Selfish Parking

There is room for two cars on this build out, yet the mini VN02ZGU has taken up the middle of the build out, blocking all other vehicle access. Yet we have seen that there is room for two cars here.

They may protect their bodywork and mirrors, but one other Clifton Resident will have to park their car further away from where they live.

Of course, the real blame goes to the council. If they did not have those needless bollards on the build out, it would be much easier to squeeze a second car in.

N Somerset school parking

This is Northleaze primary school, long ashton. There is a road between this school use only car park and the school, but there is a zebra crossing. This gives the kids the walking to school experience without the parents schedule being too badly disrupted by having to walk the kids to school and then run home to drive to work.

Why doesn't anywhere in Bristol have decent parent parking like this?

Whose side are they on?

Remember the Thali Corner 'Easi-turn' scheme, installed by a lone fanatic van driver fed up with residents parking their hippy cars on the corner ? He is very modest, and tried hard to keep a low profile - even allowing people to think Living Streets had something to do with it.
The power hungry will always fill a media vacuum, of course so no surprise Living Streets Bristol invited local residents to what they laughingly called
'an official re-opening of the footpath linking the Thali Cafe to Herbert's Bakery, popular in the last century. This path fell out of use in the 21st Century as the path became blocked by cars and then bins'.
They prattle on
'since the Easi-turn Scheme, not only is the corner free of cars, but we are delighted to see that those parking on Wellington Ave, along the side of the Thali Cafe, are aligning themselves with the planters and bins in the gutter, and not blocking the pavement.'
Yawn.

As you can see, more people attended this than a Living Streets meeting, but interestingly, the van driver actually attended the opening! We aren't going to tell you which one he is as it would blow his cover - but it has set us wondering whether he is, in fact, a double agent...he seems a bit too pally with certain well known local subversives like Dr Rogers.


The group even held a ceremony to offically bless the new bike racks outside the Thali Cafe,not realising they are actually there just to ease traffic flow. Or are we the ones being fooled? Is this a double bluff - an alliance of the forces of darkness, pretending to be pro-tax paying drivers pretending to be a pro cycling and walking alliance? I'm getting confused as to who is on which side.




Anyway there are clear benefits for us drivers. This is the pavement right opposite the Easi-turn feature above: now there are no cars opposite, there is no longer any need for us to park close to the houses on this side! Like sands shifting with the tide, within ten days, the 'accepted' line for vehicles has shifted back south into the roadspace. This means drivers and passengers can now open their doors fully on both sides without houses getting in the way.
Attempts last year by our friend Bob Bull to get the houses moved back a bit failed, but now we have clear door space both sides. Result! This will help win over dubious residents - there might be 2 fewer parking spaces but the quality of those remaining just got better.

20mph zone: an affront to car drivers

It was bad enough when some of our road tax was diverted to bicycles, but at least bike lanes are meant to keep bicycles out of our way. Then some troublemaker came up with the idea of 20mph roads, so every road would be a bike lane. Excuse us? "road", "street". Not bike lane.

Portsmouth was a challenge but after a bit of behind-the-scenes work with the council we got all the main roads, all the through roads, all the important ones kept at 30. That offered a number of benefits:

• We could still sound our horn at bikes in the way, so discouraging bicycles. People in a hurry can sprint through the town on the main roads
• We get more reward for spending so much money on big-engined 4x4s. Well, you need to if you want something that big to accelerate well.
• Its easier to get out of speeding tickets if the town is all broken up into 20 and 30 mph zones, as you can claim confusion.
  
• The extra cost of signage reduces the size of the area that gets rolled out,
  

We were pretty chuffed when the Portsmouth review came out, pointing out that adding 20mph signs to back roads had had no tangible benefit. That was the whole point! That was why we put them there!

Unfortunately, some people in the council -and that Jon Rogers has to get a lot of the blame here- read it completely differently, concluding that for 20 mph zones to work, it has to cover the entire area. Yes, he is correct, but that assumes that you want 20 mph zones to work.

We, the important people, don't live in inner Bristol because its dirty, noisy and full of traffic and poor people walking and cycling around. We live in nice parts of S. Gloucestershire or North Somerset and drive in precisely because we can do that instead. Of course the people who live in the inner city want these 20 mph zones, but that's their fault for living there. Our little 21st century suburban enclave has a 20 mph limit too, so that people can drive into their garages carefully. If the people in Southville, Easton and St Andrews want to live in streets like that, they can come out and join us!

Instead in Bristol, this main thoroughfare, Ashley Road will be given a 20 mph limit. That will increase the transit time from Stokes Croft to the M32; it will add an extra two minutes on the commute time to and from the North Fringe from residents of Clifton, Cotham and Redland.

This is not a residential road, it is a direct link between the M32 and other parts of the city. It is so that we important people who don't live in the city can drive to our important jobs, so that delivery vans essential to the UK economy can do their routes.

