The City of Bristol is embarking on a project to build a city wide MetroBus for the princely sum of £230m.
This comes at a time when the city is cutting back on other public services, such as the libraries and Public Toilets it may sem an extravagance.
Mayor Marvin Rees and other supporters may point to Bristol’s congestion as the reason, the city ranked as the country’s 3rd most congested city.
Does the logic of building new infrastructure around the exiting roads, to avoid congestion, stack up?
The answer depends on how the future pans out.
The need to cut back on carbon emmissions should spell the end for oil based private motoring. For those who think that this will be seemlessly replaced by zero carbon private transport, there is bad news.
Even if the future heralded the arrival of a vehicle that was powered solely by wishful thinking, that vehicle would still have to be manufactured.
The capital carbon cost of a car has been shown to equal the lifetime exhaust emmisions. Therefore not only would the car have to drive powered by wishful thinking, it would also have to be manufactured by elves from fairy dust.
So where does this leave the MetroBus?
Any future that comes close to reducing the carbon footprint of the nation to anywhere near close enough, will involve a significant reduction in privately owned vehicles. And with fewer vehicles on the road, there will be less congestion. And with less congestion, there is no need to build a stupid great scaletrix track around the city to avoid it.
Note: for an explainer as to why a city like Bristol ends up building a MetroBus see The Simpsons monorail episode.