After last week's shocking photographs of militant cyclists trying to reclaim their cycle paths, it was reassuring to see some of the city's van drivers striking back
Who is up on the bike paths of Abbeywood Today, making it clear what the North Fringe cycle paths are for? The white van FY04UYB
On the back, Adien, whose web site states their sustainability goals:
We will ensure that procedures and attitudes are in place to deliver an incident free working environment for our employees and those who come into contact with our operations.
We will endeavour to minimise the impact we have on the environment by use of sustainable material and processes.
Well, parking this far in ensures no driver-side wing mirrors will get clipped, so they pull that off, though the risk that a cyclist or push chair may try to get past on the other side -5 or 10 cm further in would have sorted that out.
As mentioned before, we are conducting an experiment to make sure that this area remains van friendly. "Trust, but verify", as they say.
South Gloucester Council have denied responsibility for enforcing the double yellow lines on this, so we checked to make sure that Filton police are on message, that they know the war on motorists has been lost. I think we can conclude from the fact that the Filton police hotline has an answering machine at the end of it that yes, some government changes have made their way to that part of the system.
We have won the war! Nobody will stand in our way!
Like we said, we don't suspect anyone associated with the
Bristol Cycling Campaign to have done this, as S Gloucs council has a
process for dealing with those people:
There is a monthly cycling forum, to which the activist cycle and the area's cycling advocate drives.
The cycling campaigners complain while the council staff nod and draw doodles on their notepads.
The campaigners' complaints get ignored.
The council staff drive home to their nice houses, laughing.
The cyclists pedal home in the rain, wondering what went wrong.
No, this was done by criminals out there, acting without control, without checks and balances, without morals.
Who could it be?
According to the anonymous supplier of the photographs it was the People's Cycling Front of South Gloucestershire
They are not to be confused with the South Gloucester Popular Cycling Front, who was shopping at the Sainsbury's superstore nearby at the time.
We are disappointed that such clearly dangerous people could get close to an MoD site without being arrested.
Have any other subversives been taking to the street in our fair city, harassing motorists, taxi and lorry drivers on their important missions, parents trying to get their children to school by car safely, street designers trying to improve the streets for all these people? Reporting of such outrages to the Bristol Traffic site are welcome, so we can document the fall of our city into lawlessness.
We've been watching the Egypt uprising in fear. Pedestrians, taking over the flyovers, pushing vans and arguing with tanks. They do not know their place.
We've also been reading Cities and Insurrections, which covers the problem of how to design cities to prevent popular uprisings in them from working. You want distribution and better routes for police/army control than for the troublemakers. That's why we recognise that the goal for Northern Ireland's ongoing work to force cyclists to wear helmets isn't for safety, it's to stop the subversives being so mobile. NI has always been the cutting edge of UK policing, so progress here cheers up.
It's also why we understand the strategic goal of the North Fringe: a place so anti-walking and anti-cycling that no ukcuts projectors will be out hassling the shops here, or protesting anything. But to make sure, we have to discourage those people who do walk and cycle round here -for the safety of the state.
Which is why we were horrified when some anonymous person emailed us these shocking photographs of militant cyclists adding their own reflective and hi-viz markings to the new bollards at the MOD abbeywood site, the ones that achieved national fame after someone cycled into them in the snow.
Now on a flash photo, you can see that it (and the newly added blue bicycle marking) is visible. One query: why doesn't that sign properly say bicycles keep left?
Looking the other way, you can see at least a bicycle going up and down has been painted on one side of the pavement, and it is segregated.
And turning 180 degrees we can see how much less visible the old bollards were.
What to say? Just because you don't think the bollards are safe, doesn't mean people should take actions in to your own hands like this.
Since the crash and the negative publicity, S Gloucs council have put the blue signs on. Now if anyone crashes in to it it's their own fault for being in the wrong part of the path, going to fast, or not paying attention.
Yet as these photographs show, some people, even up in the North Fringe -our part of the city, as you get a hint of from the vast MoD car park to the side of the photos- there are troublemakers out there trying to make cycle city facilities somewhere where cyclists actually welcome.
While obviously we don't use in trains and resent the fact that after privatisation the amount of our road tax spent on subsidising this form of transport has actually massively increased, we were at least pleased to see that the signage at the MOD side of the Abbeywood train station is aligned with our needs.
