Sunday 8 February 2009

Bristol snow chaos comes to Clifton

There's been a big surge in traffic to this site. Keywords used to find it: "bristol snow chaos" and "bristol firstbus snow". Those people looking for firstbus status in the snow conditions we can only apologise to: neither this web site, or, apparently, FirstBus's own web site, had any details on which buses were running in the snow. We didn't know -they didn't seemingly care.

As for the others, this web site was documenting Bristol Snow Chaos before even it started snowing. And now it has, it is time to explore it.

Here in Clifton, giant boulders of snow have rolled into the roads.

These could be the reason that this car has been pushed up onto the pavement on Victoria Square. In glaciology/mountaineering terminology, it would then be part of a lateral moraine, bits of the mountain pushed to the side as the glacier went past.

Alternatively the drivers of the car R17KYE were worried about the risk of snowploughs coming past, and they chose to park far enough away from the road there would be no worries. The snow implies they've been there for three days, so they should be safe from snowploughs now -or maybe it's best to leave it there for the next storm.

5 comments:

Chris Hutt said...

That built-out pavement was installed at great expense by Bristol City Council just a couple of years ago. It comes complete with two dropped kerbs.

At first, in my naivety, I thought it was to assist pedestrians in crossing the road, since it allows crossing movements to take place a little away from the blind corner on Merchants Road.

But subsequent use as much needed supplementary car parking makes clear the Council's true intentions. The dropped kerbs are obviously to facilitate vehicular movements.

Anonymous said...

Shame there wasn't a passing pedestrian wearing crampons trying to stay on the pavement...

Anonymous said...

some folk on the evening post site also said they couldn't find snow info on first's site, but i found it easily enough, just googled 'first bus bristol' and there was a link on their regional homepage. yer tiz in case it helps:

http://www.firstgroup.com/ukbus/southwest/bristol/home/index.php

guess the national first site is where the problem is?

Anonymous said...

can't make the link fit in the box! try these 3 together with no spaces between:

www.firstgroup.com

/ukbus/southwest/bristol

/home/index.php

Anonymous said...

-I see that link. I guess it was there, it just wasnt being picked up in the search engines, who need a couple of days to index a site. So they came to Bristol Traffic first as we were documenting snow chaos days before anyone else.

Crampon wise, those roads between the pavements blunt the edge of the blades. Then there is the problem I have: stepping on your own toes really hurts. Which means you need plastic boots too, and they are overkill for walking the sprog to school