Volvo bug reports, issue #2; SMIDSY

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"Sorry Mate I Didn't See You", as uttered by driver to person they nearly just killed due to failure to properly observe/assess the environment so making a decision based on incomplete and invalid data. Saying "sorry mate" is a way to imply that it was something minor like "sorry I didn't open the door, I didn't see you there", rather than "sorry I almost added you to this years KSI statistics, but I didn't look or comprehend the situation properly".

In this instance the driver did actually seem pretty horrified that she'd nearly done it, and she wasn't on her phone. What could be the cause then, on a clear and quiet afternoon with no other distractions in sight?

Tyndall's Park Road; Highbury Vaults is at the end of it. Before they blocked off Woodland Road on the left side of the climb, you could drive straight over. That kept the road a lot more hazardous, as there'd be cars trying to sprint across. Here though, Woodland Road provides an escape route to the side, with the raised section of road some mild traffic calming of the main university halls of residence to study route for students on foot & bike.  Coming downhill would have been a serious issue.

The vehicle is on camera for 4s of visibility before pulling out, but she doesn't actually stop at the give way, just slow down for <1s and then continue. You have to consider whether the fact that the roads were so quiet got her thinking "these roads are empty" and failed to properly stop & assess the situation. Or she was only looking the right, pulled out and didn't do a second check to the left as she came around.

Complacency?

Big Shout Out to SWC scaffolds van HK15FYH!

We don't normally go to S gloucs on the basis that it's boring.

Nice to see that today, the driver of SWC scaffolds van HK15FYH / HK15 YHF decided to lighten up the journey of our tax dodger by not bothering to slow down for the roundabout.



This isn't a great junction, so the cyclist lined up for a right turn, waited for the traffic coming from the MoD abbey wood direction to go, then set out, slowly enough to be able to react to problems. Which was good, as you can see that the van coming from the left doesn't appear to slow down at all, not until shouted at.

If you look at the still, you can see why: he's got his shiny gold iphone six in his hand



It's interesting to see the driver's reaction: they look up from the phone, look at the cyclist, then drive off, without even bothering to show a hint of remorse.



Which raises the question: report the driver to the police or not? Because that may be the only way to see some remorse, and perhaps even him stopping texting while driving.

Spicing up the school run

Halfords are reporting a surge in sales of helmet cameras. While one motivator may be that it finally resolves the he-did-I-did and she-did-I-did arguments about positions in road, actions and numberplates, we know the real reason is to provide entertaining content for others to watch on youtube.

Of course, that  content needs to be entertaining, which implies "not dull boring journeys where nothing happens".

This is why we are grateful for FW13EKN spicing up the school run

As you can see, most of the journey down Cotham Hill is boring boring boring. Apart from the delivery van in the middle of the road, nothing worth mentioning. This is a boring journey for the parent, while the child has nothing to talk to their school friends about.

This is where the black golf FW13EKN comes into the picture. You can first see it waiting for the zebra crossing to clear, as it has just turned right of Whiteladies Road.

As soon as it gets round the corner, the driver sees that there is a spare bit of double yellow line for him to park his car into, and if he veers across the road aggressively enough he can take it before anyone else.

He also sees the oncoming parent and child, and decides to make their day entertaining by veering rapidly in front of them. It'd be easy to blame the cyclists for being unlit, did the father not have a Hope Vision LED lamp on the front of his bike, and the child a high power LED light of their own. No, this action wasn't done because they hadn't seen the bicycles, it was because they thought they could clear them in time.

Of course, tax dodgers being what they are, they did take up the space, and the way the parent blocked the car off he has been held up for thirty seconds -which is thirty seconds less of the credit-card base consumption that is essential for keeping the British economy afloat.

Eric "common sense" Pickles is proposing some changes to parking, including a 10 minute right to park on double yellows, and an end to the CCTV parking enforcement which stopped this driver parking in Whiteladies Road directly. We say: it doesn't go far enough.

1. Bicycles hold up parking and should be banned.
2. Bike racks take up valuable pavement parking space that should be removed.
3. The consultation doesn't make any mention of giving us 10 minutes grace to park on white zig-zags by zebra crossings -of which there are so many in shopping areas.

Without such changes, the inner city will never be revitalised by people driving in from the suburbs to buy packs of cigarettes.

Returning to the video, you  can see the parent appreciating the extra frisson of excitement the driver added to an otherwise unmemorable school run -which is why he thanks the driver for their contribution. It's hard to see, but the driver waves their hand in acknowledgement of the appreciation.

