RPZ comes to Monty: Oh the Inhumanity!

• First they came to Kingsdown, and everyone celebrated.
• Then they came to Cotham, and nobody complained
• Then they came to Redland, and the main complaints were from people just outside the zone.
• They they came to St Pauls, and people were upset about the cost, rather than the parking
• Then they came to Clifton and the shopkeepers who wanted to drive to work were more focused on their convenience than the revenue gains on having customer parking, they paid for tanks to make their point, still lost —and now have signs up everywhere saying "30 minute parking is free, please come and shop despite all the horror stories we put out"

And now: Monty

It's fascinating to see how the Evening Post has finally managed finda an agenda they can get people even in the inner city to care about. Up till now, what the BEP wrote about was irrelevant. Like who cares about congestion in Westbury on Trym or what's happening in Stapleton.

No more. Instead they've managed to stir up horror stories and build a whole agenda which everyone wanting to be elected as a mayor is using as their core election theme.

It's almost as if the paper has found a way to stay relevant in an era of free news over the internet.


Well, unlike the Evening Post we've spent time in Montpelier and have a dataset going back years. On a road-by-road basis, such as Richmond Road.

This is what it used to look like




A road where the pavement was exclusively used for parking, yet still so tight that only the bold drove down it.

If you were, say, trying to walk your kids to school, you'd be in the same roadway, keeping a tight rein on your four year old in case they ran ahead and ended up under an oncoming van or a car pulling out from their parking space on that pavement.


It was essentially a "shared space"

Yet look now? Someone has painted double yellow lines up one entire side of it! You can now drive up this road without fearing for your paintwork!



Incredibly, you don't have to commit to that journey hoping you wont meet anyone coming the other way —as if that did happen, one of you would be reversing up a road so tight that you had to get it spot on or hear a scraping sound.

1. It is now possible to drive up and down Richmond road safely.
2. It is now possible to walk up richmond road on the pavement, and even send a small child to run ahead of you without worrying about it being run over.
3. It is now trivial to for a car and a bicycle to pass.

That is what the RPZ has brought to Montpelier: not just white lines, not just yellow lines —but pavements people can use.

Anyone who says "its destroying Montpelier" clearly has a vision of the area where nobody walked, where scenes of two drivers out their car shouting at each other as to who was going to reverse were viewed as quaint traditions.

And what does the Evening Post do? Rather than highlight how it has now become safer to walk or cycle, how it has become more convenient to drive through, they've pointed to the yellow paint that someone has thrown onto the ticket machine at (00:48). That's the machine on the pavement which was never visible before.

And while the BEP condemn the vandalism, they don' t really, they are proud to report it —and blame the mayor for making the protesters do it.

So for all this "evening post represents the people" fuss they are really fighting to preserve a time when pavements were for parking and children couldn't walk round Montpelier safely.

Why should we, the residents of the inner city care? We are just being mislead by a paper that is happy to manufacture controversy, and happy to find it in the lives of people who are unable to adapt to change. Tough.

At this point the RPZ-haters will be going "So where did the cars go, eh?" The answer there is: the council added extra parking spaces round the corner by marking St Andrews Road for echelon parking.

In this photo you can just about make out a car coming up behind the parked van blocking the view. Which highlights the issue with echelon parking: its got a higher collision rate, and is particularly bad for cyclists.

In order to make the RPZ rollout less controversial, the council chose to make cycling on St Andrews Road more hazardous.

That's something for the haters to consider.

The Zone map that Clifton Tank Command Dare Not Show

Of all the maps that appear in the RPZ tank-battles, this is one that does not surface.



Its the map of where the air pollution levels in Bristol exceed the levels that are considered safe.

Look at that map. What stands out (to any resident of the city)

1. The entire city centre is an Air Quality Management Area. 
2. Clifton manages to dodge it, primarily by being above the town -though as it gets into Kingsdown and Windmill hill, height is not enough for the roads to stay breathable.
3. The roads into and out of the city are pollution hotspots. That includes Gloucester Road, Bristol's "most popular" cycle road.
4. The Frome valley pollution zone tracks the M32 perfectly.

We can't split the pollution into resident, business, public transport and commuter, apart from the Rupert Street bus & taxi only road —the one with the worst pollution in the city. Usually.

What we do know from the queues of cars on the A370 and A4 Portway every morning is the number of people who drive in to the city.  Any morning you can walk onto the Suspension Bridge and look down at the queue of cars who have done the portishead-M5-A4 route (and from other places, including Clevedon & Weston) and are now stuck in the Avon Gorge, fuming at the empty lane next to them along which park and ride buses whizz past. Any morning you can go to the footbridge above the M32 and look down at the line of near-stationary cars, all sitting with their engines on.

And in any inner-city area that is not an RPZ, you can watch the cars go round and round in circles looking for somewhere to park.

And now what -we have a  Somerset MP actually surfacing in the county to complain that Bristol's RPZ has had knock-on effects for Leigh Woods. Well, that's unfortunate —but not a reason for Bristol to attempt to do something about their air-quality. And an RPZ, if it actually helps alternate transport options in the area -including N. Somerset- will.

What's not covered here is that Leigh Woods has always experienced commuter parking -which was getting worse with the cost of crossing the Suspension Bridge, even before the RPZ went live. People who lived in the hinterlands weren't prepared to pay £2/day to drive over, and leigh woods became the cutoff point.

Well, Leigh Woods is free to roll out an RPZ too. As is Long Ashton. We can't say "but the roll-on effects" should stop any attempt at trying to make the city better to live and breathe in.

As for the residents of Portishead who say that Bristol is now trying to control where they work? 

Sorry. We are trying to control how people get to to work, to adopt options that aren't so literally poisonous to the city.

And the people who say "hold off until there's a viable alternative?" The residents of Portishead were all happy when the council spent £3M widening a roundabout, to reduce the time they spent queuing to get onto the M5 and then to work in Bristol or the North Fringe. £3M for what: one roundabout? Which, in a manner obvious to those of us who actually understand Queue Theory (it's not rocket science, you know), does nothing except move the traffic jams slightly closer to the city. North Somerset, under the guidance of Elf-King App Rees have spectacularly failed to get the Portishead Railway reopened for passenger traffic. They've actively opposed cycle facilities along their roads,  and actively campaigned against cycle routes through their two-cars-per-household-mock-villages.

It is the repeated choices and actions of the residents of North Somerset that have failed to provide that viable alternative to driving.  Why should Bristol care about those decisions? By leaving the city, these people abdicated their right to influence the decisions the city makes. And, in the hands of their democratically elected council, held back any form of progress. When they do attempt something, it fails so badly it gets ridiculed on national TV.