There is a faded bicycle under the barriers, not maintained as well as the no bicycles sign.
Interesting that it has a ring round the bicycle and Cyclists Dismount, does that mean they are required to get off their bicycles and then, well, just stand there or something?
There's another no bicycle sign to the lampost on the right, and one further up in the sky, in case inattentive cyclists were looking up there instead. This is the kind of cycle city signage we approve of -very Portsmouth.
Then S gloucs council waste the entire effort by having a sign up just outside showing people how to walk and cycle from the station.
Yesterday we mentioned that one problem with parking on the abbeywood cycle paths was not just the new bollards, it was harassment from cyclists. Here, sadly, we have an example.
This is V134DYC, a lorry minding its own business, parked on one of the Abbeywood cycle/pedestrian paths. By getting almost entirely on the path it is not interfering with any passing traffic.
Yet our cyclist reporter felt that there was some need to criticise the driver, to take a photograph of them, "for the database".
Fortunately, our lorry driver sees their gambit and raises it by pointing out that they too have a camera in their lorry, and the cyclist looked pretty silly -which, coming from a professional hi-viz person, are pretty harsh words.
We aren't convinced that the driver saying that Hitler used to disappear troublemakers like our cyclist report actually wins the argument.
Godwin's Law implies that whoever reverts to analogies with Germany's National Socialist government of 1934-1945 automatically loses the argument.
It's not clear that that government did persecute cyclists except when their religious or political beliefs were not aligned with that of the government.
It's not clear how this possibly incorrect bit of history deals with the problem that now there is nothing to stop cyclists taking videos and photographs of vehicles in their way and sticking it up online.
We sent our expendable cyclist up to Abbeywood again to see the other side of the MoD site/car park. Sadly, our fellow traveller, Kayla Maratty, would have been on her four week holiday, so if she's a UWE student, she wouldn't have got a chance to run this cyclist over.
Note how the cyclist swerves out of the cycle side before the first corner. After we took them into the MoD site where we got them to confess to being an enemy of the economy, we asked them about this. Apparently going round a blind corner on the wrong side of the path is stupid. Maybe, but S Gloucs has put the signs up, so follow it.
Further on, you can see the new bollards. Some now have coloured tape on, some reflectors. But it's moot. Their existence is now known and widely publicised. Nobody else is going to run into them, even in snow -unless the council moves them or adds some more -perhaps on that first corner?
Knowing of the existence of the feature, does our test subject obey the signs? Follow the approved lanes? No they don't! Instead they treat it as some kind of opportunity to go through them as if they were some kind of obstacle course, "practising singletrack manoeuvres at near-race-speed", they said, whatever that means. Such actions were wrong before the bollards went up, now that bollards are in, it should be a crime. And to think that the S Gloucs bollards actually encourage such action -that simply appals us.
Notice how we say S Gloucs bollards. We thought initially that these were MoD features, it being Ministry of Defence land and all (which is why cycle campaigner Terry Miller got detained by their site police for behaving suspiciously and taking photographs here last week). Yet as the video shows, the signs and bollards go on out of the site, right up to the A4174 Ring Road, one of the two proposed Ring Roads we actually got part of. That means it came from the council, presumably out of their cycling budget.
This is what introduces such a moral dilemma for us. It makes cyclists feel less welcome -good, and it doesn't take away any driving options -great. But is it enough? Apart from that one person who crashed into one, how many cyclists are going to give up their commute from this feature? And it stops us driving down the bike path here.
This is an ongoing topic and we will cover it more. Our experiment to see if anyone in S Gloucs is capable of reacting to reports of vehicles parked on the bike path is going well, so far, no reaction from anyone. But more research is needed.
Having looked at the bollards, we are not sure whether we support them. Not because they can injure cyclists, but because they prevent motor vehicle access to the bike paths. We paid for them, we should get to use them!
Here, for example, is a South Gloucester Council lorry S764THY making use of one of the Abbeywood bike paths to park their lorry somewhere while they do some work on a roundabout.
If you look at this area, the double yellow lines mean that the shared pedestrian/bike path is the only place anyone can park. Yet bollards and harassment by cyclists -more on this another day- mean that the council and tax-dodgers are, together, removing our parking options.
Experiment #2011-1: we are using this path as an experiment to see if the war on the motorist really is over in S Gloucs, by reporting vehicles here to the authorities ( parklegally@southglos.gov.uk ) and making sure that nothing happens. If anyone gets told off or ticketed: the war on motorists is not over.
