Bristol Traffic Chaos - Leadership Please!

Driving through the city centre rush hour yesterday morning - a journey I don't often do at that time - I was amazed again at how bad the traffic congestion is in the centre of Bristol at peak times. For once, the overused term gridlock was entirely appropriate to describe the scene.

I felt sad, as someone who has lived in Bristol for 12 years, that despite a lot of talk, nothing fundamental seems to be actually happening to radically change the current appalling situation. In particular, it seems that the dominance of the car in our city is the unchallenged assumption in most of the big decisions that are made about the city's infrastructure and transport. That's despite the label of a cycling city.

I was particularly disappointed having made a day trip to Nottingham on Saturday (for a university open day) and discovered that it has a 14 km tram system that serves the city centre and beyond.

The failure of the local authorities in the former county of Avon to agree to a tram system linking Bradly Stoke / Parkway with Temple Meads and the city Centre is, sadly, a matter of historical record. So is the failure to date to re-open the rail line from Portishead to Bristol. The Department of Transport in 2008 cited a "lack of anticipated demand" for such a rail link as their reason for not funding the project.

Meanwhile, we choke in the fumes of thousands of cars and pay thorough the nose for a bus service. Recent example: I paid £1.80 for a single on a Wessex Express bus from Southmead Hospital to Westbury on Trym village, a journey of a little over a mile.

In Nottingham, an all day adult ticket (for the whole tram network) costs £2.70. The trams can carry 200 passengers and are cutting an estimated two million car journeys a year through the city. I know the grass is always greener, but I was struck on Saturday at how few cars there were in the city centre, compared with an equivalent Saturday in central Bristol. Nottingham is so confident about its system - reliability and punctuality are currently running at 99% - that, in the summer, the city gained approval from the government for a phase two that will add major extensions to the tram network.

I'm not clever enough to know exactly how and whether a tram system would work in Bristol. I also recognise that there are other options that are on the table - including the expansion of the suburban railway network that serves Redland Station. I also know that the work of doubling the number of regular cyclists in the city is a measurable objective of the cycling city campaign which is at an early stage.

There's something about the tram - its size, I guess - that says assertively that cars take second place in the city. I think that message is the key one, and at the moment we seem nowhere near reaching it.

But if they can do it in Nottingham, surely there must be people in Bristol with the knowledge, and the leadership, to actually make the dramatic changes needed to get us out of this mess.