Kate Alison Wrigley - Killed Sept 21, Ashley Road

When these photos were taken in October, flags and flowers marked where another Bristolian was killed walking across a road  - Ashley Hill -on the border between St Werburgh's and Montpelier. She was killed by someone driving a silver BMW -no further details are public at this point.


There is not even a traffic island on this stretch of road. There's one further up, but not a zebra crossing, even though a lot of schoolkids use it.

Here, although it says "20 mph", is a busy and often fast road. Cars heading up the hill are acellerating up something which, by virtue of the walls on either side "feels fast". Certain if you are on a bike, it feels safer to go on the old ashley road, parallel to this.

Kate lived on Milverton Gardens -you can see how pedestrian friendly that is.
If you live here, there is nowhere you can get to without crossing this road or walking all the way down the hill. 


On our last visit, the same cars were parked in the same places. They must be "their" bits of pavement.

Because this is just within the 20mph zone, the anti-20mph people will cite this as an example of how 20 mph zones don't work. Sadly, in this instance -it wasn't enough.

Cycling City: pavements and 20 mph zones

Milverton Gardens, off Ashley Hill. Jon R's constituency. Do you think these voters will be supportive of the cycle city plans? we suspect not.

On the far side of the road, there's not much pavement, and someone must have bashed the (defunct) sign. Will the council pay for the damage? we suspect not. On this side, the ford focus CV05WVC has managed to get its entire bodywork off road, so it will be safe from damage provided nobody is walking nearby. This is why we want to ban pushchairs from our pavements unless the parents have third party insurance.

Fortunately, there is no bike parking to take away space from motorists, which as Councillor Gollop points out, is a key reason for the Cycling City program's failure.

What they have done, though, is dropped the speed limit to 20 mph. The goal here, "supposedly" was to make it safer for pedestrians and cyclists. The ABD oppose it because, they claim that it will force drivers to look at their speedometers all the time. This is a bogus argument, because the same rule would apply to 30 and 70 limits, yet they don't complain about that. It's also bogus because the ABD don't realise that busy people are too busy texting to look up at road, let alone the speedo.

No, the real issue with 20 mph zones is this: it slows down people in a hurry just as much as if there was a bicycle in front. It may be designed to make people on the bicycle feel safer, but even there are only one or two bicycles an hour going up or down this road, it slows everyone down all the time, so imposing external costs on the entire city. It may not be explicitly removing road space, but it is removing fast road space, which is the real problem

One or two people are bold enough to fight back. As our van was up on the pavement we caught one who is best appreciated in the sound of this video.



You can hear the motorbike engine revving up as they go past the slow-moving cars, cars forced to slow down by anti-car speed limits. You can also hear the 4x4 revving its diesel engine as it slowly accelerates out of the 20 mph zone, as the 30 mph sign is in sight. And you know the rule of speed signs: if you can see a faster one in the distance you can speed up to it. It's not clear this car is doing over 20, it may just be working overhard in a low gear. This is a steepish hill.

We thought this was one of those videos was going be something we could resell to the Daily Mail "how a 20mph zone forced this motorbike into a head on collision with a 4x4", and so provide a compelling argument against more 20 mph zones in the city. But the motorbike eventually noticed the vehicle coming up the hill and pulled in.

20mph zone: an affront to car drivers

It was bad enough when some of our road tax was diverted to bicycles, but at least bike lanes are meant to keep bicycles out of our way. Then some troublemaker came up with the idea of 20mph roads, so every road would be a bike lane. Excuse us? "road", "street". Not bike lane.

Portsmouth was a challenge but after a bit of behind-the-scenes work with the council we got all the main roads, all the through roads, all the important ones kept at 30. That offered a number of benefits:

• We could still sound our horn at bikes in the way, so discouraging bicycles. People in a hurry can sprint through the town on the main roads
• We get more reward for spending so much money on big-engined 4x4s. Well, you need to if you want something that big to accelerate well.
• Its easier to get out of speeding tickets if the town is all broken up into 20 and 30 mph zones, as you can claim confusion.
  
• The extra cost of signage reduces the size of the area that gets rolled out,
  

We were pretty chuffed when the Portsmouth review came out, pointing out that adding 20mph signs to back roads had had no tangible benefit. That was the whole point! That was why we put them there!

Unfortunately, some people in the council -and that Jon Rogers has to get a lot of the blame here- read it completely differently, concluding that for 20 mph zones to work, it has to cover the entire area. Yes, he is correct, but that assumes that you want 20 mph zones to work.

We, the important people, don't live in inner Bristol because its dirty, noisy and full of traffic and poor people walking and cycling around. We live in nice parts of S. Gloucestershire or North Somerset and drive in precisely because we can do that instead. Of course the people who live in the inner city want these 20 mph zones, but that's their fault for living there. Our little 21st century suburban enclave has a 20 mph limit too, so that people can drive into their garages carefully. If the people in Southville, Easton and St Andrews want to live in streets like that, they can come out and join us!

Instead in Bristol, this main thoroughfare, Ashley Road will be given a 20 mph limit. That will increase the transit time from Stokes Croft to the M32; it will add an extra two minutes on the commute time to and from the North Fringe from residents of Clifton, Cotham and Redland.

This is not a residential road, it is a direct link between the M32 and other parts of the city. It is so that we important people who don't live in the city can drive to our important jobs, so that delivery vans essential to the UK economy can do their routes.

Here's Ashley Hill. No houses alongside here, a nice road to put your foot down when you get past those ridiculous traffic lights at the bottom. But not now, oh no. Now we will have to pootle.

The worse part is that it knifes the Portsmouth scheme in the back. The amount of under-the-table funding we in the motor industry had to pass on to the relevant people of power was justified given it set a precedent for the rest of Britain - a scheme that let us talk about road safety but without doing anything to force us to slow down.

Now this. A precedent for the rest of the city. How can main roads like Gloucester and Whiteladies stay at 30 mph now? How can useful school/commute rat-runs like Pembroke and Cotham Roads not get their 20 mph limits. Which, if enforced to 30mph, is still 10 mph lower than today.

Worse than the city though: the country. Instead of traffic engineers going to Portsmouth to see what to do, they will come here, and take the same approach home with them. This is a chilling precedent.

We are shocked.

We are equally shocked that not one so-called mainstream media outlet has asked us for our opinion on the matter. Why do campaigns like Speed Safe, run as a hobby by one person and a web site that has barely mastered the <blink> tag get all the quotes in the national papers? Why does Bob Bull from the local Association of British Drivers get his letters in the Evening Post despite the fact their web site looks like something badly designed in 1996 and they only have eight members in the city? The press should be coming to us as the mouthpiece of the motorist, instead of these amateur organisations that cannot be taken seriously. The fact that they have not offends us almost as much as the 20 mph zones themselves.

Making Bristol more pedestrian friendly

It is pedestrians who are meant to get priority in road/junction designs. Not cars, not cyclists, not FirstBus. Yet they normally come out worst. A bit of pavement narrowed in St Pauls for an extra car lane; pavement elsewhere covered in bike parking stands for the bikes. And then there are all the cars half way up the pavement.

So its nice to report something different: the emergence of extra seats at the tops of hills.

Here on the climb up from St Werburgh's

And here on Brandon Steep, the road south of Brandon Hill.

These sofas will help people gradually take up walking up hill, by providing places to rest, and so make Bristol a better place to walk round.