these cameras continue to complicate access for most, but, unlike bollards, they will enable ever-more data collection as well as fines.

It is all not so unconnected to the government’s plans for digital ID, for which there is a concurrent consultation process. You can read about this from Claire Wills Harrison here:

Conscientious Currency

The UK Digital Identity Consultation is Here

The UK Government’s consultation document, Making public services work for you with your digital identity, proposes a national digital identity system “to modernise public services and support economic innovation…

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4 months ago · 45 likes · 3 comments · Conscientious Currency

I suggest you also re-read the words of the Home Secretary at the top of this piece.

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Addendum

My questions to the Transport and Connectivity Committee 19th March 2026, together with officer responses.

1. The proposals for replacing bollards with ANPR cameras on Ducie Road and The Avenue fail to take into account the local Labour Party’s suggestion of allowing access through camera points not just for taxis, emergency services and blue badge holders but for all residents (of an admittedly unspecified area). Will the committee be discussing this before voting on the scheme, and if not, why not?

Response:

The EBLN exemptions policy for bus gates can be found here. We will be keeping the policy under review. However, please note that giving all residents access would undermine the benefits of the scheme.

2. The Moving Traffic Enforcement powers being used to propose the installation of these cameras clearly relate to six specific sites in Bristol: none of these are Ducie Road or The Avenue. Can you explain how these powers can therefore be arbitrarily extended to these streets and why the streets concerned are considered to be so dangerous that such special enforcement is necessary?

Thank you for your question. The proposed locations for ANPR camera enforcement were identified following discussions with the emergency services, ensuring that we prioritise public safety by enabling emergency vehicles to travel efficiently to and from incidents while also creating safer conditions for all road users.

3. According to the Local Government Association (https://www.local.gov.uk/our-support/communications-and-community-engagement/resident-communications/understanding-views-2), best practice for local authority consultations with the public recommends they remain open for 6 to 8 weeks in order to give enough time to raise awareness and for all stakeholders to be able to find the time to respond. This shows a genuine desire to listen to and take on board public feedback. Why does BCC therefore only give the statutory minimum of three weeks for statutory TRO consultations for the EBLN, where it is fully aware of how controversial its proposals are and therefore how important it is to build rather than diminish the trust of the public?

Response:

Thank you for your question. Three weeks is the standard period for a TRO consultation, and we are progressing to enable improvements to the scheme in response to monitoring and engagement findings. Non-statutory consultations that inform the scheme design are generally longer and last around 6-8 weeks.

In the video below you can listen to my follow-up questions and the officers’ verbal responses. Do also listen to the questions and statements by Zoe, Amber and Megan.

Below is a comment by East Bristolian Katie Sullivan on the following YouTube video.

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Introduction: A City Re‑Engineered Behind Closed Doors

When Bristol City Council first announced its programme of “Liveable Neighbourhoods,” the promise was simple: safer streets, cleaner air, and better walking and cycling routes.

But three years on, a very different picture is emerging.

Across East and South Bristol, residents are discovering that Liveable Neighbourhoods (LNs) are not simply traffic‑calming schemes. They are the backbone of a quiet, unpublicised restructuring of the city’s planning and transport system — one that enables high‑density development while displacing traffic, parking, and pollution onto a shrinking number of already overloaded main roads.

An investigation into planning decisions, appeal rulings, transport proposals, and resident testimony reveals a pattern of policy contradictions, legal blind spots, and governance failures that stretch from Church Road to North Street.

This is the story of how Bristol’s Liveable Neighbourhoods became something very different from what residents were told.

Part 1: East Bristol — The First Cracks Appear

The Church Road Case: A Canary in the Coal Mine

In 2023, the Government’s Planning Inspectorate rejected a 174‑bed student block on Church Road, Redfield. The Inspector found the scheme:

• Overbearing and incongruous

• Harmful to a heritage asset

• Likely to worsen parking and highway safety

• Providing substandard living conditions

• Unjustified in its loss of employment land

Legally, this should have set a clear precedent.

