Now, here at Bristol Traffic, none of us do Twitter.
It's not our thing, so we leave that to others like @ipayroadtax to point out how cyclists continuously get in our way, without contributing to the costs of our roads.
More importantly, we don't do twitter because we know how it can be used to persecute us.
Take this example: here's an innocent tweet from a motorist (@andythomas365), sitting waiting for the lights to change just north of Stokes Croft:
Nothing wrong with this, you might think, except some clever clog spotted it and has now alerted the Police to the use of a mobile device to take photos whilst driving...
"was this the famous Bristol Traffic Van? It drove out of Ashley Road after the light changed to block the traffic heading north to Cheltenham Road. Many of the drivers on Stokes Croft were somewhat unhappy about this, as the junction was already blocked and the driver ended up even stopping cars heading south from getting through"
No not us. It says Lloyds Pharmacy prescription delivery on the side, while ours clearly says "pornography delivery"
In amongst the various ePetitions for making parking outside someone's house illegal, and for the many cyclist ones, making cyclist pay for the road, we are the only organisation to campaign for pedestrians to be better equipped for our cities. Cutting and pasting from someone else's proposal, we have one of our own.
Other road users have to pass tests to prove they are competent to operate a vehicle on the public highway. Pedestrians however are at the most risk and from any age they can walk around without any training, they are often wearing ipods and flout the rules of the roads e.g not stopping at traffic lights and crossing the road. I propose that all pedestrians must undertake training and be insured before riding on the road to protect themselves and others. They should wear hi-viz clothing and have helmets for their own safety
Some people will think we are taking the piss or something but not so: it's for their own safety.
Look at this scene from the Stokes Croft/Ashley Road junction.
A pedestrian crossing the road nearly gets hit by a taxi waiting for the lights to change in the middle of their road -past the ASL and not blocking it, we note. This taxi that manages to turn in front of the oncoming traffic by putting their foot down as soon as the lights go red & orange -and were it not for the pedestrian, would be on their way safely sprinting down the 20mph road to east Bristol.
Look at that pedestrian
Dark clothing, hard to spot: no hi-viz anywhere
No helmet.
No insurance/tax disk.
Probably no third party liability for damage caused to the front of cars.
Moving really slowly.
The taxi driver narrowly manages to avoid running them over as he accelerates down Ashley Road, and has to sound his horn to make them move faster. The tax-dodger seems a bit upset by this.
We are impressed. Every day that one of the team members has been down to Cheltenham Road this week, there's been a vehicle or two outside Tesco. What was once one of the showcase "cycle city" and "Greater Bristol Bus Network" routes has been returned to the tax paying driver -and as vans and lorries pay more road tax, they deserve to use it first.
"Slug" sends a couple of Pics from 09:15 on Friday 17 June showing a security van outside tesco,
And right outside the credit union, another lorry, MX07GJV
As slug says " It can be very dangerous for a cyclist to cycle in the cycle lane because it is to the left of traffic turning left. So the lorry driver out of concern for the potential danger that inexperienced cyclists are putting themselves in, decided to park on the double yellow lines ... ignoring the no unloading sign.
Behind the vehicle you can see all the way to the security van that is also parked on the cycle lane -and in between the lane is completely empty! Mission accomplished! no cyclists Left Hooked at Ashley junction this morning.
Interestingly, we have a different video of the same stretch of road from someone else taken about ten minutes later. This video is interesting because it is from the perspective of one of the tax-dodgers, someone who is trying to get across the city "after 9am because the roads are quieter." See that? These people have deliberately chosen to commute outside "the rush hour" because they prefer it. But that reduction in road traffic creates an illusion of safety -and encourages more of such behaviour.
At 0:03 there's another cyclist on Freemantle Road -heading towards the university or Clifton, then our underemployed camera-enabled tax-avoider descends Nugent Hill, an option forbidden to cars, especially since they put that island in at the bottom to stop right turns, a feature few motorists have managed to deal with. Our troublemaker negotiates that island by abusing the contraflow bike lane on Arley Hill, then flips into the left lane to undertake the stationary traffic to wait for a green light.
While waiting we see important people in cars and taxis, some public transport users, and unimportant pedestrians, and another cyclist at 1:58 crossing over to the contraflow. Because The A38 here, it could unify or divide the city. The council wanted to make it a showcase for the cycle city program, encouraging people from Bishopston (out of town; to the left) to head into the city centre, down this very road!
That is something we need to stop, which is why we are grateful for Tesco and its support. Because as well as unifying the cyclists, it could divide them. It and Muller road are the two roads that anyone cycling around north Bristol has to encounter, and if we can only roll back any pro-cycling "enhancements" there, then we can discourage anyone not just from cycling on these main roads, but even get across them.