So far, we are pleased to see that S Gloucs parking services are happy not to care about this path, with this reply twelve days after we reported the issue:
Thank you for highlighting this problem to our department, however our Civil Enforcement Officers are not able to deal with (UNNECESSARY OBSTRUCTIONS) under the current Legislation Traffic Management Act 2004 (TMA04), this offence still comes under Police Officers or Police Community Support Officers who only have the powers of Enforcement for this Offence.
I have also passed your complaint onto our street care department who are in charge of highways maintenance and asked them to investigate this issue and to please remove this vehicle from its obstructive position.
Hope you find this information helpful and should you notice any other vehicles parked illegally with in South Gloucestershire please don’t hesitate to contact our department.
We are now continuing our experiment on new vehicles to see if S Gloucs police are on our side or not. The fact that Filton police station appears to be manned only by an answering machine bodes well.
We've sent the team to the North Fringe for a few days, to see what the fuss is about regarding Abbeywood and Bollards. In order to cover this accurately, we have had to recruit someone on a bicycle, for which we apologise. If it makes the audience feel better, they think they are being paid to be a courier for paperwork. Normally we just pay them to carry old phone books around, as it slows them down, and about once a week they have to deliver high-strength home-grown Montpelier herbs, an action which would get them put away for 20-25 years if they were caught with them, a thought which always cheers us up when we send them out.
Returning to Abbeywood, some people may recall the fuss made last year when someone cycled into a bollard that S Gloucester council stuck in. These are white bollards with a white stripe, no hi-viz markings, and on a path that is only intermittently illuminated. Well, yes, a crash was inevitable. Yet we agree with some the comments made in the Evening Post and Daily Mail -while we sympathetic to the lecturer's injuries, they have only themselves to blame for being on a bicycle.
We actually saw some of the bollards going in, but didn't think it was interesting enough to cover. Now that we see it is, we can go through the back records and find the video.
Now that the bollards are here on the eastern side of the MoD land, we are disappointed to see that it does so little to discourage cycling. Instead our courier can travel down the bike path at speed, slow down for the road, where apparently off camera someone driving a car actually gives way to the bicycle, hinting this green paint is giving some mistaken impression about rights of way to MoD staff.
Last year, this path had a proper anti-bicycle gate, which the subversives used to ignore by going through the vegetation, forcing the MoD deployment of an anti-vegetation-cycling feature, before they went and removed it, eventually adding this new bollard.
The bollard does not stop people cycling to the North Fringe. The only way to prevent that would be to improve A4174 traffic by widening it and banning bicycles from the ring road, while downgrading any adjacent bike paths. We may have some good news there, in a week or two.
For now, this side of Abbey Wood does little to discourage cycling. We shall visit the other side, which was where the crash took place to see if it is any better.
Shocking footage of an entire family's collection of bicycles, up in the North Fringe, at a secret (as in "official secret protected by the official secrets act") location.
What's surprising is that they managed to get there, despite the efforts of S Gloucs council, who strategically positioned a lorry over the bike path to stop anyone who wasn't bold enough to cycle along a dual carriageway from getting to the bike racks.
As Bristol's Premier road traffic news outlet, we are saddened to bring some terrible news from the North Fringe, from MoD Abbey Wood. They are going to forbid anyone who lives within three miles of the site from driving in to work, by removing their right to park. They say it is due to excess parking pressure, but if you look at the parking area furthest from the entrance (i.e. the bit close to Lockleaze that requires you to walk afterwards), it's clear this isn't the case.
Therefore this entire plan is purely an anti-motorist conspiracy.
We received this memorandum by the "abbey wood motorists collective", who are trying to stand up for the British way of life, here in a government facility.
MoD staff demand car park action.
Following last year's car park overload fiasco when the nearly 8,000 MoD staff at Abbeywood where forced to park on the access road to nearby Hewlett Packard, the site management team have announced that from January 2011 they plan to tackle the shortage of car park spaces.
You'd have thought that the MoD plan to do the sensible thing - use their diminishing Defence budget wisely - and build new multi-storey car parks over the entire (currently open site) single storey car park hence doubling the available spaces... But no!
Apparently the MoD has instead decided to revoke the car passes of those who live within 3 miles of the site!