Instead, the developer returned with a bigger scheme — 231 beds — and a new argument:

“Because this is a Liveable Neighbourhood, students won’t own cars.”

The Council did not challenge this claim.

The contradiction

The Inspector had already ruled that students would own cars and that parking pressure would worsen.

Yet the new application:

• Increased occupancy by 33%

• Offered only 8 parking spaces

• Relied on the East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood (EBLN) to justify low parking

• Provided no cumulative‑impact assessment

• Ignored the Inspector’s findings

This was the first sign that Liveable Neighbourhoods were being used as a policy shield for development — not a tool to protect residents.

Part 2: South Bristol — The Pattern Repeats

A neighbourhood that says: “We are already liveable.”

In South Bristol — Bedminster, Southville, Windmill Hill, Totterdown — residents have marched from Ashton Gate to City Hall to protest the South Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood (SBLN).

Their message is consistent:

• “We already have quiet streets.”

• “You’re pushing traffic onto North Street and Coronation Road.”

• “You’re dividing communities into zones.”

• “You’re enabling development, not protecting us.”

The development pipeline

At the same time, BS3 is experiencing one of the most aggressive redevelopment cycles in the city:

• Bedminster Green towers

• Malago Road mixed‑use schemes

• East Street regeneration

• Student blocks

• High‑density flats with minimal parking

Developers repeatedly cite the same justification:

“Because this is a Liveable Neighbourhood, car ownership will be low.”

And again, the Council accepts it.

The main‑road pressure cooker

SBLN filters and one‑way systems will push traffic onto:

• North Street

• Coronation Road

• Malago Road

• Dalby Avenue

These roads are already:

• congested

• polluted

• dangerous

• narrow

• heavily used by buses

• the site of recent fatal collisions

Yet SBLN is being advanced without a published cumulative‑impact model.

Part 3: The Legal and Policy Tests Being Ignored

Across both East and South Bristol, the same statutory and policy requirements are being breached or sidestepped:

NPPF §111

Development must be refused where residual cumulative impacts on the road network are severe.1

→ No cumulative‑impact modelling has been published for EBLN or SBLN.

Local Plan DM23

Requires assessment of combined impacts of development and transport changes.2

→ Each scheme is assessed in isolation; LNs are treated as mitigation, not as new constraints.

s.38(6) Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004

Inspectorate decisions must be given significant weight.3

→ The Church Road Inspector’s findings were effectively ignored.

DM12, DM14, DM26, DM29, DM31

Policies on employment land, amenity, design, character, and heritage.4

→ Repeatedly overridden or minimised in LN‑adjacent schemes.

Part 4: The Governance Problem

1. Policy incoherence

Transport and planning operate on contradictory assumptions.

2. Evidence‑free decision‑making

Behavioural assumptions (“students won’t own cars”) replace data.

3. Development‑led policy

Liveable Neighbourhoods are used to justify intensification, not protect residents.

4. Displacement without modelling

Traffic and parking are pushed onto main roads without assessment.

5. Public‑trust erosion

Residents in both East and South Bristol say the same thing:

“You are creating the problem you claim to be solving.”

6. Procedural vulnerability

Failure to assess cumulative impacts risks decisions being unsound.

Part 5: The Bigger Picture — A City Quietly Re‑Engineered

Taken together, East and South Bristol reveal a city undergoing a silent restructuring:

• Side streets filtered

• Main roads overloaded

• High‑density development approved

• Parking displaced

• Residents blamed for “car dependency”

• Inspectorate findings sidelined

• Legal tests bent

• Public consultation treated as a formality

Liveable Neighbourhoods are not being used to fix transport problems. They are being used to enable development without infrastructure.

Conclusion: A City at a Crossroads

Bristol’s Liveable Neighbourhoods could have been transformative.

Instead, they have become:

• a development tool,

• a policy shield,

• a displacement engine,

• and a source of growing public distrust.

Unless Bristol City Council confronts the contradictions at the heart of EBLN and SBLN — and begins to publish honest, transparent cumulative‑impact assessments — the city risks locking itself into a future where:

• main roads become unliveable,

• side streets become gated enclaves,

• development outpaces infrastructure,

• and residents lose faith in the very institutions meant to serve them.