North Somerset are the hinterland of Bristol, not just geographically, but culturally.

Which is why we in the city can't afford to be held back by them.

We aren't trying to tell them where to work. We aren't even telling them how to commute.

What we are doing is saying "The road space and air quality in Bristol is too precious to waste on free commuter parking." By taking that away, anyone who wants to drive in still can —except they now get to pay for that right, so making the external costs of commuting in what is usually a single-occupancy vehicle tangible. In doing so it makes the now-internalized cost of driving in closer to that of using public transport, including the Avonmouth P&R site. It may even provide motivation for the residents of Portishead to push their councillors to get their thumbs out their arses and start working on this —maybe even setting up a Metropolitan Transport Authority covering the CUBA district, so actually giving them some input on Bristol's traffic plans. And, given there's an election coming up, maybe talk to their candiate MPs and say "will you do something for transport in the area other than staged photos in Leigh Woods?"

What we can't do is stop the RPZs and say "business as usual". Because its not just that everyone driving is causing congestion, they are helping poison the city.

Next time someone talks about resident parking zones, say "what about the air quality zones?". And if they don't have an answer, instead complaining how they have to use P&R instead of queueing to get into the city —you don't have to feel sorry for them at all.

An introduction to surveys

Richard Payne of ITV has asked by way of our strategic code-sharing and data mining partners, Twitter, how to explain bias and self-selection in surveys.

This is a topic dear to our hearts for a number of reasons:

1. We consider ourselves to Bristol's premier data-driven traffic analysis site.
2. We recently conducted a survey on traffic issues for the city —a survey which has been completely ignored by the evening post, the BBC and ITV.
3. We have just received an SERC grant for a new project to measure the weight of the city using a stopwatch and a trampoline —and plan to conduct our survey at the BRI next week.

Population: A collection "set" of things you want to measure values from.  Examples: the population of Bristol or all the residents of an area within Bristol.

Subset: Some or all entities within a subset. Example, some of the population of Bristol or some of the residents of an area within Bristol.

Proper subset: A subset of a set which is actually smaller than the original set. (fancy mathematical word: Cardinality). Examples: some but not all of the population of Bristol, or some but not all of the residents of an area within Bristol.

What is important here is that, by definition, a subset of a population must not contain any members outside that population. As examples, a subset of the population of Bristol must exclude people from North Somerset. Similarly, a subset of the residents of an area within Bristol must not contain anyone who does not live within that area.

In our survey we actually measured the origin of our self-selected sample to assess this. We could have just ignored them, but instead chose to include them in our answers on the basis that it was easier just to leave them in.

Data: Numbers. May be analysed by somebody with a statistical background to reach some meaningful conclusions. Without those mathematical skills you'll end up with something as useful as having a rabbit do your tax return.

Measurement: Using some form of scientific mechanism to come up with data about the things you measure. Examples: determining the weight of someone with a weighing scale. Determining the parking and driving habits of people by recording where they park or tracking where they drive.

Invalid Measurement: trying measure something by using the wrong tools, badly calibrated tools or reading the numbers off wrong. Example: determining the weight of people by having people jump onto a trampoline and using a stopwatch to time how long it takes for them to stop bouncing.

Poll: Asking people for their opinions. This is different from a survey in that it is assessing the beliefs of those people, rather than through measurement. Example: asking someone how much they think they weigh rather than putting them on a weighing scale. Asking people about parking and driving rather than actually recording or tracking them.

Leading questions. A sequence of questions which may, unintentionally or not, change the answers to follow-on questions. As example of leading questions, imagine the following sequence

1. Are you aware that being overweight can lead to an increase in coronary heart disease and diabetes?
2. Do you believe that overweight people should be billed by the NHS for medical care for weight-related conditions.
3. Are you a fat bastard?

After the first two questions, nobody will say yes to question 3.

Census: Measuring or polling a Population. Examples: people whose weight you want to measure, or the residents of an area whose opinion on parking you want to known. A census of a population is the only way to come up with a value of the measurement or poll which can be considered 100% accurate in terms of sample set. Everything else is incomplete and therefore inaccurate to some degree.

Survey: Measuring or polling a proper subset of a population —with the goal being to extrapolate the results to the entire population. Examples: weighing only some of the people in Bristol to extrapolate the weight of everyone in the city, or polling some of the residents in part of the city to extrapolate to the opinions of all the residents of that area.

Sample: The proper subset of a population used in a survey. Examples: some but not all of the population of Bristol, or some but not all of the residents of an area within Bristol. Another term is Sample Set.

Defensible: Something which you can present to people who understand statistics without being laughed at.

Invalid Sample Set: A sample for a survey which cannot be used to extrapolate to the entire population. Examples:

1. Including people from North Somerset in a survey to determine the average weight of the population of Bristol.
2. Weighing only those Bristolians who have been referred to the BRI heart clinic in a survey to determine the average weight of the population of Bristol and using a trampoline and a stopwatch to do so.
3. Using too small a survey set for the size of the total population. Example, weighing two people and attempting to reach a conclusion about the weight of the entire population of the city.
4. Attempting to conduct an opinion poll of residents of part of the city without excluding non-residents of that region.
5. Attempting to conduct an opinion poll of residents of the city within, say, residents parking zone, yet deliberately choosing to exclude parts of the area —such as, say, Kingsdown and the city centre.
6. Excluding some of the population on the basis that they do not meet some criteria. Example: excluding anyone who doesn't own a car from any opinion poll on the topic of residents parking.
7. Conducting an opinion poll of the residents of part of the city by only asking those people who have opinions on one specific outcome of the survey. Example: asking only people opposed to residents parking of their opinion on the topic. Conducting a survey by requiring participants to perform some action such as posting in their survey. The latter tends to something called self-selecting samples.

In our survey 32% of respondees declared they couldn't afford a car. These people don't have valid opinions on parking, nor on other parts of our own survey.

Statistical Outliers

These are a fun thing in experiments. Something way out of the expected. You can include these in your answer, though you can also try and work out how the outliers got in there and then discount them —this is especially useful if you are trying to make sure the survey reaches the conclusions you want it to.

Look at our question on the number of wing-mirrors replaced since the 20 mph rollout.

70% of the respondees claimed that they hadn't replaced any wingmirrors since the 20 mph zone. This was utterly unexpected, and, if used when trying to determine the average number of wingmirrors lost per resident per year, we get an arithmetic mean of 0.87 mirrors/year -less than one!