Followup on the "R242AAC incident"

We've been keeping an eye on the Times's Cities Safe for Cycling campaign.


We weren't that worried, because their manifesto was all about infrastructure. Such projects take years and can be put off on the grounds of the "the economy is in crisis -all we can afford is more bypasses".

What they had left out was the one thing that could have made our life tangibly worse straight away -demanding anything resembling enforcement of traffic laws. Today we can drive into ASLs on the phone, speed around the city, park in bike lanes, sound our horn behind cyclists. The underpeople may view all this as harassment, but it is what we need to do to get by in our city. There isn't room in the city for bike lanes, not when short term parking is so critical; stopping behind ASLs costs us seconds when the lights change, and mobile phones reduce the cost of congestion.

We need to break these outdated highway code laws to keep the city moving!

What's  concerned us recently is not just that the times is giving cyclists more publicity, but that they are slowly starting to look at enforcement:

• Put onus on drivers, says cycling world champion Mark Cavendish.
• Tougher sentences demanded against drivers who kill cyclists

That's a danger -a legal system that actually enforces the outdated rules. Of course, for that we will need judges that care about cyclists -which we are fortunately a long way off from having, and a police force that forwards cases to them.

The latter is something we all fear, obviously. Which is why it is so reassuring to look at the Cycling Silk's blog and see that in London, the police, sensibly, refuse to do anything. Indeed, the unit set to to focus on road safety, Roadpeace, are leading the way in this refusal to do anything.

Similarly, up in Glasgow, the one surviving cyclist, Magnatom, has actually been surprised to discover that the police won't do anything about HGVs nearly running him over at roundabouts.

It is critical that this unofficial policy remains. The growing popularity of helmet and handlebar cameras means that the things we used to do with impunity, now become videoed and stuck up online. If the police acted on these videos, then it would be worse than when the speed cameras were turned on.

Which is why today, we have some bad news for all important people in a hurry. Bristol Police do seem to care about the cyclists.

As regular readers may recall, last October we covered an incident where the car R242AAC nearly ran over a cyclist at a mini-roundabout.
 




The cyclist had complained to the police, who were trying to track the driver down. However, the driver had been successfully using the "don't reply to the letters" gambit, along with the "hide under the sofa when the police come by" tactic. It looked like they would get away with it.

Sadly for him, just before the time limit ran out, the police uploaded his registration number to the "cars to stop" list  on all the police cars, and within a week he'd been pulled over, forced to acknowledge he had been the driver, and pulled into court for "driving without due care and attention"

Now, at this point the normal my word vs their word argument would come out, and since the cyclist is trying to prove guilt, it's hard for them to make any defensible claims about our driving. And here is where those helmet cameras really hurt.

The driver had done what we'd do: deny all charges. But as soon as the video was shown to them, they realised that the usual denial tactic was doomed, and changed their plea to guilty.

We'll cover this in more detail shortly, but the key thing to bear in mind is this:

Not only are cyclists filming their journeys, the police in Bristol are acting on their complaints.

This is chilling. At least is hasn't got as far as London or Glasgow yet -maybe we should all move there.

Big Hello to R242AAC: roundabout jumper

We've had this video for a while, but been keeping quiet about it. Why? because there is a limit of six months for charging anyone for any dangerous driving/careless driving offence, and this driver has been successfully avoiding all attempts by the police to contact him. While that creates a new offence, "failing to report who was driving at the time an offence was committed", again, that has a limit.

This is profound. It means if you can hide for long enough, you can even get away with nearly running over a family at a roundabout.

The video and email came to us from "S":

I have a video of a near miss by a car that failed to stop for me and my nine year old son at a roundabout.

We are cycling up Cotham Road, about to go down over the roundabout to Cotham Hill. Cotham Road is calmer now the zebra crossing is in, and as you can see, the few cars passing on the bank holiday gives my son a wide berth, which is appreciated.

As we approach the roundabout, at 08:00 on 29 of April, I get my son in the correct place to go over, check that nothing is pulling out and we set off. I can hear the sound of a car approaching from the left, from St Michael's Hill, so I warn my son that this this car on the left is the next hazard we are going to worry about -as you can hear in the commentary.

As we get partway over, I pull ahead of my son, to make sure the approach car sees us slows down in good time.

However, instead of looking, instead of slowing down, this car pulls straight out onto the mini roundabout. If I had been about 50cm further ahead, I would have been hit, and if my son had been about 1.5m ahead of where he was, he would have been hit.