The evidence is already there. The pattern is already visible. The question now is whether anyone in power is willing to acknowledge it

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This Scheme Will Harm Southville

Let’s be clear from the outset: this scheme will harm Southville, and the council has been warned.

It is being sold as progress, but in reality it will knowingly damage Southville and the people who live and work there.

The South Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood scheme is being justified using claims about air quality, safety, and evidence that simply do not withstand serious scrutiny — and Southville will be one of the areas most damaged as a result.

Air Quality?

We are repeatedly told this scheme will improve air quality. Yet the council knows full well that blocking routes and forcing traffic onto boundary roads increases congestion, idling, and emissions. Pollution does not vanish because a line is drawn on a map. It is pushed into surrounding streets, onto main roads, and into neighbouring communities — including the very places where people live, work, and shop. Claiming this is an air-quality solution is misleading at best.

Safety?

We are also told this scheme will improve safety. There is no credible evidence that increasing congestion, driver frustration, longer journeys, and route confusion creates safer conditions in a dense, mixed-use area like Southville. Safety is not achieved by engineering chaos and hoping behaviour improves. Nor is safety improved when emergency routes are constrained, response times are put at risk, and access becomes less predictable.

Evidence-based?

And then there is the claim that this scheme is “evidence-based.” Evidence from where, exactly? Evidence from cities with entirely different layouts, demographics, transport options, and levels of deprivation? Evidence that ignores displacement effects, ignores business impact, and ignores the specific reality of Southville? Selective evidence is not evidence — it is justification.

Southville is not a commuter experiment.

It is a working, trading, living area with independent businesses that rely on access, deliveries, trades, carers, and customers coming from outside walking distance. Restricting movement will not magically convert lost customers into cyclists. It will drive them away. That means lost income, job losses, and business closures — consequences that are barely acknowledged, let alone properly assessed.

The Core Problem: Ideology Over Impact

The council’s own approach reveals the core problem: this scheme prioritises ideology over impact. It tells residents and business owners how they should live, rather than engaging with how they actually do live. It treats legitimate concerns as resistance rather than warnings.

Consultation has been inadequate and dismissive. Most of us residents and businesses in Southville feel this decision has already been made and that engagement is little more than a box-ticking exercise. That is not democratic transport planning — it is imposed change.

If this scheme proceeds in its current form, the council will be knowingly increasing congestion, undermining local business, damaging community trust, and exporting pollution rather than reducing it.

Calling that enforced harm “liveable” does not make it so.

Southville should not be sacrificed to an unproven, poorly adapted scheme that ignores real-world consequences.

I urge the council to stop presenting assumptions as facts, stop dismissing valid concerns, and stop pushing forward a plan that will cause long-term harm to the area and the people who sustain it.

Proceeding regardless will not be seen as bold leadership.

Many of us are beginning to see this council as running away with its own agendas towards utopian ideologies and forgetting those you serve.

We also see a refusal to listen.

The damage you intend to inflict on us will be yours to own.

That is not liveable.

It is irresponsible.

If this proceeds, the council will be knowingly causing harm and rebranding it as success.

This proposal represents a failure of evidence, a failure of consultation, and a failure of responsibility to Southville.

The harm to us who live and work here will be deliberate, not accidental. and responsibility for this damage will rest entirely with this council.

Statement 74 – Teri Bramah

Titles and emphases added.

KBM posts are coming thick and fast at the moment, and I appreciate my own ones have been long and require time to digest. I would nevertheless urge readers to make their way through them as they contain important information from in depth research into the agendas behind current transport policy - with Bristol just being representative of what is happening everywhere across the UK.

My last publication was a cross-post of Iain Davis’s excellent description of what a ‘15-minute city’ is and why those who question the concept are in no way ‘conspiracy theorists’. It is truly a ‘must read’.

The next few posts will be much shorter, you may be relieved to hear!

There are many statements being submitted to the council and to WECA by people living and working in both East and South Bristol which deserve more publicity, so I will do what I can to highlight some of them here.