Yet can be explained if we include two other facts from our survey

• the number of respondees who asserted that they lived outside the city: 54%
• The number of respondees who asserted that they were too poor to own a car: 32%

As we are measuring the impact of 20 mph zones, we should be discounting those people from our analysis of this question:

Discounting non-car owners: 70-32 = 38. Therefore of respondees who owned car, only 38% of them got through the year without needing a new mirror.

Discounting non-residents. 54-38: -16! Which seems impossible, unless you consider that many of those non residents will have driven into a 20 mph zone, and so lost a mirror.

Once you discount the non-car owners and non-residents, we get the result we expected: since the 20 mph rollout, everyone in the 20 mph zone has lost one or more wing-mirrors, with the average number being 3. At 15-25 pounds a shot,  that wingmirror-tax is yet another tax on the hard-working motorist.

Causality and co-relatedness
Again, fascinating. Merely because two things appear correlated over time, doesn't mean that one causes another.

In this question Why has congestion got worse in Bristol over 25 years?, 17% said BT added an extra digit to all the phone numbers in the early 1990s. Some people may say "so what?", or even "the growth in Bristol's population caused BT to add more numbers; that same population growth increased the number of cars, hence the resultant congestion". We say something else: It was the adding of that digit which made it possible, in a pre-mobile-phone era, to move to the city. That 17% were right. And from this survey nobody can prove us wrong!

Invalid Survey
Any survey that can be considered invalid from a statistical perspective. Common causes are: invalid sample sets, leading questions, bad measurement, leading questions and bad-analysis, including confusing correlation for causation.

For some examples:

1. Asserting facts about the average weight of Bristolians through an opinion poll with leading questions conducted at the BRI heart clinic of 4-5 people, without even excluding any attendees from North Somerset. That fails: invalid sample set and leading questions.
2. Asserting facts about the entire population of Bristol's opinions on residents parking through an opinion poll with leading questions conducted against a self-selected sample set of some people who care about the subject.
3. Getting your maths wrong when you add things up, divide the answers, etc.
4. Misinterpretation of results. Reaching the wrong conclusions. If you want to reach a set of conclusions, you are less likely to question the sampling or analysis if the outcome agrees with your expectation. This is sometimes called confirmation bias

One classic way to bias a survey is simply to discount the "don't know" respondees and other non-participants. If you explicitly exclude these people from your survey —example by asking different people the question until you get one whose answer is interesting enough to write an article about, you've got an invalid subset of the population, hence the results cannot be extrapolated.

This problem of the don't-know answer is particularly bad in any self-selected survey because the members of the population who don't not hold opinions tend not to participate in it. Instead you get that subset of the population who hold opinions one way or the other.  It is also common for any survey which requires an action on behalf of the respondee, be it jump on a trampoline holding a stopwatch, or fill in a paper questionnaire and then post it.

Summary

As you can see, it is a lot easier to produce an invalid survey than a valid one. More subtly, its very easy to misinterpret a invalid survey for a valid one without knowledge of the sampling and measuring process, and knowledge of statistics.

For that reason, while surveys can provide some data about a subject, you can't consider the conclusions to be valid without knowing about the sampling, measuring and analysis —and any bias of the surveyors.

When you reviewing a survey, you should really query

1. The population for which the survey is meant to be analysing
2. The sampling process conducted in order to get a valid sample set
3. How things were measured
4. If it is some form of poll, the sequence and content of the questions.
5. Outliers: what were they? were any discounted?
6. What compensation have you made for non-participants?
7. How do you defend your claim that this survey can be extrapolated to the population it was meant to.

Alongside invalid surveys, you have bad reporting of surveys. Often this where an invalid survey has been conducted yet the survey is reported as if it is actually represented as "fact" or representative of the entire population. This is a shame that reporters do accept surveys so unquestioningly -as if they did, they'd realise how often politicians use bad maths to make decisions. Or, in the case of Bristol, to generate controversy for the local press where otherwise there'd be nothing in the papers to talk about.

Further Reading

We hope readers found this introduction to surveys and censuses informative and timely. Please practice what have learned by using some of the terms introduced above in your everyday conversation —at least once per day. Example uses

• "Please can I sample some of your chips"
• "the causality relationship between eating chips and being overweight is not clear",
• "your survey is utterly indefensible due to its painfully awful selection bias and leading questions  —your attempt to extrapolate it to any larger population hence so ridiculous you'd fail a GSCE if you sat one this week"

For anyone interested in learning more about this topic, here are some great online books on the topic

• Probability and statistics EBook UCLA. wiki-based book. Notable for a section of uses and abuses of statistics.
• Introduction to Probability. Dartmouth College.
  Foundational undergraduate probability book, with the history of the topic included too. Did you know that early work in probability was funded by french nobility so that they could win more money gambling with their peers? you do now. 
• Think Stats: Probability and Statistics for Programmers, Green Tea Press.
  —great read which makes few assumptions about the ability or willingness of readers to stare at equations. 

Clifton: last days of Christchurch School paveparking

Royal Park is yet to get its markings, so we can view the invaluable space the council will be taking away, ruining with ugly yellow lines

Here, by Christchurch School, the lines already exist -but as they can be ignored, they have a beauty of their own

Round the corner, there's more pavement space. Its inevitable the council will put down double yellow lines here —just so schoolchildren can get to school safely

Yet look at our archives: we've evidence back from 2008 that there's enough space for cars and children!



Given that small children on scooters can already squeeze past parked cars, there is no justification in adding more ugly yellow lines —or even enforcing the ones that are already there

Royal York Crescent: ruined!

Royal York Crescent is the grandest of the Clifton terraces, overlooking the entire city.

Only now, look out the window and what do you see? Yellow lines.

Completely out of place in a historic environment, such as this pleasant rural-esque scene of a pickup paveparked behind some bollards

Utterly inappropriate removal of echelon parking opportunities on a blind corner.

There's only a few days until the car-hating council start enforcing these awful yellow lines

A few more days for the village to live

It's worth remembering that the motorist-haters were pushing for bike parking on these streets.

bike racks would ruin one of Bristol's —nay, one of Britain's—greatest Georgian crescents!

 

Clifton RPZ: Yellow lines ruin Wetherell Place

Here's the junction of Wetherell Place and Frederick Place, forever ruined

Remember before, the quaintness of the village-in-a-city look




From a quiet-villagesque pavement to park on, to what ? double yellow lines



This totally destroys the character of the area




And for what? For safe walking round the city? For the benefit of people too poor to afford a car?

Unacceptable.

Clifton Village RPZ rollout: first photos!

We're here with the first photos of the clifton RPZ rollout.

