The high streets are in trouble, and there is little that can be done.
The government has proposed making it easier to change retail outlets from one use to another without so much paperwork -something the Costa Coffee outlet in Whiteladies road has done pre-emptively.
Another area was improved parking, which the whiteladies showcase bus route promises -by converting whiteladies road to 1h short stay parking during the day. Which shows how naive the government high street survey was -where do they expect the staff to park now that there is no long stay parking in front of the shop?
What Whiteladies road does have is an overflowing bike parking area, which gets in the way of pedestrians.
It also fails to recognise the benefit to the high street were it converted into retail advertising space
Cycling City Bristol has been a success, as we all know, so now's the time to sell your car if you still have one.
Last summer, as the cycle scheme was just coming to a formal close, small adverts could be seen in Bristol, testing the water and gauging the reaction to the apparent increase in cycle use. In order to keep a low profile, pop-up vehicles like CT04FMP would park up on the grass between Eastgate Road and Muller Road. Waiting patiently for a newly converted cyclist who might sell their old car to them.
Recently, however, the adverts have become larger.
They are still located out of the way of motorists, though, as they can often be seen on the double yellows in Stokes Croft. EJ55RCY illustrates their concern not to use up valuable parking spaces for those that still own cars.
Which makes us wonder whether, with the bigger presence, the cars4cash unit is:
A) doing well in acquiring cars for cash
B) aiming to get bigger cars for cash
or
C) a front for the squatting fraternity in the Emporium or Free Shop.
After all, there's plenty of space for a few mattresses in the back of that lorry. And a few bikes, too.
We wish to thank the Danish subversives at Copenhagenize.com for moving on from showing pretty Danish women on bicycles to showing pretty american women in cars, even if they do seem to be looking rather affectionately at the bollard-headed tax-dodger. with a slogan like "Stop Pedaling, Start Driving" you can see that their message is quite simple: grow up. You are no longer a five year old. Get a car.
We love the GM web site too, especially where it shows a pedestrian getting soaked by a passing GM SUV. It's fantastic. Not only does it show that wonderful feeling you get when you swerve into a puddle just to soak the tax-dodging pedestrians, the contrast between pedestrian and vehicle size makes it clear the real message: buy a big 4x4 or you will get run over by one. That said, GMC Sierras suck now that even in the US you pay $3.50 for a (US) Gallon). Even if you are only paying 55p a litre, if your barge does 12 MPG your cost/mile is way higher than, say ,a VW Golf 1.4T, and we not only know which is more fun, we know what depreciates faster. Not the Golf.
If there is one complaint about the advert it is this: there is nowhere near the University of Bristol to park, not now the area is all resident parking. We even hear rumours that Cotham will go the same way. What does that leave? It leaves the University of the West of England with its 20+ designated car parks as Bristol's premier university for important people.
On, one more thing: the US had to step in to save it from bankruptcy in 2008, and the US and Canadian governments own have 43% of the company's shares. This is not just a company, this is the US government.
Over in Temple Quarter there's a big purple wooden fence up with some marketing blurb, including a photo of someone on bike in hi-viz who is "building the future in Bristol"
Where is Temple Quarter. Next to station, where the cyclists dismount stretch of a sustrans route begins.
In the other direction, there's a sign saying "cyclists should dismount for their own safety", specifically, if they don't, they may hit the barriers put to make cyclists dismount for their own safety.
One commuter deftly negotiates the safety feature. One that presumably creates a pedestrian/cycle conflict too.
People might think the area picks on cyclists, and hence note the complete inconsistency between the marketing and reality, but that's unfair.
They pick on all round things, be they cylindrical or spherical.
Now: the competition. What is behind the big purple fence?
I am very inspire from your blog, i love your simple and clean post for getting information about Bristol zoo. overall your blog and content is superb.
As stated in our comment policy on spam postings, " Such attempts SHALL result in one or more postings in which we MAY be rude or we MAY make fun of you". In accordance with our policy, we opt to be rude.
How can you call yourself a zoo when you don't believe in evolution? It'd be like a geology museum that thought the earth began a hundred thousand years ago and yet had to come up with explanations for sandstone that denied that they were historic deserts, that the limestone that your zoo stands on isn't the relics of Cretaceous-era coral reefs.
Why do you hide the fact that many of your animals are on loan from a circus. If you believe your religious claims are valid, then surely you ought to come out and be proud of the fact that the creatures -to which humans have divine rights over- are mistreated. Why feel guilt?
How can the local councils justify sending their schoolkids to a zoo whose belief system is at odds with modern rational thinking about the nature of the universe and life -and how to treat animals?