Here's Ashley Hill. No houses alongside here, a nice road to put your foot down when you get past those ridiculous traffic lights at the bottom. But not now, oh no. Now we will have to pootle.

The worse part is that it knifes the Portsmouth scheme in the back. The amount of under-the-table funding we in the motor industry had to pass on to the relevant people of power was justified given it set a precedent for the rest of Britain - a scheme that let us talk about road safety but without doing anything to force us to slow down.

Now this. A precedent for the rest of the city. How can main roads like Gloucester and Whiteladies stay at 30 mph now? How can useful school/commute rat-runs like Pembroke and Cotham Roads not get their 20 mph limits. Which, if enforced to 30mph, is still 10 mph lower than today.

Worse than the city though: the country. Instead of traffic engineers going to Portsmouth to see what to do, they will come here, and take the same approach home with them. This is a chilling precedent.

We are shocked.

We are equally shocked that not one so-called mainstream media outlet has asked us for our opinion on the matter. Why do campaigns like Speed Safe, run as a hobby by one person and a web site that has barely mastered the <blink> tag get all the quotes in the national papers? Why does Bob Bull from the local Association of British Drivers get his letters in the Evening Post despite the fact their web site looks like something badly designed in 1996 and they only have eight members in the city? The press should be coming to us as the mouthpiece of the motorist, instead of these amateur organisations that cannot be taken seriously. The fact that they have not offends us almost as much as the 20 mph zones themselves.

Campaign against red lights

We've decided to copy the other local media outlets and MPs hoping to be reelected, by starting to campaign against red lights. As the evening post rightfully points out, cars, buses, bicycles and pedestrians just need to get on better. That means you, pedestrians -stop blocking our way.

Rather than go through various committees, we are going to advocate ignoring red lights completely. Here's a start on Stokes Croft, as viewed from Ashley Road. You can see from the cars in the sprint-finish when the lights on the croft change, and then it all goes quiet as pedestrians get their 20 seconds.



You can hear an ambulance coming, which forces drivers to give way. What to do? Pull forwards into the junction? You could be blocking it. So S57HBW solves the problem by turning off the road, going over the green man.

Notice how some of the pedestrians were not looking around while they crossed on the green man; many had hoods on, others umbrellas. After the car has crossed, someone runs across -talking on a phone. That's dangerous; if she'd been hit she'd have been another "pedestrian on the phone" statistic. If troublemakers like Crap Cycling in Waltham Forest can go on about car drivers on the phone, we should be able to denounce pedestrians walking dangerously.

That's the kind of give and take we need: they give us the right to turn while they have the green man, and we take it.

Students: they think they own the road

One interesting aspect of our secret-instrumentation of unsuspecting cyclists is that we see how differently people behave in situations we would not normally encounter. Normally, when heading up Cotham Hill as a last minute Redland-Mum sprint we'd sound the horn and expect people to get out the way. But here, as the cyclist crawls up, you can see the students out and about uninterrupted.

And very interesting it is too.

You can see that they are quite happy to step out without looking round, without turning their head to see if there is any risk. Yet Cotham Hill is your first option to sprint on the school run after the crawl down Whiteladies Road; your first chance to put your foot down. These pedestrians think that shared-space means they get some of our taxpayer space, when really it means we get to park on the pavement we pay for.

As for the other roads -plenty of room for double parking. Yet not with all these students just wandering around. There should be a law against them.

Drive round here, run one of them over -you get the blame. They should not be allowed to walk round without passing some "walking in the city" test and getting third-party insurance. And as winter comes in, they need to get with the hi-viz clothing.

Rock'n'Rolling along

Ever since Elvis first went on stage wearing underpants a size too small causing a lack of blood flow to his knees, resulting in what was to become his trademark dance moves, music has always aligned itself with forces of evil and sin. You'd think that with modern technology and advances in manmade fabrics times would have changed, but no.

If you need proof then you need look no further than popular music act "30 Seconds To Mars" and their latest insult to our ears, eyes and sense of moral decency.

Not only do they underestimate our intelligence by providing us with a music video that is almost 9 minutes in length when their proposed trip to Mars is only thirty seconds, the video appears to be promoting cycling on public tax funded roads. Not just any cycling either. At numerous points in the video the bicyclists can be seen blatantly riding more than two abreast, lacking any sort of helmets or high viz attire, and I'm sure at one point someone can be seen riding backwards without using the appropriate hand signal. They then have the nerve to use an altercation with a car as the crux and dramatic turning point for the video when it's obvious that the only reason the altercation occured is because the cyclist wasn't wearing a helmet rendering him very difficult to see.

Well, "30 Seconds to Mars", I hope you're pleased with yourselves. I have just one thing to point out to you. When you do start making your journeys to Mars, you might find it actually takes a little bit longer than 30 seconds on a bicycle. Think on.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VhZDiG7ye0