Review on M32 park and ride location not due until the autumn

A REVIEW of plans to build a park and ride on the M32 will not be delivered until autumn 2023.

The project’s latest phase was revealed in March 2022 – three years after the Bristol city mayor promised a community farm by the motorway would not be bulldozed to make way for the car park.

In 2019, the Sims Hill shared harvest site was earmarked as the only viable option for the project in a report by West of England Combined Authority (Weca), though Bristol mayor Marvin Rees later confirmed the land would not be turned into a car park. A feasibility study, made possible by £500,000 awarded to Bristol to help it reduce carbon emissions from transport, was commissioned 12 months ago to look at alternatives, but no potential new location has been settled on.

Council documents showed that consultants were commissioned to identify the preferred sites for the M32 park and ride and that £48 million was allocated for the project. An outline business case was due to be delivered in 2022/2023, but a Weca spokesperson has now said: “The project is currently assessing potential options as part of the Outline Business Case (OBC) stage. The OBC is due to be completed in autumn 2023, with public engagement activities having taken place ahead of that. The West of England Combined Authority continues to work with all partners, including the national highways.”

In April 2022, Cllr Toby Savage, the leader of South Gloucestershire Council, said that the M32 would have to be downgraded to an A-road if the long-awaited park and ride was ever going to happen as local roads cannot take more congestion, so access for drivers to the yet to be determined site must be only from the motorway.

Speaking on BBC Radio Bristol’s John Darvall show in 2022, he said that park and rides are not allowed directly on motorways, so the M32 would need to be reclassified from the M32 to the A32.

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.

“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.”