As you can see —the paint is now down



In the background, the village has died, the trees have rotted away, and volcanoes have risen up out of the devastation.

Zombies travel the wasteland, eating children and small pets.

This is everything Clifton Tank Command warned us about!

Clifton: riot of the self-entitled

The Economist has discovered the Clifton Popular Front in their article Four wheel Fever.

This shows what press a tank in a city can have.

The paper did fail to note what bad press a tank in a city can have, such as when the driver of the tank feels that a protest against an RPZ in Clifton is more important than a protest against bombing of UN refugee centres in Gaza


As the paper nodes, "CLIFTON, in Bristol, is an unlikely hotbed of political activism. ". It is however, a hotbed of self-entitlement, be it the right to park your 4x4 on a double-yellow-lined corner near your fee-paying school, the right to double-park near your house -and the right for commuters to park on pavements.

Which is the problem: a clash between a mayor trying address the traffic problems for the city with a part of the city that believes in the inalienable right to drive the kids to school even if there is no parking, to drive to the local shops even if there is no parking, and to drive to work even if there is no parking.

A lot of the city believes that, but Clifton is one part of the city that has come out in protest against it. There's also the Aberystwyth Faction of Gloucester Road, but they have gone quiet. And in Clifton, its the traders who believe in the right to drive to work that are being most vocal.

The article is interesting, we just have a few points to add

"Bristol is one of the most congested cities in Britain. Traffic during the evening rush hour moves more slowly than anywhere except Belfast, Edinburgh and London. "

That's something we've looked at before. "Congestion" is an odd concept; for Bristol it is often defined as "the city with the highest variance between peak hour and non-peak hour traffic". Bristol becomes easy to drive around between 09:10 and 16:30, whereas outer london is always near-stationary. Another metric "average traffic speed" fails to consider that journey time is defined as distance/velocity, so if the distances are short, so is the time. In London, people travel further to work.

"Locals will pay £48 ($81) for the first permit to park near their homes."

Locals in some of the city already do, Kingsdown (KN) and Cotham South (CM) being examples. Nobody protested there, showing that it's not the residents in the inner ring that have the issues. It's those people who have adopted a lifestyle that assumes that free parking will be available near their place of work, and consider congestion to be something imposed on them, rather than a consequence of their own decisions.

"In Clifton, a suspension bridge links Bristol with North Somerset. “Everybody and his daughter will park there and walk across,” predicts one resident. Rather than solving a city’s traffic problem, Mr Ferguson might just end up pushing it elsewhere."

If you ever visit Abbot's Leigh on a weekday you will see that it is already full of park+walk commuters. Why? You save on the £1 bridge toll, adding up to £10/week for commuters. There's also more chance of finding a parking space there. Claiming that the RPZ will force commuters to park elsewhere really means "the expanded RPZs will force commuters to walk further". Oh, and as the Downs is out of the zone, park+bus and park+pedal from there will continue to be as popular as it is today.

What the paper does pick up on is the fact that South Gloucestershire council has a big chunk of the Bristol metropole —and a very different transport policy. S Gloucs has the "Leeds Strategy": wider roads. They've had the space for this, but all it does is amplify congestion in the North Fringe. That conflict between strategies is going to place Bristol and South Gloucestershire in head-on conflict between long.

Get your tanks off my lawn!

As d-day for the Clifton RPZ rollout approaches, already tempers are getting hot. What will happen? Will it be tanks up Whiteladies road a-la Soviet Liberation of Berlin, or will be house-to-house battling like Stalingrad?

We know this: it'll be noisy.

Clifton Resident James Gadd sends us this video of one of the pre-RPZ skirmishes -one where the Clifton Popular Front and their tank are nowhere to be seen. Here it's commuter vs resident, soon escalating to the police and then finally the builders. As anyone who has spent time in the city will know, builder's trucks are some of the most damaged out there, and so have little qualms about banging up against someone's car while they get their scaffolding out. Which is why that's the time even the police should consider their exit strategy.

Part one: opening skirmish



Part two: the residents come out with their pitchforks



Part 3: here come the Polis



Part 4: I see your police car and raise you a Builder's Lorry


Part 5: call it a draw



James -thank you for these, and we look forward to more as rollout day arrives!

Questions for anyone claiming RPZs devalue houses

There's a 3500+ petition up on the council web site demanding a rethink to RPZs in Bristol. This shows how effective the Clifton people at organising defence of their rights. Or, as the late Glaswegian father of this team member said "The extension of the M1 to Swiss Cottage was stopped because it went through Hampstead. The inner glasgow motorways went through the Gorbals because it went through the Gorbals". Anyone who thinks this petition is about RPZs anywhere outside Clifton are wonderfully naive.

Again, this petition is repeating the claim that an RPZ is bad for your house price.

Some questions for anyone who repeats that claims?

-Why is nobody from Cotham or Kingsdown protesting about the RPZs, saying "the RPZ devalued our house prices"?

-Have house prices in Cotham South and Kingsdown either fallen since the RPZ -or even just increased at a lower rate than Cotham North?

-Why do estate agents in Clifton emphasise off-street parking as a feature when selling houses?


-If, as is claimed, an RPZ will eliminate shop staff and commuter parking on weekdays, is that £50/year going to buy you the ability to park near your home, without having to pay that off-street parking premium?

-When the asking price for a house in or near Clifton is £1.5M+, who is suffering here? Because the only people that can afford a house like that is going to be someone selling up a flat in London and moving west,  someone in Clifton earning large amounts of money and still overcommitting on the mortgage -or someone with money making an investment in buy-to-let and expecting prices to continue to rise.

-Why are the Clifton RPZ protesters so concerned about the limit of the number of cars/household, or the cost of registering an overweight car, when a large fraction of the inner city don't even own one car, let alone three?

As the Bristol Blogger observed the last time we covered this, the RPZ is potentially going to increase value of your house. "In the Clifton West RPZ" means that you are officially in Clifton, and will have the right to drive your SUV round the corner to Clifton village for a latte.

More interesting is not so much "what will it mean for Clifton houses costing £1.5M", as "what will it mean for St Pauls houses?" Or, phrased differently, "will all-day residential parking it St Pauls increase gentrification and so break up the community there?"

That's something to discuss, but it's hard for the Cliftonians to complain about a destruction of community, as there is none. Everyone hates their neighbours as they are competing for the same parking spaces. And that's speaking as a former resident who was taken aback when moving to Horfield that neighbours actually say hello to each other.

Yes but who will think of the children? (part 1)

Say what you like about Tank Commander "Wolfie" Miles and his right-to-commute-to-work campaigners, call them "lost in time" or "selfish and missing Clifton's underlying issues" -they are good at PR.

