East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood - Latest news

Councillor Donald Alexander, Cabinet member for Transport, has published a Mayor’s blog about the next stage of the East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood pilot.

In it he sets out how we are putting together plans for how a series of measures in the design toolkit can be trialled on the ground, based on local feedback through two rounds of community engagement.

The trial will bring together a combinations of measures, including pocket parks, cycle hangars and new road layouts, so the concept of the Liveable Neighbourhood and changes on local streets can be tested before designing a permanent scheme.

Interventions for main roads, such as pedestrian crossings, junctions, and continuous footways, cannot be trialled as they are permanent solutions. This does not mean that they will not be included in the final scheme, which we’ll design based on the trial and further community engagement.

What’s next?

Bristol City Council’s Cabinet will meet on 4 April to review and decide whether to progress to the next stage of project with the introduction of the trial scheme, further engagement on a permanent scheme, and the development of a full business case.

If approved, we would then work with the West of England Combined Authority to identify the £1.34 million needed to fund this next stage.

Overall, the East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood pilot, including both the trial and permanent scheme, is projected to cost in the region of £5.8 million, which is a huge investment into east Bristol.

The costs will be met by the West of England Combined Authority using funding set aside for Liveable Neighbourhoods from the City Region Sustainable Transport Settlement. This is being supported by over £290,000 of EU Horizon funding.

Workshops and walkabouts

In May and June we’ll be hosting workshops and walkabouts across the pilot area to show how the trial scheme could work, before formally consulting on the proposed changes in the summer.

We’ll send out more information about this in the coming weeks.

Over the trial we will continue to talk to the community to help shape the permanent scheme.

Earlier this year we asked residents, businesses, and everyone who travels to or through Barton Hill, Redfield and St George to give us their views on the area as part of the East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood early engagement exercise.

We received thousands of responses through our community survey, interactive map, postcards, drop-in sessions, school visits and more.

It’s taken us a while to go through all your feedback, and the good news is that we’ve now published our East Bristol Liveable Neighbourhood Co-Discover Engagement Report.

From this we can see the top three essential things near where you live are that:

• everyone feels safe to walk and cycle
• there is good air quality
• it’s easy and convenient to walk, cycle and use public transport

And the top suggestions for how the area could be improved are to:

• slow down traffic
• improve road safety
• reduce traffic
• safer junction for walking and cycling
• add crossing points

Having an overview of the issues you care about most means we can start putting together a range of possible solutions as part of the co-develop phase. This will include measures to reduce, slow and redistribute traffic away from residential streets, as well as measures to make walking and cycling safer, easier and more pleasant.

We'll be adding a list along with descriptions of these solutions online later this summer so you can think about which ones will work well in your neighbourhood.

Then in September and October we’ll be inviting you to a series of workshops to find out what you think of these measures, whether they are right for your neighbourhood, and where you think they could have the most benefit.

Once we've completed this co-develop phase, we'll review the findings and build our case to fund the trial scheme. This will be followed by more community engagement to make sure our final, permanent scheme is right for the area.

Find out the results of the co-discover phase.