Also, with the very real harms that have been visited upon Barton Hill in particular, many are starting to delve more deeply into what on earth is happening - not just with ‘liveable neighbourhoods’ but also with Residents’ Parking Zones, bus gates, one-off blocked roads and other traffic restrictions.

One member of the public, who wishes to remain anonymous, has recently been in touch to share their research and I am all too happy to publish it here.

I would note that it has been carried out with the aid of AI to ascertain facts from various sources. I am not a fan of AI: I see humans dabbling with a technology that we can hardly begin to understand (which is nothing new, of course) and for which we currently lack the collective wisdom to use healthily.

Yet I accept that for research purposes and summarising key points it is a remarkable tool, which can save a lot of time and energy. And this member of the public concerned has devoted countless hours of their time to ensuring the right questions have been asked and any bias avoided. Our thanks are due to them for this extremely hard work.

What follows in this first post is a clear and concise list of the very serious issues that have been identified with Bristol City Council’s transport policy. It will serve as a reference point for anyone who wishes to highlight, in both informal and formal conversations, how disingenuously the council is behaving. If you are not in Bristol you may nevertheless note similar themes in your own area.

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1. Evidence Gaps and Inconsistencies

These appear repeatedly across schemes:

• Traffic, collision, and air‑quality data not published, incomplete, or contradicted by STATS191 or monitoring.

• Narratives (“dangerous junction”, “rat‑run”, “air quality hotspot”) not supported by evidence.

• Baseline data missing, making before/after comparisons impossible.

• Claims of benefits (safety, modal shift, congestion reduction) not matched by measurable outcomes.

• Selective use of data — favourable figures highlighted, unfavourable ones omitted.

This undermines legality, rationality, and procedural fairness.

2. Misalignment Between Policy and Practice

Across the city, schemes often don’t match the requirements of:

• JLTP42 (carbon, equality, accessibility, better places)

• Local Plan 2014 (site allocations, safeguarded routes, open space)

• Statutory duties (PSED3, TRO4 regulations, consultation requirements)

Examples of misalignment:

• Road schemes that functionally rezone areas without Local Plan review.

• Traffic restrictions that reduce accessibility for protected groups (contrary to JLTP4 and PSED).

• “Experimental” schemes that were designed as permanent from the outset.

3. Conflicts of Interest (Actual or Apparent)

This is one of the strongest and most consistent themes.

BCC5 simultaneously acts as:

• Landowner

• Developer (via Goram Homes)

• Planning authority

• Highways authority

• Transport strategy authority (via WECA6 partnership)

This creates structural conflicts when:

• Transport schemes increase land value of BCC/Goram sites.

• Access changes favour development parcels.

• Public narrative omits BCC’s financial interest in nearby land.

• No evidence of independent conflict management is published.

This is a major scrutiny and governance issue.

4. Premeditated Forward Planning of Road Schemes

Patterns suggest some schemes were:

• Planned years before public consultation

• Aligned with future development, not current transport need

• Presented as “trials” despite being designed for permanence

• Justified using generic climate/active travel language, not local evidence

Indicators include:

• Repeated references to the same corridors in strategy documents.

• Early concept maps matching later “consultation options”.

• Road changes that unlock or uplift specific land parcels.

This raises questions about transparency and honesty of purpose.

5. Transparency and Traceability Failures

Across multiple schemes:

• Key documents missing (modelling, equalities assessments, option appraisals).

• Consultation summaries incomplete or not reflective of objections.

• Decision-making trails unclear — who decided what, when, and why.

• No published valuation or uplift analysis for land affected by transport schemes.

• No disclosure of developer engagement during scheme design.

This obstructs public accountability.

6. Procedural Weaknesses

Common issues include:

• Consultations that appear predetermined.

• TROs with vague or generic Statements of Reasons.

• Equality Impact Assessments that are superficial or copy‑pasted.

• Failure to consider reasonable alternatives, a legal requirement.

• Inadequate mitigation for displaced traffic or accessibility impacts.

