St Werbugh's Path

Some members of Bristol Traffic Civil engineering team visited the ongoing Cycle-City works on the St Werbugh's to Muller Road path. Bristol Traffic snuck in as the semi-official reporting channel of urban improvements.

Here is the view looking from the Station Road underpass towards Muller Road. Eventually this will become tarmac, which is good for commuters. But at the same time, tarmac is eternal: once a piece of open ground gets covered over, that's usually it. Another piece of rural mud, lost.

Heading the other way, we can see how widened the path has become. This corner was always mildly dangerous, as bikes heading to St W. had a bit of speed from the gentle slope, but absolutely no visibility round the fence.

Now it is wide, and that slope would make a nice place for a berm for the BMX-ers to take at speed.

This is a machine to drill holes in the slope; it looks a bit like "the mole" from thunderbirds.

Here is the view looking over the allotments towards the narrows. Here the path will return to that strip on the right; the trees are precious elms. The big track on the left is for the machinery; it will be returned to allotment afterwards.

One of our team asked for the fence to stay away, to get a nicer view -and even have a bench put in so that people could stop and enjoy it. Sadly, railtrack needs the fence to keep people off the railway lines, so it will go back in. A bench would be nice though.

Summary: work is ongoing, it looks wild now but once the fences go back it will be a bit more urban. A wider urban. That leaves the problems of the path at both ends, namely the fact it doesn't connect to Montpelier legally for bikes or safely for pedestrians, and at the other end -there's Muller Road to deal with.

One more thing: schedule slippage due to feature creep. The bane of all engineering projects -along with management changing their mind. Look for this to open in May.