If you do wish to deny the whole notion of modern rational thought then why are you using computers whose existence is based on experimental science working at the nanometre scale? At least people like the Amish and the Mennonites are willing to live consistently within their world view.
We don't know what you were thinking paying some tier-3 loser to post such badly written comments on our site about your zoo, but this is the response.
If you feel that our claims that your beliefs about evolution are utterly mistaken, please file a lawsuit.
If you do want to pick on a bit of science, go for the low level physics stuff, the bits nobody really understands. Not evolution. Seriously.
Thank you for your participation in the Bristol Traffic project. It was not expected, and no doubt, neither was this response.
There's a lot of fuss in the press about a new paper arguing that Satellite Navigation, in the form of the US GPS system, ex-Soviet GLONASS and the EU Galileo system are all vulnerable to failure, and that the country now depends on them working.
This doesn't surprise us, because we made this claim back in 2001, in our article "BMW - No Joy: GPS is a SPOF", using Volpe 2001 as the reference paper. We pointed out that BMW made naive or misleading comments about the reliability of GPS, helping to retain an unrealistic expectation of the failure modes of a tool designed to prosecute a conventional war or the opening exchange of a nuclear war rather than help you get home in time.
We've never mentioned it, but we did get a reply from the ASA on the 29 of November 2009 -a paper one- in which they stated that:
We were the only people that complained.
It was meant to be metaphor, and therefore the fact that the failure of GPS could cause widescale destruction to the national transportation infrastructure was unimportant.
This is somewhat disappointing. The Bristol Traffic project was seventeen months ahead of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and yet the ASA dismissed us because we were the only people in the country who knew what they were talking about. The fact that we were the only organisation to complain is a sign that we are more competent than the rest of the national media, not some daft troublemakers.
A quick hello to Van Hire Bristol who added a comment to our co-existence post, the one that showed a white van turning into Cotham Hill without bothering to look, because the driver knew that mostly only people on bicycles come down the hill, and any pedestrians crossing at that point are students and therefore liabilities on the state.
Whoever it was that posted the comment made some well informed comments showing their mastery of the the English language, and their complete failure to read the bit where we warn that anyone posting adverts will be publicly criticised, along with ignorance of the nofollow attribute hence the fact that adding comments to a high page-ranked site like ours does nothing for their own ranking:
Hey I like the post very much. This is really a very good post with very good information.
Thanks
a lot for sharing the post very much. You know what I like the title of
video very much which insist to watch the video to me. :)
Keep sharing such stuffs.
Well, we don't care whether you like the title or whether you think it's a really good post with very good information, and we shall keep sharing such stuffs without being asked. What we want to know is this? Is the white van
YB06BDO one of the Van Hire Bristol fleet?
Furthermore, if we rent a van from you:
Does it automatically come with pre-insurance cover for running over bicycles and pedestrians?
Will you be upset if comes back with scratches and blood on the bumper?
Does it have a tow bar to provide audible feedback when reverse parking (crunching sounds)
What driver training will you provide showing us how to drive and park such vehicles, especially while texting?
Regarding the comment itself, a few more questions
Did you actually pay somebody to write such an atrociously badly written comment?
What did they promise in return?
Did they read the warning notice before they commented, and did they understand the consequences of their action, namely that they consented to have your site discussed in a posting all of its own?
How does it feel to have a web page making fun of you (as promised in the comment form) come back ahead of you in searches?
Given that some people may view the video as portraying a mildly negative opinion of white vans in the city -despite our own view that they are an essential part of the national economy- do you feel that it is wise to have your brand associated with such incidents?
Did you ask the person who promised to boost your page to read the pages first? Will you request this in future?
Have you asked your outsourced SEO agent about nofollow tags and the fact
that they mean that none of our google pagerank (5) transfers to yours
(0) -and that the comments have at best no effect whatsoever?
Are you aware that because Google own blogspot, there is the possibility that at worst they will use the URLs in postings downgraded as spam to actually penalise such sites in their search engine?
Have you a way of asking for your money back?
Remember, the Bristol Traffic project is a data gathering and datamining organisation that views Google and Yahoo! as strategic partners; Game Theory and Graph Theory key branches of mathematics to model traffic movement around cities. We do not yet see any value in strategic or tactical alliances with Van Hire Bristol, whoever you are, so will be forced to block any further attempts to add comments to our site.
Thank you for your participation in the Bristol Traffic Project.