These are potential grounds for challenge or scrutiny escalation.

7. Narrative vs Reality Conflicts

A recurring pattern:

• Public messaging emphasises:

  • “Safety”

  • “Air quality”

  • “Active travel”

  • “Climate emergency”

• But internal logic appears driven by:

  • Land value uplift

  • Development enablement

  • Strategic corridor shaping

  • Budget-driven priorities

This mismatch is a major red flag for misrepresentation.

8. Pattern of Selective Benefit

Across the city, transport interventions disproportionately:

• Improve access, permeability, or amenity around BCC/Goram land.

• Restrict general traffic while preserving developer access.

• Enhance public realm in areas with planned or active development.

• Avoid areas where restrictions would harm politically sensitive groups.

This suggests non-neutral application of transport powers.

In One Sentence

Across Bristol, the recurring issues are: weak evidence, misaligned policy, undeclared conflicts of interest, pre‑engineered schemes, poor transparency, weak procedural compliance, and a consistent pattern of transport interventions that appear to favour development interests over neutral public need.

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*Important notice: For details of Southville’s protest march to the Transport and Connectivity meeting on Thursday 5th February see the end of this post*

On Friday 17th October 2025 I attended the West of England Combined Authority (WECA) Joint Committee meeting in Redcliffe, Bristol. If you have been following this blog since March, you may remember my previous encounter with the organisation, shortly after Bristol City Council’s nighttime raid on Barton Hill, and shortly before the arrest of then WECA ‘Metro Mayor’ (and still MP for North East Somerset and Hanham) Dan Norris.

WECA’s current Metro Mayor is Helen Godwin, who presumably has no connections with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios (lol - though isn’t politics all just theatre?).

But - as anything is possible these days - perhaps this is more likely to be connected: has she surfaced to reclaim the Godwin bloodline’s authority over the West of England? The powers being accorded to local authorities are certainly becoming reminiscent of ancient fiefdoms!

Anyway, Godwin, elected in May 2025 (with Reform’s Arron Banks hot on her heels), is a former Labour Bristol councillor, who served in former city mayor Marvin Rees’s cabinet. In 2021 she resigned to take up a job in consulting with PwC. Not having kept up with the exciting world of accountancy, I had to look PwC up, and realised it’s been the branding for some time for Price Waterhouse Coopers. When I checked out this very famous global accountancy firm on Wikipedia, this is what I found:

I started scrolling down the list of misdemeanors and found myself in a horror movie. It seemed to go on forever. In the end I counted 41 of them.

Just good to be aware of, I think.

What is the West of England Combined Authority?

WECA was one of the metro authorities created during Theresa May’s premiership, following the government’s decision to devolve certain powers to the regions. As a ‘combined authority’, it brings together three local councils - Bristol City, South Gloucestershire, and Bath and North East Somerset - under one umbrella. A fourth, North Somerset, is soon to be added to its earldom. 1

WECA sets policy and controls the allocation of funding for transport and housing in the region. Its website makes abundantly clear that its purpose is to ‘deliver’ economic growth:

I’ve read through that last paragraph several times and still can’t make complete sense of it. WECA is trying to link making the economy bigger with making at least some lives better in some way in the west of England, through more housing and employment ‘opportunities’, and transforming transport - fast and with more money. Some unclear relationships will get stronger, and something (the strengthened relationships?) will be delivered to someone. I think.

Perhaps it is clearer in WECA’s ‘Growth Strategy’.

Sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? And just a little Orwellian.

It’s all about ‘unlocking’ and ‘delivering’ things, so that our already ‘vibrant’ region can produce more and more stuff (I think that’s what ‘growth’ means?), to increase GDP by a whopping 28%. The plan is that more consuming will lift everyone out of poverty. Which always works, doesn’t it.

The Growth Strategy places a lot of emphasis on both net zero and digital technology - two things that appear inextricably linked in the minds of those with power and money these days and paving the way for smart cities.