They've realise that demanding the right to park outside the estate agent where you work, where you can charge a premium of thousands of pounds for any form of guaranteed parking, makes you look hypocritical. So instead they've found a commuter group that they can call on: school teachers.

The best one yet is how the introduction of an RPZ will force a teacher in Colston Primary School to resign as she'll have nowhere near to park after 45 minutes driving from Bath.

We've covered Colston Primary before, showing our datasets go back years, and can so place things in a historical context. We also know that the school is already in the CM zone, so can do before and after footage. So over today past the traffic jam chaos that was the st michael's hill school run jam, and what do we see -and how does it compare with the equivalent photos from 2009.

Before: Parked cars provide exciting things for small children too look at





After: empty crossing with good visibility



Before: congested dropoff zone outside the school, with the only place for parents to pull over the keep clear zone

:

After: emptiness. Those parents do doing dropoff can do it without going on the yellow lines -and so risk earning a ticket.
 

This carries on up the hill -where you can see the small kid scootering up and down while waiting for a parent with a push chair to catch up.





Finally, rotate pi radians  from the first photo -that's 180 degrees to people that stopped doing maths at 16 and don't understand data science- and what do you see behind the pleasant park with a play area where the younger brothers and sister of the colston primary age kids are playing on their scooters?

A train station.



Colston's Primary is three minutes walk from the Severn Beach line, which has a regular service to and from Templemeads -it takes 12 minutes, costs 1 pound 60 or thereabouts return, and hooks in to the trains to bath. If you do make the choice to live in Bath and commute into Bristol, this school is one of the few places where you can actually do it by train conveniently.

Whereas the parents with they schoolkids? They get a no-worry area where they can walk their kids to school, without fearing for the kids running ahead, without having to cross roads with zero visibility -roads congested with cars driving round in circles waiting for a space freed up by a resident.

This gives them a low stress stretch of the journey, which lasts until they get to the No-RPZ areas, such as Montpelier




That's why we think this sob-story is just that: something dredged up by tank command to make a point, but which doesn't hold up to scrutiny

1. Colston's primary is served by both a train system 3-5 minutes walk away
2. It's 15 minutes walk from the central bus station, where buses go to bath
3. The primary users of the school -the families nearby- benefit, where they are walking, driving or cycling their kids there.
4. There's nowhere that says it is compulsory for schoolteachers to live in bath

Central Bath has been nothing but RPZ for ages -anyone who lives in Cotham and who works in Bath isn't going to find any free parking except out past Victoria Park or other places more than half an hour's walk from the centre.

If the teacher lives in central Bath, she's going to have an RPZ permit on her own car. If she lives out of the core, well, she'd be just as inconvenienced teaching at a school in Bath as she would be in Bristol, so doesn't make a defensible case for the Tooting Clifton Popular Front.

Clifton : bring out your dead

After the Tank visit, we felt that a trip to Clifton was in order.

We took our stolen bicycle to the area. Just as there is no tank parking, there is no cycle parking in this part of the city -something they are proud of, rather than something they campaign about.

We ended up using the "no cycling" bit of tarmac where the tank had been.


Here's the video from a quick spin round the area


Key points

1. There's nothing happening
2. In the centre of the village, there is no legal area to park left.
3. Even the parking for under 2 hours is full -showing that short-term parking restrictions do not stop shop customers coming.
4. All four bicycle racks are full, and cyclists are inconveniencing pedestrians and endangering motorists by chaining their bicycles to railings and lamp posts -they do not take a hint, do they?
5. at 1:18, outside the parking limited zone, the residents are double parking. This extra parking area is going to be lost come the RPZ.
6. all vehicles bar the one a 3:49 have wing mirrors
7. There's no decent graffiti -hence no motivation for modern tourists to visit it.
8. Nothing is happening. There's a few people wandering around, but that's it
9. Despite all the echelon parking on Sion Hill and York Crescent, there's only 3-4 parking spaces there. The residents have to be grateful that they are powerful enough to stop the council taking the echelon parking away and putting in something anti-Clifton like a safe cycle route to the bridge!
10. Down in Hotwells, on Hope Chapel Hill, the RPZ is being painted in.
11. Civilisation has not collapsed down there, there are not legions of zombies walking around chewing the limbs of people with resident parking permits.

No, Hotwells's RPZ is not zombie country. Clifton village is, sadly. For all those "Clifton Will Die" posters, clifton is already dead as far as the rest of the inner city is concerned -they just haven't noticed.

Which means that rather than worry about whether the removal of shopkeeper and local business staff parking will kill the village, the Clifton Popular Front needs to think about how to get customers who aren't local businesses in there, competing with other parts of the town that are getting a national reputation.

Stokes Croft: exciting.

Clifton: an afternoon with an elderly aunt who smells of cat wee.

Clifton and 4X4s

After our post on the Clifton Popular Front, we got a complaint by way of Twitter from one LittleGibbo.

We were told not to be so rude:

@bristoltraffic don’t make assumptions. We don’t all have SUVs. Don’t be so rude.

and later, when we questioned her assumptions:

@bristoltraffic sorry if I am, but how? Was that tweet not suggesting that people of Clifton drive SUV’s? It’s how it read….

Notice how we said "Clifton has always had a reputation for being Bristol's 4x4 country,".
We didn't say "Clifton is Bristol's 4x4 country" -only that it has a reputation. We were declaring a statement of fact -a reputation- without considering whether it was valid.

well we don't like assumptions, we're a data-driven organisation.

Time to take out a vehicle to see. We lack a tank and they aren't very fuel efficient, so stole a bicycle and visited the area. This was a mid-week, mid-afternoon visit, so is at risk of collecting statistics on the 4x4 ownership of shopkeepers in the core village, not residents -so we went over to a residential street nearby: Canynge Square

And yes, we did find some SUVs.

One photograph isn't a defensible dataset, so we did a complete circuit of the square



this shows some important facts

1. Although it claims to be a square, it is in fact a triangle
2. There's a lot of cars at home, even on a weekday. 
3. Most of the cars are new, shiny and dent free
4. All have their wing mirrors attached.
5. Yes, there are a lot of 4x4s there, even if you discount the volvo XC70 estate car.

Anyway, we can look at the video and say "from our survey of clifton a lot of the locals have 4x4s".

Which means that the reputation of Clifton being Bristol's 4x4 country is clearly valid. We have nothing to apologise for -and expect an apology of our own.

