Monday 6 October 2008

Montpelier nighttime safety

A new contributor, David from Strawberry Hill, posts these pics of Montpelier by night, showing how the "smart-car" style parking works even better when a whole line of vehicles have parked this way.

Note they have reverse parked: this is good for safety of road users -including pedestrians- as it stops the vehicles pulling out with inadequte visibility. And all these vehicles, do, sadly, have inadequate visibility. We see the smartcars MK03?JK, YJ52HYE and the smartvan DN08LDG. None of these registrations were in our database yet; they are now.

Now that it is getting dark, the risk cyclists pedalling round without lights pose to themselves and other road users increases. To stop that risk, these vehicles are selflessy blocking all access points from bikes trying to use this bike route. No unlit bikes will be pulling out onto Picton Street tonight! Given how easily it would be for a bike trying this to scrape against any of these vehicles while attempting to pull out, the drivers are being very selfless: putting the safety of cyclists ahead of the preservation of their own vehicles. Its drivers like these that are helping make Montpelier Bristol's first community shared space.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Remind me, what are you doing with the Database?

SteveL said...

right now, it's google's database. Registration numbers map to photos; we also are building up categories by tag, "school-run", "school", "kingsdown", etc. Once we have more data, we are in a position to go the schools/council and say "these are the places, times and vehicles where some improvements could be made"