So the strategy promises to ‘deliver’ jobs and build affordable housing, at the same time as ‘progressing towards net zero’ and investing in AI (via an AI ‘supercluster’) and digital tech. It doesn’t state where it is going to find the magic wand it needs to do all this at the same time. For example,

• Where are more jobs going to come from while we simultaneously replace most of them with AI, and kill local businesses through banning cars?

• How are we going to reach net zero carbon emissions while we create superclusters of AI computing that consume vast amounts of energy, and build a proliferation of new housing estates, even ‘new towns’, many of which will be on green field sites?

• How are enough jobs going to be possible while we drastically cut carbon emissions in a very short space of time?

• How is economic growth even compatible with net zero, and when has it ever created a utopia where everyone is raised out of poverty?

As Brett Scott writes,

If economic growth simply referred to an increase in stuff, it would mean that our lives would get easier when it happened. As growth progressed, we’d end up with vast amounts of abundance in excess of what we need.

This is a utopian vision pushed out by growth junkies, but it’s also bullshit, and here’s why.

In a capitalist system, new growth is new output, but that in turn gets inputted back into our system as the new baseline for continued survival. After all, we live in a competitive system in which you have to fight others to continue to survive. This means growth gets weaponised, like upgrading your weapons in a computer game.

You don’t get to lie back and relax as the stuff increases. No, you have to use it to fight others to produce more. Economic growth does not fulfil our needs because it’s always used to increase our needs. You never end up with any surplus in excess of your needs because your needs are constantly expanding due to the competitive nature of the economy.

For example, the battle between the US and China for AI supremacy will never lead to the liberation of anyone in the world. No, it’s just a competitive struggle between players hanging on for survival. There’s no goddamn utopia waiting at the end of it.

The only way to think about improving economies then, is to ignore the absolute amount of stuff being produced, and to think about it in relative terms - i.e. how you would spread ownership of stuff more equally to relieve the pointless death match.

WECA’s Transport Policy

Transport policy forms a significant part of WECA’s role, and is very much driven by net zero. Its current goals are to be found in its Joint Local Transport Plan 4: 2020-2036 (JLTP4), which I mentioned at the end of my last piece. In 2022 the authority was awarded a sum of £540m by central government,

to help transform the region, delivering growth, levelling-up and supporting our 2030 net zero ambitions by changing the way people travel.

This funding will make it easier for residents and visitors to travel in and around the region, accessing their homes, places of work and ways to enjoy themselves in a sustainable way.

You may travel, access your homes and workplaces, and enjoy yourselves - so long as it is ‘in a sustainable way’ i.e. on yer bike, or walk (peasant!). Otherwise, WECA will ensure it is all more difficult for you. Don’t forget that funding is not for what people want or need, but for the crude ‘sticks’ the authorities have decided are the best way to achieve ‘climate goals’.

Last summer there was a further award of £750m (or more) for transport in the region, emphasising that the ‘essential improvements’ to be funded ‘are not just about upkeep; they’re enabling the long-term transformation of how people move around the region’. This very much echoes the ambitions of the tech companies supplying local councils with their ANPR surveillance technology.

There is lip service to public transport and a ‘mass transit system’, but not much evidence of anything besides a proliferation of cycle ways. The region is to be ‘connected’ for people on bikes or foot, whilst being disconnected for people in cars (unless you are wealthy enough to pay to pollute, and of course some are).

If anyone is still in doubt that Bristol City Council (amongst others) is throwing money at low traffic neighbourhoods because of central government net zero targets, take a look at both the JLTP4 and the Sustainable Transport Settlement. It is why South Gloucestershire council is obsessively expanding cycling infrastructure on the A4174 and in Bradley Stoke, for example, and and why Bath is being transformed into a city of cul-de-sacs.

Back in October, those living in South Bristol had woken up with a jolt to what Bristol City Council was planning to impose on them through the SBLN. They flooded WECA with around one hundred clear and eloquent questions sharing their grave concerns. Helen Godwin’s provided one copy and paste response to them all, saying:

• They should respond to the consultation before 30th October and everyone’s voices need to be heard

• BCC would be refining their proposals in the light of public feedback, and then submitting a business case bid to WECA

• An independent review of the EBLN would be informing WECA’s response to BCC’s submission.