This has understandably caused outrage amongst staff. How on earth do the management think people are going to get to work? One member of staff said "Someone dared suggest I could walk to work, I mean WALK, 3 miles. The furthest I've ever walked is 300 yards. It would take me hours". It has been suggested that the idea might encourage staff to think about using other means of getting to work other than their cars. Someone even suggested that there is a perfectly good bus service in the local area, or that they could ride a bike. "What on earth where they thinking, buses are meant for common people. Ride a bike? You must be joking" said one MoD mandarin climbing into his chauffeur driven staff car.
If it is true, then it means that the MoD has joined the war against the motorist, just as the Department of Transport comes back onto our side.
Our coverage of cycling families endangering car paintwork created some feedback from one Tony John Cooke, who expressed some concern that some of our claims (helmetless cyclists are uninsured troublemakers) lacked proof. Tony, the fact that cyclists are threats to our city and its motors are Axioms; we don't need to prove it, it is self-evident. We -and the rest of the media- work forward on that axiom, just like most of mathematics works on Euclids set without worrying about whether or not parallel lines ever meet.
Our goal when we set up this project was simple:
Timely coverage of the city's real transport issues.
Project the motorist's point of view, not the watered down stuff that the Evening Post and Daily Mail pushes out.
To check we are meeting these goals we benchmark ourselves against the competitors and the cycling press. Tony -your very complaint re-inforces our conclusions that we are being strongly consistent with our messaging, so it cheers us up no end.
But is a complaint from one person enough? No, of course not. Which is where benchmarking ourselves against the mainstream press comes in:
We check that we are ahead of AA and RAC foundation thinking by looking for their press-releases reprinted unquestioningly by the BBC and other outlets.
We verify that we are consistent with the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph.
We verify that we are ahead of the local newspaper by reading it sometimes.
We compare our coverage with comments in the on-line press, to make sure we represent the real opinions of readers.
In particular, we keep an eye on our competitor, the Bristol Evening Post. For those readers out of the city, know that it is the city's premier daily newspaper, although we find that the South West Big Issue does tend to have more in depth coverage of economic and political issues. What the B.E.P. does have is a local news remit, though the reduction in staffing means that it is generally reduced to reprinting press announcements or criticising the council. Those press releases from Tesco, Bristol City Football Club and other major revenue sources are always welcome, but they do support some local pressure groups where their campaigns don't conflict with the needs of the supermarkets or BCFC.
On Thursday Sept 9, the coverage was on Snuff Mills and the proposals to replace the dirt track with a cycle path. This would be the continuation of the one which runs through Eastville Park, one we are aware of but haven't bothered to denounce.
Here a path runs along that bit of the Frome river which is not under the M32 flyover, providing somewhere for pedestrians and cyclists.
It looks like it might be a nice place to walk or cycle. But it doesn't really go
anywhere right now, not until a link to UWE has been sorted out.
Which is where the Snuff Mills connection comes into play. Now, as metric of how up to date we are - success metric #1 -, we covered this issue on 8 july 2009, when we expressed our concerned that the improvements may degrade from the wilderness experience of the park. That is a whole fourteen months before the Evening Post heard of it. This shows the advantage of our reporting tactic: getting out and about in the city, versus theirs: waiting for press releases from organisations like the Snuff Mills Action Group.
Now, this is where things get complicated. According to the Snuff Mills people:
we reached a compromise with Cycling City following a meeting on site a few weeks ago. They agreed a narrower path and other changes to the scheme, but then emailed us the following week to say this was no longer acceptable because of the needs of the 'disabled community'.
We don't know anything about that, but we do encourage readers to go to the Snuff Mills Group, look at the proposals, come to their own conclusion and contact the council. We suspect that even the cyclists may be despairing about the effort being put into creating bike/pedestrian conflict here, while inner city troublespots -like Stokes Croft- have been abandoned. There's an obvious reason for that, nobody wants to take on the motorist.
Anyway, returning to our benchmarking theme, we checked out the comments. Remember how we are campaining for a new dual carriageway to be built across purdown to provide a fast route from an expanded Lockleaze to the M32? Some of the green party people in the city think this is some kind of joke. Sorry, but if you look at the comments of the Snuff Mills article, you can see that we are merely slightly ahead of the mainstream press.
"I used to live in this part of town, and what that area really needs is a link road connecting Fishponds Road to Broom Hill, through Wickham Glen and Eastville Park. This would relieve the traffic around Blackberry Hill.