No doubt some people will be pointing to the inadequate size of our sample set, and our failure to compare a control group of another part of Bristol, or indeed look at national statistics of the ratio of 4x4s to practical cars in the previous two to three years. But we must pre-emptive dismissly their arguments.

People are trying to shape the parking and driving policy of the area without any data at all -so our sample of a single residential triangle is in fact more valid. If we'd stopped at the photo we'd have been selective, but showing the entire circuit provides more defensible data than all content by other parties..

In comparison, the downs committee voted against a 20 mph based on a single experiment conducted by a single councillor - an experiment for which the councillor is failing to provide the data on.

Meanwhile The Clifton Popular Front are using results of their surveys to claim that 99% of businesses are against having their all-day staff parking converted to short-stay shopper parking. making exaggerated claims to residents about how that loss of staff parking will damage their life, and completely missing the point that Clifton already has a parking problem: nowhere legal for customers to park precisely due to all that staff parking.

To summarise: We have conducted a survey of Clifton village and observed a number of 4x4s in residential streets. Anyone attempting to dismiss our claims as inadequate will be required to provide defensible data for their own assertions about Clifton, parking, and how an end to free staff parking will bring about the downfall of the area. Otherwise: be quiet

The Clifton Popular Front: parking or war!

Clifton has always had a reputation for being Bristol's 4x4 country, indeed, one of our first ever photograph was someone being forced to park their 4x4 outside a fee paying ecole.


Well, the "clifton or death" campaigners, who are campaigning for "right to commute by car" have escalated beyond the mock tanks to the real thing,


If you look at the footage, they are saying "loss of parking will destroy clifton" -yet as you note in the video: there are are no free spaces. Which means that the combination of residents and staff parking has destroyed the parking opportunities for any paying shop customers. Which means that the number of customers that can drive to their shops is reduced.

More formally: if the number of free spaces is zero, the the number of hours of free parking you get is also zero.

You can see this at 1:10 where the tank is forced to park on Clifton Downs, just behind the "No Cycling sign".

Which is where the whole "RPZ kills the village" story falls apart. As it appears to be granting free parking where none exists today.

Ignoring the fact that they are really fighting for the right to drive to work, they threaten to take their battle all the way to David Cameron if they don't get their way.

Here then is the second video of their war against the RPZ, taking the battle to westminster itself!



Support the Clifton Popular Front in their campaign! Rise up and overthrow the oppressors that is Bristol Parking Services!

Clifton Parking or Death

There's a web site, Tufton or Death, where campaigners are trying to save the lives of people that use a turn-off on the A34 "Chievley Services" Road.

This is relevant, as some Cliftonians are now campaigning about their RPZ plans, with signs round the area placed perfectly at eye-level for anyone driving a little urban 4x4 -meaning exactly the kind of people that Clifton depends on.



One thing to call out here, if you step back a bit, what it looks like


     Not
Clifton Will
    DIE

Which can then be parsed as "Clifton Will Not Die"...

Anyway, interesting to see the signs. In today's BBC Radio 4 Costing the Earth program we got to hear a someone describe the residents of Clifton as "In the driving seat". That was not a metaphor: it is a statement of fact.

Imposing time limits on parking in Clifton is either going to force residents to walk a bit, or destroy the village the way it did to Southville. We shall have to see what the outcome is. Of course, Southville tried to address the problem by adding bike parking -something Clifton has strongly resist on the basis that it is out of keeping with the area. Is the RPZ plan a first step to forcing Clifton Village to actually have bike parking?

Meanwhile, keep an eye on what happens here. What's impressive is that someone had the money to print some nice posters. Elsewhere in the city the protests were limited to bits of paper run off home printers. This though -professional.

Aberystwyth Road, Bishopston

Time to catch up with the Aberystwyth Faction's proposals for an improved Gloucester Road -one that makes the bus lane tidal and so adds short-stay parking in the opposite direction.

We have now heard from the councillor behind the petition:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David Willingham <David.Willingham@bristol.gov.uk>
Date: 17 December 2013 13:48
Subject: RE: Gloucester Road Parking Changes

  The petition neither mentions nor proposes making any changes to bus or cycle lanes as that is not what it is asking the council to change. 

  If you visit Gloucester Road, then you will find that there are various parking bays that could be brought into use to allow the traders to benefit from more passing trade during the peaks, without having a detrimental effect on cyclist safety.

  As a local cyclist who uses the Gloucester Road, I have no intention of trying to make it more dangerous for cyclists, and if done carefully and in the right locations, I believe the proposed change would make it possible to share the limited road space a little more efficiently.

  If the council do decide to act on this petition, then they would be required to perform a highways safety audit of any locations they intend to change, as well as statutory consultation on any changes, so all road users, local residents or traders could have their say.

Regards,

David
--
Cllr Dr David Willingham
Liberal Democrat Councillor for Bishopston ward

So there you go: it's about sharing the limited road space a little more efficiently.

If you look at the petition, it does call out the recessed parking bays outside  288 Gloucester Road -the original Maplins site -these changes are non-controversial and likely to be unopposed, except perhaps matched by some demands for bike parking alongside.

What is a flash point is going to be the sentence "Furthermore we call upon Bristol City Council to implement "tidal" parking on Gloucester Road,". Because its goals, "Parking on the inbound carriageway during the evening peak" means "no bus or bike lane inbound in the evening rush hour", while "Parking on the outbound carriageway during the morning peak." means the same in opposite direction.

This is where the controversy lies. What is being proposed here implies no bus lane to-and-from the North Fringe commute, which means

1. No bike lane for anyone heading to the north fringe
2. No bus lane for anyone trying to get the Wessex red busses. These are the ones used to get to and from UWE -and if the students can't go by bus or bike, that leaves car. We don't want that. They don't pay enough taxes to deserve any tarmac.
3. Anyone commuting by car up the north fringe is now going to get held up by congestion on the A38. As that's something that wasn't covered in the C4 documentary: what it was like to drive down Gloucester Road before the showcase routes were launched. It was much, much, worse. The buses would have to stop in your lane to let passengers on and off, and if there was a bus heading north stuck behind a minicab with its hazards  on near the minicab office, your road would block as the two buses would never be able to pass each other. Gloucester Road was only viable as a driving commute option on those days that the council was actually enforcing parking. Which is something you wouldn't know on the commute until you were committed. 

See that? No matter how you get to the North Fringe, car, bus or even bicycle, the showcase bus route benefits. We don't expect the motoring advocate groups to realise that, as Bob Bull of portishead, official spokesman of the ABD in the evening post, is too busy complaining about his journey along the portway to appreciate how the bus lane helps commuting by car.