To my knowledge, none of the concerns have ever been addressed individually.

One thing is abundantly clear: government at all levels, regardless of party politics, is desperate to force through restrictive changes in how we travel. No amount of appealing to WECA to save East or South Bristol from BCC’s ‘liveable neighbourhood’ schemes is likely to make a substantial difference.

I have explained why here:

I will conclude this piece with my statement to the WECA Joint Committee meeting from October 2025, and the questions I have submitted for January 2026 (my submission, though clearly two days before the deadline, has not been acknowledged).

In coming posts I will be sharing with you some of the brilliant submissions to both WECA and BCC by many other concerned Bristolians since October.

Statement October 2025

Money is energy and power. If you have access to a lot of money and choose to inject it into a particular project, you can make life-changing things happen. As all Spiderman fans know, with great power comes great responsibility. As a body which has great power over transport policy in the west of England through having the authority to make funding decisions, WECA has a great responsibility for the lives of all the people affected by these decisions.

In 2022 WECA allocated £10 million to ‘Liveable Neighbourhood’ projects in Bristol. The implementation of the trial scheme in East Bristol has made drastic changes to people’ lives. The stated aims were to change these lives by making them healthier, happier and greener. The strategy chosen to make these changes is a very crude one. Health, happiness and care for the natural environment have in effect been reduced to an attempt to force behaviour change – from driving cars to ‘walking, wheeling and cycling’. Money has been spent on the placing of impediments in residential streets to people who need to get to their destination by car, using boxes for plants, bollards and ANPR camera systems.

These measures have failed to take into account the manifold aspects to health, happiness and protection of nature that have nothing to do with a reduction in exhaust fumes or cars being driven above the speed limit. Health and happiness are most definitely compromised by breathing in exhaust fumes or being in danger of hit by a car, and at the same time attempting to eradicate these dangers using a strategy that in itself not only causes increased stress, mental health issues, community division and loss of income through decreased work opportunities, but also increases exhaust fume and dangerous driving on the roads onto which all through traffic is now squeezed, is both counter-productive and nonsensical. The EBLN has directly caused all this.

Instead of admitting this, Bristol City Council is instead doubling down on the harms it has directly caused to people in East Bristol and wishes to repeat the exercise at greater scale in Greater Bedminster.

I would like to suggest that if the West of England Combined Authority wishes to retain the trust of the people, it channels funding into projects that do no harm at the same time as really improving our lives. In order to do this I suggest that none of the £150 million investment in transport from central government be used to block roads and set up surveillance cameras, but instead is all used for improvements in public transport possibilities. This will act as a carrot rather than a stick to encourage fewer car journeys for those who. for many different reasons, cannot walk or cycle to their necessary destinations. To encourage more ‘active travel, I suggest investing in local businesses so that people do not have to make long journeys for at least some of their shopping. This would be of benefit to all in so many ways. Further, if our local councils are serious about helping us become healthier and happier through walking and cycling more, I suggest finding ways of encouraging less online shopping and thereby fewer van deliveries.

As a permaculture designer I would be happy to offer my services to any transport planning teams interested in looking at how be greener, healthier and happier by working with nature and humanity rather than against them.

(Needless to say I have not been contacted!)

Questions January 2026:

1. In the Combined Authority’s Joint Local Transport Plan (JLTP4) 2020-2036 (https://www.westofengland-ca.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/JLTP4-Adopted-Joint-Local-Transport-Plan-4.pdf) it states on page 21 that,

‘For the West of England transport CO2 emissions will rise by a further 22% by 2036 if we don’t act - increasing the risk of droughts, floods and extreme heat not just globally but also for the South West region.’

No sources are cited for this or any of the other claims reliant on statistical modelling in the report. It merely goes on to state that ‘we need to change the way we travel’ and that this must include ‘city centre and town centre private vehicle bans’.

It further states that,

‘The demand for travel to and within the West of England is growing, and will continue to grow, due to forecast housing and employment growth. This will put increasing pressure on the already congested transport network. Changing travel patterns, due to the layout and location of more recent developments, flexible working and the increasing availability of technology and telecommunications, will have some impact on transport.’