But will we, the law abiding, tax paying motorist get this perfectly reasonable request granted? No, of course not. We're not blathering cyclists.
James Carmichael, Highridge"
We see his point. The council is spending our tax money on paths, but no new roads have been added to our city for some time -despite the parkland being up for sale. We propose the DfT should buy the parkland and add the roads or city needs.
The fact that we came up with our vision, some weeks before the most vociferous of the Evening Post commentators proposed a new road through Eastville Park, shows that we really are setting the agenda in this city. We aren't just reporting on news months old, we aren't even following press releases or comments in news articles. No: we are laying out a vision for a new city, one with the ring-roads back.
There you have it. Our web site is upsetting cyclists and pedestrians enough for them to complain to us, we are years ahead of the B.E.P. in covering developments, and months ahead of their readers. The AA and RAC "think tanks" aren't even beginning to think at our rate, let alone on our agenda. We are in charge.
We close, then, with a video of what the completed bit of the Eastville Bike and pedestrian path is like. Look at it, and think how much lovelier it would be if you could use this as a ratrun alternative to Stapleton or Fishponds Roads?
Bristol Traffic: more than just a news site -creating the new city.
We loves Abbey Wood, S. Gloucs. Our part of the city. The council provides those off-street bike lanes which the cycle campaigners demand, missing the point that their purpose is to provide parking
Here it provides it for the car RV10LZF apparently associated with Western Power Distribution -whose vans are parked off-camera to the right of the photo below. Everyone is apparently working on some electricity substation issues behind the MoD site.
Parking over a bike/pedestrian path like this is not just about getting your car off the road, or away from the double yellows, it's about making a statement. It says I am important, you are not. Which is why we are very worried about some worrying emails we are are being forwarded from the MOD-land. Very worried indeed. More another day. Today though, we, the motorist, are in charge. First we give them their bike lanes, their pavements, to get them out the way, then we use them too. Lovely.
Drainage Services are busy up by the MOD Abbey Wood area in the North Fringe, keeping the drainage in a bit of S. Gloucs well drained.
Some people might think that it is somewhat antisocial blocking an entire bike/foot path when the dual carriageway alongside has almost no traffic, at least not until the tailspin housing estate sells some more houses.
But think about it. Badly drained bike paths force cyclists into the road, where they could interfere with us.
Furthermore, this particular path enables a combined bicycle and supermarket journey, in which the shopper cycles to the A4174 Sainsbury's and pushes both the bicycle and the shopping trolley home. This is not possible on on-road, vehicular cycling routes. These people should be grateful for getting such an open bit of pavement to share with pedestrians, even if we hate them on the other pavements.
Although we are clearly in the cars-not-students-on-bikes camp w.r.t the Abbey Wood and UWE bike paths, we are worried that those people trying to exercise their legal right to drive along the abbey wood path are entering dangerous ground.
You see this cyclist who is walking on the UWE path while holding a phone up to their ear? If they were a student then yes, sounding your horn as you clipped them with your wing mirror on a bike path to which you had inherited ancient access rights would be the right thing to do. But he's not in student clothes is he?
He's in full army uniform with cap and camouflaged rucksack, and that probably means he's spending a few months at abbey wood in between some posting in Iraq or Afghanistan -places where any perceived threat to the foot patrols is met by a fairly aggressive response.
Cut someone like this up in your car and he's going to use that phone to call in air support to deal with your mondeo, and as we are only 10 seconds flight from BAe Filton, a dispersal site for the UK airborne nuclear weapons fleet in the cuban missile crisis, that response could be pretty destructive.
We urge whoever it is who claims historical right to drive down the Abbey Wood bike lanes to show some sanity here, to show some restraint. The alternative is worse.
Remember how only a few weeks ago we wanted to turn the back bike path to abbeywood into a proper road. There may be some good news there.
First, note how the bike barriers are down.
The fence to stop cyclists dodging the barriers now looks lonely, the path put in by people dodging the fence may even recover.
The cyclists may be happy, but not all. Not Clive, whose email we picked up.
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Clive Date: Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 10:39 PM
Car access on MOD Abbey Wood Cycle path
I was amazed to see a car coming down the MOD Abbey Wood Cycle path (between the gated end of the lockleaze rugby grounds and the MOD gatehouse.