I work with a company that sells bollards and we would LOVE to get a link to their site from Bristol Traffic. Especially as these inventions feature on your blog quite often, such as your History of Bollards Is this something you're open to?
If you could let me know either way that would be much appreciated.
Thanks,
James
And
Hi again, my email address is james AT becomeknown DOT co DOT uk :)
While you were posting your two comments, you would have had time to notice the text immediately above which stated "No adverts, no spam, no requests for cross linking. We will only be rude.".
As this text warned, we not only decline your request, we do so publicly, with your email address put up online with the email address converted into an Internet Engineering Task Force RFC2822-compatible form, RFC2822 replacing, as you may recall, RFC822, so ensuring that spam-bots will find your address and get in touch with your inbox, giving you opportunities to buy discounted counterfeit pharmaceuticals as well as Nigerian 419-spam about how this-week's toppled middle-eastern leader's bank funds could be yours for a small investment up front.
Now, perhaps our rules were not clear enough, so we have reviewed the text and the IETF RFC2119 standards on the correct use of MUST, MUST NOT, SHALL, SHOULD, SHALL NOT, SHOULD NOT, MAY and MAY NOT.
Here then is our new statement in which we state our expectations from commenters and the response that faces comments that violate the rules:
Commenters MUST NOT post spam, MUST NOT post requests for cross linking and MUST NOT post up requests for paid links. Such attempts SHALL result in one or more postings in which we MAY be rude or we MAY make fun of you and MAY include your public email address. Furthermore, we MAY report you to google for attempts at paid linking, who SHALL then punish your site.
This statement follows RFC2119 rules regarding the use of MUST, MUST NOT, MAY, and SHALL and MUST be treated as normative.
We hope that this clarifies things, and that you do not attempt to add any more comments, as if you continue to do so we SHALL go to the relevant google form and report you and your customer.
Thank you for your participation in the Bristol Traffic Project.
This sounds quite fun, we thought we could join in with the van. We swing past the racers, cut in and park on the uphill side of the road to do a delivery gambit, helping to get our main line of business -discreet delivery of sex toys to all parts of the city- a bit of publicity. But it will not be.
From 18:00, Park Street will be closed to traffic!
This is so wrong. Not just because it denies Saturday night stretch-limos the opportunity to take stag parties up from the centre to whiteladies road, it gives the racers and the audience an unrealistic view of what Park Street is like without motor vehicles. Which then gives the audience an unrealistic view of what the city would be like without motor vehicles. Unrealistic, because all of us, from the parents driving their kids to school, to our white vans, discreetly delivering inflatable people everywhere from stokes croft to southville, keep the city alive. Have you ever tried to get a child to school on foot? Crossing the roads? Have you ever tried to get a matched set of official Sky TV presenter inflatable dolls (with the official presenters voices- its like having them on your own sofa) across the city on the back of a fixed wheel bike? It just doesn't work.
What
galls us is, as "O.M." points out, Red Bull were on our side. Their
energy drink not only lets you stay up night drinking vodka until you
have to drive home, if you only get three hours sleep a couple of cans
of the stuff will wake you up and have you so buzzing that you'll be
driving right behind the vehicle in front, flashing your lights, be they
cyclist, commuter or even then avon and somerset police. There they
are, doing the 20mph or 30 mph speed limit, and there you are, jittering
so much you can barely text ahead to the office complaining that a
police car doing 30 is holding you back and you'll need another five
Jeremy Clarkson models as now he's the last remaining real man left on
TV the fact that he looks like a run-over badger doesn't put the punters
off.
Red Bull, whose side are you on? You sponsor a formula 1 team, the cars above, yet now you seem to think encouraging cycling will keep your business going. This fills us with resentment and fear
Also, and this is for the cyclists taking part:
We have given you Ninetree Hill. What more do you want?
We are aware that we are the highest ranked site when you search blogspot for alloy wheels, and therefore that a comment with some banal chat and back links to your own site would help your page rank. However, as well as using nofollow links to remove them from google's PageRank scores, we have a policy that says if you spam us with attempted to links, we only make fun of you. Therefore, please accept this posting as a gift, but note that the nofollow tag above renders your link worthless and all that you will get is more spam to your email address. Sorry.
There is no point trying to push alloy wheel services to our readers, despite our broad readership in Bristol, because (a) you have a Southampton postcode and are therefore unimportant, and (b) we don't think alloy wheels have a place in the city.
Every driver who has alloy wheels values their wheels. Not only does this prevent them doing operations in the city, it holds up other traffic. Takes this video of the bottom of St Michael's Hill from last month.