In March 2024 the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) published accredited official statistics on 2023 greenhouse gas emissions: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6604460f91a320001a82b0fd/uk-greenhouse-gas-emissions-provisional-figures-statistical-release-2023.pdf

On page 12 it is states that,

‘Primarily as a result of a continual growth in vehicle kilometres travelled on roads10, domestic transport emissions grew to a peak in 2007, 7.8% higher than in 1990. Since then, emissions from this sector had fallen back to around 1990 levels up until 2019, driven mainly by improvements in new car fuel efficiency, as well lower traffic growth than in previous years as a result of a dip following the 2008/2009 recession.’

The accompanying graph clearly shows that UK emissions from domestic transport, although they have naturally risen again since the periods of heavily reduced travel in 2020-21, still remain significantly lower than 2019, a year which itself showed significant reductions from the 2007 figure, as stated above.

So my first question is: In the name of transparency and accountability, please can you provide the source of the modelling that predicts a 22% increase in CO2 emissions in our region by 2036 (when, for the reasons cited in the DESNZ report, all round the country they have been falling), and, if this really is reliable, verified and unquestionable data, also the differential analysis between private motor vehicles and freight/industrial transportation that must have been performed before the decision to fund the severe restrictions of movements by private motor vehicle was taken by WECA?

2. On the WECA website it states:

‘Growing the economy and improving lives across the West of England

We want to transform our region.

The next decade will see the West of England change. Growth will mean more job opportunities, new homes, an injection in pace and investment in the transformation of our transport network and the strengthening of those relationships that will help us deliver.

In 10 years, the action in this strategy will deliver tangible change and iprove the lives of the peole who call this region home.’

WECA assumes both that economic growth is always synonymous with ‘improving lives’ and that it is possible alongside pursuing the contentious legally binding Net Zero goals.

As part of this drive for economic growth, it is celebrating its plans to build various new towns as well as other housing developments, many of which will be on green field sites. These developments are predicted to increase travel in the region, and this increased travel is a source of grave concern to WECA because of the predicted increase in emissions.

It is well known that the construction industry, through the production of e.g. concrete, cement, tarmac, metals, bricks, plastics and glass as well as transportation, is a prominent contributor to greenhouse emissions.

It is also well-known that intact living and breathing ecosystems are essential for a healthy balance of gases in the atmosphere as well as a balanced water cycle – both of which are vital contributors to climate stability.

So, through its insistence on growth through investment in vast new housing projects and new towns, WECA is itself a major contributor to the level of greenhouse gases in the air around the region, and will remain so going forward.

It is then seeking to address this by funding restrictions on private travel, for example Bristol’s low traffic neighbourhood schemes, in the name of preventing carbon emissions. These restrictions are portrayed as ‘improving lives’ even though they are deeply unpopular and a cause of considerable stress and anxiety, and contributing to the death of local businesses.

My question is this: please can you make sense of the fact that WECA’s capitalistic pursuit of economic growth is creating the very problems you claim your policies seek to address? Problems which you then seek to solve by passing the buck onto people to whom you are in theory accountable but have not asked for these policy decisions on growth and housing to be made, with the consequence that their lives are being anything but ‘improved’?

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Message from Southville activist Liz Newton:

Please join us to march to the next Transport and Connectivity Meeting (on Thursday 5th February) from Southville. All are welcome (my kids will definitely be coming). If you are not able to march, please join us outside the council buildings by 4:45pm.

Please bring home made placards, as well as showing the council we want to raise awareness of the proposed SBLN.
The plan - leave Aldi 3:45pm to walk along North Street
Pick up Supporters at Hen & Chicken (3:55pm), Steam Crane (4:10pm), end of Kingston Road on Dean Lane (4:15pm), to arrive at Council Buildings by 4:45pm.

Please share with others in our community who you think might also want to get involved/come along.. If would be amazing if we could get a couple of hundred people along..as I know it’s way fewer than that who oppose the SBLN.