We do fear that the bus companies will pick up on this -as will UWE. And the cyclists, well they are the all-powerful-cycle-lobby.

Gloucester Road is going to be flash point there.

• Statistics imply that Gloucester Road has the highest number of reporting cycling incidents. -if you add Cheltenham Road to the figures, the A38 stands out as either the busiest cycling route in the city, or one of the more hazardous. Notable is that the Railway Path, which has the highest use, doesn't appear on the list at all.
• Bristol Cycling Campaign's followups on police involvement in any of these incidents imply the outcome is "not interested". This has the potential to be an issue in its own right.
• Even the mountain bikers are getting involved in this. Because while they are happy doing things like the red bits on the Super Nova trail, they at least know if they do get it wrong, they won't have somebody on the phone drive straight over them.
• A lot of the North Fringe employers have Bicycle User Groups with group mailing lists -easily organised, and capable of co-opting driving colleagues into the battle.
• The cyclists have more influence in the national press.

Putting it together, the shops may think that a review of the bus lane and a tidal system may get wide support -after their success in ensuring they retain their commuter parking in the RPZ-, but they are potentially getting into trouble. How are they going to react if cycling campaigners start handing out leaflets saying "email your councillor" to cyclists waiting at junctions on gloucester road? Can they take the trade of cyclists for granted -or are they going to have to deal with people coming into the shops, creating queues at peak hours, then when they get to the counter announcing they won't shop there as the shopkeepers are endangering their lives.

This is going to one to watch.

As for now, at the time of writing (16:02, Wednesday December 18), the petitions stand at

• Cyclists for a better bike lane: 135
• Aberystwyth: 73.

That's gone in a week from about 62-63 each -the cycling petition doubling, the shopkeeper's going by ten. This should be a warning sign to the councillors: they run a risk of making more enemies than friends here.

The Aberystwyth Faction: short stay parking matters more than life

This is just a first post on what is going to brew up into the next story to keep the Evening Post readers suitably outraged. Remember: we covered it first.

Regular readers may recall our coverage of a recent channel4 documentary, one that showed how the council was enforcing the parking restrictions in the showcase bus route at peak hours -and worse than that, by doing it with CCTV, ensuring that people really really didn't stop there, rather than "stop for 10 minutes -no harm done" stopping.

Well, now it's got national coverage, it's going to blow up

The "more parking" campaigners did manage to hold off the rollout of resident parking zones nearby, so ensuring that the parking areas will be available for staff and other commuters -leaving a remaining problem: where do shoppers go?

The answer is obvious: the bus and bike lanes.

Hence a petition: Fairer parking on Gloucester Road.

This is The Aberystwyth Faction's petition

We call upon Bristol City Council to remove peak parking restrictions from all parking bays that do not cause obstruction to traffic lanes of Gloucester Road, 

...
Furthermore we call upon Bristol City Council to implement "tidal" parking on Gloucester Road, and to permit the following:
•Parking on the inbound carriageway during the evening peak.
•Parking on the outbound carriageway during the morning peak.

This is pretty significant as if they get their way, it means that the bike lanes will be dead, and the bus lanes will only work for people heading towards town in the morning, away in the evening.

Which means that anyone trying to cycle in the opposite direction, say to school, or even to work on the North Fringe -and get there alive, are stuffed.

The right to park outside a shop is more important than the rights of others to live

In the other corner, just warming up, are the people who mistakenly believe that their right to live is more important than allowing people to get a bag of chips without having to park round the corner and walk 100 paces.

Their petition: Petition: Uninterrupted Cycle Lane on both sides along entire Gloucester Road

This is going to go head to head -two pressure groups, seeing who can be the loudest. Those demanding that Gloucester Road becomes like Aberystwyth: free range parking, or those who don't want the cycling clock pushed backwards -but instead want the bike lane expanded and enforced.

It's going to get exciting!

Bristol Parking on C4

Channel 4 did a documentary about Bristol's driving and parking issues -you can watch it until early december.

Being Bristol's premier "rational" commentary on parking -and the one with the best historical datset, it's a shame to see us being excluded from the program in exchange for a little old biddy who walks up and down Gloucester Road telling people to move if they don't want a ticket.

Some initial observations

• That TomTom claim that Bristol is "the most congested city" is bogus -it is based on the definition of congestion as "the most significant difference between peak hour journey time and off-peak journey time". We've discredited this before. By their reasoning Bristol is "more congested" than London because driving round London takes forever at any time day or night.
• The focus was on Gloucester Road, with some coverage of the M32 from cameras, and somebody "bold" trying to cross the end of it at Newfoundland Way.
• Stokes Croft coverage was limited to making the assertion that the riot was about a supermarket, not about drunk people being help up by the police.
• They treated one person on the streets of the croft shouting at a traffic warden as unusual, which shows the under-researched program didn't spend more than half an hour in the area -otherwise they'd know that shouting at complete strangers there is a common activity.
• Anchor Road popped up with a mini blocking the bus lane -if the council had done the right thing in the 1970s and turned the harbour into a motorway exchange, there wouldn't be such a narrow approach to an unwidened Jacob's Wells Road. Nor did the closure of the A4 outside college green get covered -let alone queen's square. The way the council has systematically resisted road widening and even converted roads into parkland was not covered as a cause of congestion and parking problems
• George Ferguson appeared to be cycling over the Cumberland Basin bridges, that mess of entrances and exits where nobody ever knows which is the right one to exit on, a road where the on-ramps heading north are angled perfectly to keep the small amount of visible tarmac hidden in your blind spot. Cycling there showed he is in fact a very "bold" mayor.

A key theme was that the council need to tow cars parked in bus lanes because at peak hours the road traffic collapses when this happens. Yet nobody considered it is only buses, cyclists, motorcyclists and taxis that are held up when someone pops into a fish and chip shop for a couple of minutes -AND THEY SHOULDN'T BE THERE!

By eliminating the bus lanes, gloucester road could have more parking for staff and customers to the shops. We'd have to eliminate the buses too, as it would otherwise be like before the clearway went in -when your lane would be held up by a bus that was hanging back to let an oncoming bus get past a minivan with the lights flashing.

You see -there was one key point missed: it is buses that cause congestion. Bus lanes simply eliminate essential parking spaces. And as you can see from elsewhere in the city, every busy high street needs its delivery vans.

One confusing aspect of the C4 programme is that the residents and shopkeepers of Gloucester Road seemed to be complaining the urban clearway preventing parking from 07:30-09:30 and 16:30-18:00,  one and half hours of an 09:00-17:30 shop's opening hours.

