Monday 2 February 2009

Snow brings chaos to Bristol #2

It's a bad evening out there too. A lot of people are travelling round the city the way they normally do, without taking into account the effect that ice has on steering, staying upright or even stopping.

Here we see Cheltenham Road at 16:08:03. The light went red two seconds ago, and this van has just gone across the lights.

Its brake lights appear on, so the road must be sheet ice on which vehicles are struggling to slow down on.

At 16:08:06, a bike goes through the same red light. Given how icy the road must be, the fact that they could make it over without crashing is a pretty good skill.

And now, 16:08:19, a good 15 seconds since the lights changed, another bike careers across the junction

This cyclist really needs to get their brakes looked at. Anything that can't bring you to a halt with 15s warning, at urban speeds, it pretty awful. It's obvious from the wheels that he's not using disc brakes -from the way he was pedalling desperately the bike must have one of those pedal-to-stop brakes, though for some reason he's pedalling forwards.

Having made it safely across the junction myself, I can see another bike just managing to come to a halt before running into a van. That's the second of the two side roads to get green -again about 20 seconds after the Cheltenham Road northbound lights would have gone red. At least this bike's brakes did finally work, but it must have given the rider a bit of a fright.

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