The M32 will have to be downgraded to an A-road if a long-awaited park and ride is going to happen, insists the leader of South Gloucestershire Council. Cllr Toby Savage says local roads cannot take more congestion, so access for drivers to the as-yet-unidentified site must be only from the motorway.
But he says park and rides are not allowed directly on motorways, so the only way would be to declassify the M32. Consultants commissioned by the West of England Combined Authority (Weca) are identifying preferred locations, and £48million has been allocated to the “strategic corridor” as part of the £540million City Region Sustainable Transport Settlement (CRSTS) from the Government.
However, speaking on BBC Radio Bristol’s John Darvall show, the Conservative councillor said finding an actual site, which has still not been pinned down, was not the only sticking point. “The location needs to be one that means access can only be to and from the M32 itself,” Cllr Savage said.
Read more: Hopes raised for long-awaited M32 park and ride
“I’ve mentioned before about reclassifying the M32 into in effect the A32 in order to allow that to happen. But I’m very clear that in terms of an M32 park and ride, I would not want to see that accessed from the local road network, which is already congested.
“Having people come off the M32 to then find their way to this park and ride through local roads would only add to that.” He said it would still be years before it opened and that work was ongoing to find a suitable site, with Bristol mayor Marvin Rees having ruled out the only option on the table in 2019, Sims Hill community farm’s harvest site, and no alternatives have been announced since then.
Cllr Savage said: “There are a number of sites, some of which are not available, others that there is a question mark over their availability, so we need to go through that work to understand where it’s most appropriate. We’re doing that work with National Highways, who are in charge of the motorway network, Bristol City Council and Weca.
“There is funding set aside for the M32 corridor through our CRSTS, the half-a-billion pounds we secured from the Government a few months ago. The technical work is progressing but from today to the point at which a park and ride will be open we are looking at several years.”
He said it was also important to consider whether the services would go only to the city centre or out to Cribbs Causeway and Emersons Green. "When you look at the location of our park and rides around the region, the M32 corridor continues to be a gap that we do need to fill,” Cllr Savage told Mr Darvall on Tuesday (April 26).
“But there are then questions around the size of it and some of the detail that sits behind it where we need to look again at the evidence.” He added that a lot of the assumptions for the region’s future transport and housing were based on pre-pandemic figures and that the future was still not clear.