Yet they were generally protesting about the RPZ plans.

Which are completely independent of the showcase bus clearway restrictions

And which, by eliminating commuter parking, should actually increase side-street short stay parking

Yet they were protesting. Which makes no sense whatsoever, except that the word "parking enforcement" appears in both contexts. But the urban clearway zones are for traffic flow, so coming to the council house to complain that an RPZ will destroy Gloucester Road is utterly incoherent. They could complain that the showcase bus route is destroying it today, but that is a separate issue.

Why complain then?

1. They have conflated the loss of commuter parking with the fall of civilisation.
2. They are dependent on commuter drive-by customers who will not pop in to the shops if they have to drive round the corner to park.
3. They fear that a reduction in commuter car traffic will impact revenue
4. They will not be able to drive to work themselves.
5. They believed what that Evening Post told them.

Other Gloucester Road issues which surface in the video

• That chip-lady walking up the road telling people to move or they get a ticket? If the council's goal is traffic flow over revenue, then the fact that she is doing this without being paid is not some act of civil disobedience, it is being an unpaid traffic enforcement officer. Also: that chip shop is just up the road from her house. While we don't normally encourage walking. looking at her trying to 3-point turn, walking would actually be faster here -and she should warn people about the council while doing it.
• The Prince of Wales pub did not get any coverage, even though it is a core institution -nor did Grecian Kebabs or Rocco's Pizzeria. None of the long-standing institutions got the coverage and respect they deserve.
• If you want to get your hair cut on Gloucester Road, go to Franco's. Everybody knows that. If another hairdresser on the stretch is complaining they are losing customers who aren't stopping on the drive home -there may be other factors at play.

The RPZ issues for residents are independent of Gloucester Road -but something for coverage another time.

Residents Parking: Bristol's Poll Tax?

According to the evening post, opposition in Montpelier and St Pauls is rising to the point where civil disobedience is contemplated. Already we have an unnamed pensioner pushing for active resistance: "We need to paint out the lines and pull down the signs."

Well, being able to park outside your house is a fundamental right -and when you consider that the troubles in Northern Ireland grew out of a failure of the civil rights movement there, it is better to accede to such demands before they get out of hand.

Even so, hopefully the area will go for rasta colours on the kerbstones, not royalty.

We'd like to highlight a particularly insightful solution to the problem from "Pogo_T_Clown :

Given the tendency of communities to descend into NIMBYism when they're tasked with self-policing, I think this is a flawed idea. However, I do believe that it would create quite a burden for the council to determine the needs of each street in the city. As such, I would suggest a "Street-twinning" system where, for example, a street in Clifton would be twinned with one from Bedminster. The residents of the Clifton street could drive over to Bedminster and provide an objective view on the level of parking required. The people from Bedminster could catch a series of buses to Clifton and return the favour. This would save the council money and improve ties between the communities in Bristol, which could only be a good thing.

This is an innovative approach which we hope the leaders of The Parking Rebellion embrace.

Clifton: premium knives out for the residents

As we said yesterday, the knives are out in Clifton. And when we say knives, we mean the  Messermiester Meridian Elite 9" Kullenschliff Chef’s Knife on a granite kitchen unit, freshly sharpened after its wash in a Miele dishwasher that actually texts your iPhone when the wash is done.

Why? Because the Clifton Business Improvement district's press release on the RPZ contains the phrase "99% of those surveyed feel there should be less residential permit parking in the Village with more pay and display and business permit parking"

The 99% surveyed are the businesses obviously, though they don't give full details about the population size for the survey, number of responses, whether the responses are a representative sample of the population -all the things that we, as a data science organisation, would expect. As the release also says "over 300 business" (sic),  then perhaps that was the population, and the response was over 100, with 1 person saying "no".

This may seem a small detail, but we like defensible data, which is why we like to back up our datasets with photographs, and are prepared to email councillors for the data behind their claims.

Similarly, we like data to justify conclusions, such as "Through BCC’s actions shoppers are more likely to migrate to Cribbs Causeway with free parking and to Cabot Circus where there is sufficient car parking and an efficient bus service."

Note how they avoid noting that Cabot Circus hasn't got any free parking. Because it doesn't -yet there's invariably a queue on the M32/Newfoundland Way approach on a weekend, showing that if people are prepared to drive a distance to the destination, they are prepared to park there for a while. And, if you look at the Cabot Circus pricing, you'll see that it is priced for shoppers not commuters. Because the Cabot Circus operators know that parking is too important to waste on commuters, not when you want revenue-earning shoppers in there. Cribbs Causeway don't have that problem: they have a separate one, namely it is in the middle of nowhere unless you have a car or take the bus.

Anyway, the key issue here is "less residential permit parking in the Village with more pay and display and business permit parking"

If they'd stopped at "less residential permit parking in the Village with more pay and display ". There would have been a nice argument "we need more space for visitors than residents", which could have been a negotiating point -how much for exclusive residents vs shared. Given the residents are (presumably) sacrificing their right to double park in the Mall, unless the Mall Garden Residents Association comes round to approving of echelon parking, instead of saying "please double park instead". they are already sacrificing a lot of the parking capacity of the area.

With a nice tangible "paying customers => money" equation, the BID team would have gone into meetings with the residents with a good negotiating point.

Except they go and spoil it with that final clause "and business permit parking".  That lets the cat out the bag. The reason the Clifton BID want resident parking capacity reduced is not for those customers who would otherwise drive to Cribb's Causeway or go to Cabot Circus. No, it's for commuters into Clifton: the shops and other businesses, such as the soon to be re-opened private hospital whose  management have just discovered that there is nowhere on site for their 100 staff to park and they'd better have a plan here.

This is why the BID is going to go head to head with the residents, and why they have to get the Astroturf out to make it look like the resistance to the RPZ is going to come from residents who will suddenly get hit with bills of "up to" 192 pounds for their car.  It's not about how much residents will have to pay for their #3 car. It's not even about the 0-48 pounds they will have to pay for the #1 car. It's about whether weekday parking space in Clifton should be allocated to residents or to the staff of the businesses in the area.

Which is why this is going to be so much fun to watch it would be worth attending and just asking completely off topic questions like "I only park on zebra crossings -will that still be legal" or "if Bristol Zoo is complaining about staff parking issues, is it because of their history of opposing park and ride to the zoo in favour of letting visitors pay to park on the downs?"

Yes, the wednesday evening event will be entertaining -please attend if you can. Being at Clifton High school there will be free parking for your 4X4 on the school keep clear area -and, as the commuters will have gone, other spaces further up college road if you find yourself forced to walk