The Driver, Mr Blair, was quite upset that cyclists were impeding his 'Right of Way'. Mr. Blair apparently lives in the house at the top of the path and claims that the route past the MOD has been 'his' right-of-way for 300 years .
When I arrived at the scene, he was arguing with a student who he claimed was blocking his way. During his 'discourse', he caught a girl with his car door as she tried to get past. Not a happy chappie.
Now, he may indeed have some access right to his property via the cycle path ( I don't know, only S. Gloucester Cncl. can answer that) but does this mean he has vehicular access via this route?
If he does, than S. Gloucester should signpost the track to warn cyclists and pedestrians that it is a shared thoroughfare, as most people will not expect to find cars on the path. (travelling at the national speed limit)
How do I go about progressing this (from a safety perspective) to find out if Mr Blair is allowed to drive his car through this section of the cycle path, and if so, ensuring cyclists and pedestrians are aware of the danger.
This is interesting. It's why we put the maps up last week. First, let's assume that the Mr Blair is the person by the rugby grounds who has an interested in old vehicles, many of which without tax or insurance. Driving them on private roads is the only thing he can do.
The MoD roads on Abbey Wood are private, so if he has a historic right of way to get there then yes, he can drive down the bike path. That way he can drive his old cars without all the pesky government regulation, health and safety nonsense about seat belts and brakes working. Road tax, that stuff.
One funny thing though, which the maps raise. Does the right of way extend to access to the MoD roads, or does it go to the woods and hence to the HP site, which has been fenced off since the mid 1980s? Is his claim for 300 years access is right, by our estimate this would put them within 50 years of end of the English civil war, some time before the Jacobite rising in Scotland, and therefore possibly predate Britain coming into existence. As ancient as nine-tree hill.
If there really is car access on this path and to the MoD roads, then it shouldn't just be a luxury for one person. No, it should be something we can all enjoy: a new road between the A4174 Ring Road and Lockleaze, an alternative to the always congested, speed-camera enabled Filton Avenue.
More investigations -and maybe some experiments- are needed.
This is a before and after map series, full details of why to crop up later in the week.
First, the North Fringe, 1987. Congestion on the A4174, running through the middle of the photo: minimal. The roundabout centres on gridref ST6135787, apparently with trees on it. To south, a large blank space -the remains of some quarry or something. Crossing it, three power lines, one phone line, and a footpath from the sports grounds in the left side to some fields just E. of Splatts Abbey Wood, then roughly north. All of the area was under the control of Avon County Council; there are still some signs up in the area if you know where to look. In the S.E corner, just S. of Bonnington Walk, Sta (dis) remembers the existence of some station? Lockleaze Station? (no: Horfield Railway Station)
What is clear is this: No congestion on the ring road. No cycle lanes from the sports grounds to the ring road. Less traffic lights in the city. Not a coincidence.
Now, map two, printed in 1997, in the time the socialists were in power, and things were bleak.
The A4174 roundabout has moved to ST61607880, though not with the trees. South of it, the wasteland for motorbikers is now MoD abbey wood, with a moat on the NE side to eliminate the risk of anyone driving a truck full of explosives in, parking to the east and south-west and positioned to reduce the damage caused by anyone getting a car/truck full of explosives in there and blowing it up. Although the NI peace process was making progress, the tendency of the Provisional IRA to mark some kind of stalemate by blowing up prestigious targets on the mainland meant that these things were considered important. The disused station has been supplemented by the Abbey Wood railway station, which apparently has direct connections with Wales. The former Filton Junction station, north of the A4174, is now marked as Sta (dis) to indicate its new state.
South of the MoD facility, just north of where the Tailspin housing estate is still being built, a bike path. And what else has changed? Congestion. Is it any coincidence that there are traffic jams on the A4174 now that a bike path connects Lockleaze with the ring road, and that the new roundabout and the one by the M32 have traffic lights? We think not.
The final item of this note is the rights of way, the footpaths. These two maps imply that there was never any right to cycle through the rugby grounds, even the footpath doesn't go direct from Bonnington walk, but instead via Landseer Avenue. And here's the best bit: the right of way finishes by going through the MoD moat, through some of the building, and out the other side. We think pedestrians wanting to walk from Lockleaze to Sainsbury's should be made to walk this route, as it will reduce the number of them pressing the cross button on the pelican lights at the ring road.