The car registration was R242AAC, I repeat this phonetically multiple times after the incident, along with the date and time, and at 1:12 in the video you can see the registration number, along with the Honda logo and the Accord model name.

The driver was a white male, with -I believe -brownish hair. He saw me and waved mildly apologetically as he continues through the junction without slowing down, continuing down Hampton Road. I follow him briefly enough to confirm the registration number, then turn back to see my son.

We are impressed not just by the driver's bravery in pulling out on what can be a busy roundabout without looking, but in their successful attempt to avoid what are apparently repeated attempts by the police to contact the driver, as with a video like this it would be pretty hard to deny your car was there.

We hope that nobody in the Bristol Area manages to spot this dark blue Honda Accord registration number R242AAC, that is R242 AAC and then immediately contacts the Avon and Somerset police on the phone number 101. All readers of this blog must keep an eye out for this car and make sure there are no cyclists in the area, to defend this bold driver from the menace caused by militant troublemakers who video their journeys round the city and complain about such minor things like nearly being killed.

The fact that if you hide for six months you can avoid prosecution is a new one to us. We look forward to using that technique ourselves in the near future.

CF54UWV: never own up to a SMIDSY, even if you don't think it's being videoed

We got sent this video for review of an event at 09:10 this morning, just off Park Row. And what a lovely video it is.



As you can see, the tax dodger descends St Michael's Hill then goes to the front of the road, waiting for a green light and then heading off along Perry Road with the goal of turning into Lodge Street and so descend to The Centre. While they are trying to do this, a road tax payer driving the premium Audi CF54UWV comes up Lower Park Row and starts to pull out. The tax-dodger expresses some concern here and then has to take evasive action by getting up on the pavement, before pulling in front of the Audi where he stops and expresses some more concern to the driver.

The driver says "I'm Sorry, I didn't see you". We suspect that some more discussions would have taken place if the cars behind hadn't started sounding their horns -nobody died, no need for a post-mortem- so the cyclist sets off. The Audi is no longer behind the bicycle at the bottom, implying it has turned into Lodge Place and the office parking therein.

The tax dodger then proceeds to make life hard for the car behind by giving way to other cars, rather than recognise that from their actions on the horn, they are clearly also important and in a hurry.

Here's our review

1. The Tax Dodger is to be praised for wearing a helmet. The helmet camera, well, it provides entertainment.
2. If they had waited behind all the cars on St Michaels Hill, they would not have been the first road user to approach Lodge Street. This would have reduce the risk of collision, as the taxpayer would have had something larger to spot. Furthermore, the MPV sounding its horn would not have been held up, as it was waiting on St Michael's Hill too -and would have been ahead of the cyclist.
3. There is a small dotted line bike lane on Park Row. This would have caused the collision to happen earlier, and so not hold up the MPV.
4. Getting on the pavement as a form of evasive action is illegal. If they had a registration number, they'd have been reported to the police for it.
5. If they had been hit, their lack of third party insurance would have placed all the costs of repair to an expensive vehicle on that driver.
6. After the incident, the actions of being nice to all cars pulling out was insensitive. They had already held up at least three important people who had paid for the right to be there; this just made things worse. 
7. If they hadn't been on a bicycle, none of this would have happened.

We are also going to discuss the actions of the female Audi driver.

• Although playing the "I'm not going to look" gambit does help in some pullout negotiations, in this situation we'd have sounded our horn to make clear we were coming through.
• If you drive an old van you have better negotiating power. 
• It's clearly a fast car, you could have looked at the bike, then done the same action aggressively enough that they wouldn't have caught up with you.
• Never, never, never say "I'm sorry, I didn't see you". Your insurance company will hate you for it, and in a world of universal cameras, your actions will be permanently associated with CF54UWV, Bristol and your apparent place of work, Lodge Place, for as long as google's servers retain the data.

The correct thing to say in this situation is usually something like "get out the way, I pay for the roads and you don't". Sometimes we also demand they have insurance, though given our van's current insurance state, that would be a bit hypocritical. Speaking of insurance, we hope that the cyclist does not contact your insurers and provide them with some hard data on your driving techniques. That is one of the reasons why we do not insure our vehicle.

Nevertheless: We in the Bristol Traffic Project salute the driver of CF54UWV for taking a personal stand against making Bristol city a safe and friendly place to ride a bicycle! Your single-handed actions should be celebrated! We hope that all other cyclists heading along this road -and there are clearly many of a weekday morning- will recognise that you are important and give way appropriately.