The car in front of us is waiting to turn slide into the left turn lane -which has a green light onto Park Row. But it cannot do that as the car in front of it values their wheels too much to scrape against the kerb or to commit more aggressively and get both wheels entirely on the pavement, and they still have a driver-side wingmirror to lose. The selfish decision of the first car to have alloy wheels not only slows them down, it slows down the rest of the city's traffic. And this is on a Sunday! Imagine how much congestion one selfish alloy-wheel owning outsider would cause on a busy weekday morning!
Drivers who value their vehicle's bodywork and paintwork are as much an inconvenience to us locals as pedestrians on zebra crossings and cyclists pootling along. You may not realise this as you live in the provinces and dream of day trips to Portsmouth where you can see three cars in a row, but we city folk know the harsh truth: from a game-theory perspective, alloy wheels place you at a disadvantage. They are easily damaged and, as they are a visible status symbol, everyone else sees that you value your car, therefore are more likely to give way on high conflict roads, such as here, the Horfield Road/St Michael's Hill junction.
Please do not bother posting any more spam advertisement comments, as we will only continue to criticise you for your naive lack of understanding of modern driving techniques and issues, as well as your complete ignorance of game theory and its application in city driving.
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.
SPOF: Single Point of Failure. The failure modes of GPS are pretty fascinating, which is why you cannot trust it to get you home alive, not unless you are in the US army and have access to the military GPS channels. Even then, you can't trust them past the opening salvo of a war that involves non-conventional armaments.
The Bristol Traffic Project is not anti-car, but we are anti unscientific approaches to the traffic issues of our city. Therefore it was with some sadness that one member of the team was forced to issue a complaint about a recent advert. For anyone else who fears that SatNav is not something that should be relied on, consider complaining to the Advertising Standards Authority. There is no need to
go to such detail, a more succint summary would be "If GPS is so reliable, how come come someone
nearly drove their BMW off a cliff last summer? (Apologies for the citation style, but it was needed for the ASA complaint form). Plain text only.
We have teamed up with central government to produce this new advertising campaign for the Bristol Traffic web site, one that makes it clear that anyone walking or cycling is a potential subversive who should be reported to the police.
Expect to see this being rolled out across the city centre soon. First location -the bottom of Arley Hill.
"Mr W" points us a lovely flickr photo of some people coming to Stokes Croft for a photoshoot Question is, what are they trying to photo? 1: The lovely painting in the background, ruined by an ugly car on the pavement in front of it 2: The fact that it's OK to park your car on the pavement in Stokes Croft Follow up issues to consider is if this is used in any advertising campaign, does the copyright holder of the artwork have any say in the matter, and are there any issues with parking illegally in the act of creating a car advert. Let's wait and see. I
We currently run a wide-open comments policy, because it makes things more entertaining. But every so often we get comments by naive idiots, today's being "Peacy Combson" commenting on Lockleaze.
I have visited your beautiful and stylish website..And I can suggest,
The style is default and as for the photos, they tend to get not just the exposure wrong but even the horizon, so are not considered beautiful or stylish. Compliments like this just raise suspicion
Lets exchange the links between our websites..
In the absence of a reason, let's not
I couldn't find contact page, that's why I'm writing here: My preferred link: idiot who doesnt read the blog before commenting Please put mine, and tell me your link(complete linking info), my e-mail is mceselko@gmail.com, I'll put it immediately...
Delete this comment afterwards...
Best Regards Peacy Combson
The site we are requested to link to is some US-centric car web site that is currently comparing the Porche Cayenne with the BMW X6. Given that our only criteria for comparing them would be which has to park more on the pavement or how best for a passing cyclist to take down their wing mirror without damaging their forearm, linking to this site is not possible;. instead we 've just left the email address up for the spam harvesters to find. Sorry -but those who live by spam deserve to drown in it.
Some random car-loans site has also just tried to link to us, but it wasn't even funny enough to deserve criticism. Straight in the bin instead. We consider these feeble attempts to get lisnks from our site to be a metric of success. We only link to local web sites, journalism sites like Crap Cycling and Walking in Waltham Forest, or spoof sites like the Association of British Drivers.
We do regularly accept suitably entertaining photographs of Bristol streets, ideally with matching commentary, but not necessarily. Ideas from elsewhere that we can adopt are also welcome. The contribution policy is documented.
To encourage the adoption of practical transport solutions in a congested and polluted city, FirstBus take advantage of the size of their buses and their ubiquity in the inner cities, by covering them in advertising designed to encourage citizens of the city to adopt clean, efficient and sustainable transport solutions.
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