Last week's focus on Abbeywood and the nearby area should have been enough to show cyclists they were not welcome in this part of the town, the car city. Yet shocking coverage comes to us of a cyclist in this very area, harassing a car driver on the A4174 ring-road for using a mobile phone. We will let the contributor, "A", speak for themselves:
One of the big advantages of driving a car is that it leaves your hands free for other things like reading some papers, or talking on your mobile. Or in this case both (steering can always be conducted using your knees). Never mind that talking on the phone might occasionally distract you from the actual job at hand (driving) causing you to collide with the odd pedestrian, cyclist or anyone else.
That's why we were so upset to see this video of an unknown cyclist accosting this poor employee of the very appropriately named HIT (Hospitality Industry Training) on the A4174 near Coldharbour Lane, Filton.
There he is trying to have a conversation on his phone, whilst looking through what looks like his appointment book when this cyclist has the cheek to ask him what his employer thinks of him driving using a phone. Just for the record again, that's Hospitality Industry Training Limited, www.hittraining.co.uk, tel 0800 093 5892, the vehicle a white Renault van, registration number AY09ZNP.
The driver with the phone doesn't shock us -what else can you do in the awful traffic jams there- but what shocks us is how the cyclist shows no shame at all. Not a bit. In fact, we suspect they are proud of what they did.
On the west side of the MOD site is this path. We don't know where it goes, as that would involve walking or cycling it. Presumably it comes out by the A4174 behind the ex-woolworths. It is marked as shared use, but as it is unused, perhaps it could be used for MOD parking instead.
To the left, there is a route to Lockleaze. But not for bicycles -despite this being marked in green on the cycling city map!
And look! when we went there, some teenager trying to cycle over. That is despite the money invested in a no-bicycle barrier!
These cyclists are selfish and dangerous. They should recognise that money spent adding no-bicycle barriers to cycling city routes shows that South Gloucester isn't on their site, and aspire to the dream we in the North Fringe live: to spend 45 minutes every evening stuck in the A4174 ring road in a high-performance car. It's not about the fastest or most cost effective form of transport, it's about visible displays of wealth and status. Cycling on back paths behind Lockleaze achieves none of this, and does not contribute to the national economy either.
Someone warned us about changes at Abbey Wood, with the famous "gated" bike path, the one where whoever designed the bike path wasn't in touch with whoever was designing the gates designed -during the 1990s- to stop an IRA-class of attack. The gate would prevent militant cyclists from attacking the car park, and while this may seem unlikely, it is folklore that on the day Michael Portillo and the Queen opened the facility, there was in fact a cycle police unit spotted fixing their puncture on this very bit of tarmac.
We drove over there and yes, someone had closed the gate, so pedestrian and bicycle access was now possible. This worried us, as it could imply that S. Gloucs cycling city money was actually being wasted on encouraging cycling, rather than forcing them out of our way on convenient rat runs.
We waited for a cyclist to come by, and rather adopt than our usual technique of setting a pitbull on them while shouting "It's OK, he just gets a bit scared by bicycles!" as our pet dog, Roadkill, savaged their lycra-clad legs, this time we filmed the tax dodger who could well be the first person ever to make use of this bike lane. That is, if you consider cyclists to be people.
Sadly for this particular government-funded tax dodger, because the gate was closed, he was unable to enter the Abbey Wood MoD facility, that being his place of employment. We left him there -pleased that by closing the access route to work, the cycle lane was still without any value whatsoever.
Since this path opening event on April 8, the gate has been reopened and the path has returned to its normal state. You cannot walk or cycle out of it, but if you could, you could get into work.
This is on the A4174 looking towards the Abbey Wood roundabout, behind that UWE and the M32. The right is a post-post-industrial landscape, such as a closed down Woolworth superstore.
The piece of tarmac with some fading red stripes in front of the camera is the bike lane. Yet predictably, the cyclist is in the pedestrian area.
One might think it is a bit odd to have a bus lane in the middle of a bike path, but this is part of the S. Gloucs integrated transport plan: bicycle and bus. More importantly, if the North Fringe commuters are to embrace cycling, the existing business plan of advertising agencies "adverts at junctions where cars get stuck" goes away; we drivers stuck in our cars are their target market. To deal with cyclists, it is not enough to have adverts where they can see them, the cyclist needs to spend time in front of the advert. Putting the advert precisely where they will run into it achieves this.
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