A link road is supposed to be built from Ashton to Bedminster Down which will remove the worst of the one-way tribulations on the southern edge of Bristol for those driving to BRS from the M5 at Avonmouth via the A4 (Portway), though in the best tradition of Bristol politics a debate continues as to whether it should go ahead despite funding being secured from central government.
When Bristol City Council, the owners of Whitchurch Airport (the primary land airport connection with neutral Europe in WW2), decided it was too small to develop they opted to purchase the former RAF Lulsgate Bottom site, by then home to a glider club, for their future airport (it opened in 1957). Lulsgate was then in Somerset; it's now in the unitary authority of North Somerset.
In so doing they were storing up the same problems for future generations that had led them to abandon Whitchurch. A persistent rumour has held sway for many years that the city council could have become the tenants of the Bristol Aeroplane Company at Filton for a peppercorn rent but elected for Lulsgate as they would own it and have greater control.
By the late 1970s the city council may have wished it had got into bed at Filton because Lulsgate had become a millstone around the necks of the city's rate payers and there were serious mentions of closure in the local press.
Trotting to the rescue came one Les Wilson, newly installed as MD, as charismatic a figure as ever graced Lulsgate or most other airports for that matter, who during the 1980s and 1990s gradually built the BRS base into a position where it was able to develop into the position it now enjoys behind only Manchester and Birmingham in the number of passengers it handles in the English regions. Tragically, Les was killed in a road accident in the mid 1990s.
Had the aldermen, burgesses and councillors of 1950s Bristol possessed sufficient prescience to recognise the way air travel, and motorways for that matter, were to develop in the ensuing decades they might well have thrown in their lot with the BAC at that time - assuming the invitation really had existed.
Of course, operating a growing airport as a tenant might not have been plain sailing and neither might have been acquiring the funding for the considerable infrastructure necessary. Almost certainly a sale into the private sector would have been required as it was to enable Lulsgate to acquire its present structures.
By the 1990s BAE thought that it might itself try to set up a city airport at Filton. A public enquiry led to the relevant government minister - Selwyn Gummer? - rejecting the application. Filton had become a close neighbour to a substantial urban population and environmentalism and nimbyism had become popular sports in the airport world, so the city airport outcome was perhaps unsurprising.
Bristol as an entity has another cross to bear when it comes to major changes in anything because, largely for petty, party political reasons, the city boundary has not changed since the early 1960s though the contiguous urban sprawl has moved further and further outwards from its original core.
The upshot is that various parts of the UK's largest conurbation west of London and south of Birmingham are run (if that's the right word because it's not done well) by four separate local authorities: and they rarely agree on anything.
If Bristol City Council had wanted to pursue Filton as the city's airport you can be sure the other local authorities would have moved heaven and earth to pursue the opposing view. Filton lies within the unitary authority of South Gloucestershire, though it's physically joined to municipal Bristol - you can't see the join, and that council has been no more enthusiastic about keeping Filton's runway open than Bristol City Council was to move there all those years ago.
It was reported within the past few days that BAE has sold much of the Filton site to a Capital Fund for £120 million for housing and commercial development. This would solve much of South Gloucestershire's government requirement for new housing in its area so perhaps it's not a surprise that its leaders were not falling over backwards to try to keep open the runway.