That is why it is so essential to fight them on the streets, and why the Tesco delivery process is helping transform this road, and hence the whole of north Bristol.
At 2:14 you can see the bicycle head in to town. Although they think they have a lane to themselves, at 2:22 you can see their mistake -the security van has moved on since 09:15, but another delivery van has taken its place. Then at 2:34, a car half on the pavement, half on the bike lane. That bike lane is considered unsafe anyway, which is why they and the next lorry are blocking it. What's changed since the photos earlier is that the lorry seems to be deciding to pull out now; it's flipped its indicators on. The tax dodger goes past, and at 2:47 you can see another paveparked van; a 2:49 a similar car. All it takes is one or two vehicles doing this, all the time, every day, and people will be discouraged not just from commuting along this road by bicycle, but across it.
At 3:04 our troublemaker does a U-turn and heads out of town, showing that the bike lane there is in its usual state: short stay parking for shop customers and staff. This bike lane has been reclaimed!
At 3:36, they are now waiting to turn right towards montpelier, where you can see that the row of vehicles blocking the left lane do actually turn it into a bikes-only lane, albeit because nobody actually wants to turn left. Anyone turning left will have to swing over from the right hand lane, which might be a surprise to anyone cycling down it, of which we can see a couple at 3:50.
Then, finally, at 3:54, our errant tax dodger turns right, and then left into Montpelier, where they can feel slightly safer.
You see that? How the quiet bits of the city, Cotham and Montpelier, can be made cycling unfriendly not by adding any anti-cycling infrastructure, but by making it unpleasant to cross the roads between them. We don't need to ask the council for special anti-bicycle features, the way they do in Waltham Forest, all we need to do is park our delivery vans where we want on the roads the cyclist have to cross. It only takes a couple of HGVs to set an example, and once it's begun, every else will copy. What was a bike lane has become a parking area, not just to achieve the tactical goal: park outside our destination, but to achieve a strategic one: to knife the cycling city dream in the back.
Whose streets? Ours! For parking in whenever we want!
A few minutes at the Stokes Croft/Ashley Road junction shows it is quiet there.
A van sits half over the ASL, waiting for the lights to change
Two cyclists wait to turn right, above them the "Think Local" graffiti
When the lights change, someone drives into that ASL
The only hint of recent troubles is this sign on the pedestrian crossing.
Incidentally, some press coverage likened the area to "Camden". This is ridiculous: Camden is about the same size as NW Bristol, includes Hampstead and its Heath (local version: Clifton and the Downs), as well as places like Camden High Street, Gospel Oak, Kentish Town, even the University of London area.
A more accurate description of the area would be a main road that has some areas that went upmarket so long ago that most people have forgotten when they weren't (Kingsdown, Cotham), some areas that are undergoing more recent change (Montpelier) and some areas that have a long cultural identity based on ethnic diversity -but a culture that is itself at risk from ongoing gentrification. The street itself is a mix of classic local venues (Slix and Ritas) as well as new places (the Canteen), leading to diverse options of an evening. Even we, the 'traffic van drivers, like to walk around there, eating our cheese chips while skimpily-dressed working ladies ask us if we have a light.
For London-based reporters, an equivalent in Camden would be something like Edgware Road, with St Pauls being replaced by Notting Hill & Portobello Road; Kingsdown and Cotham by the Abbey Road area. Kilburn and Cricklewood would represent the areas further up the A38 -Gloucester Road and Horfield respectively, though these areas lack the ethnic diversity of NW London, where the older Irish and Caribbean areas have merged with the new immigrants to produce a dialect and culture all of their own.
We've not seen this AA van, EJ08XMD, before. Here it is, on Ashley Road. Or to be precise, Ashley Road's Pavement.
As you can see from the cars behind it, the driver could have parked further out, and still not inconvenienced passing cars. Well, probably not. But those AA van wing mirrors, they do stick out, they could brush against someone important driving past: a customer.
The people on the pavement -they don't count. The aren't revenue streams. Every person who chooses to not own a car is lost forever. Every household that opts to go from two cars to one: the revenue drops in half. And in today's troubled economy, customers are not things you don't want to lose.
That's why when Edmund King gets up on TV to speak up for us, "the motorist", he's really thinking of us "the customer", and our cars, "the revenue stream. We know this because whenever he's on telly, he's going on about outrageous fuel costs, road tax costs. Not once does he ever complain about the excessive cost of Car Insurance in this country, because that's the AA. Similarly, no discussion of how much full AA breakdown cover costs, or whether, given the improved reliability of motor vehicles since the days of British Leyland, whether it makes any sense. You can tell people who grew up in those days as they are the people who phone you when they get to some destination twenty miles away. "I got home", they say, as if we still worry that the Allegro or Mini will not get that far.
For that reason, we don't trust anything Edmund King says. The van drivers may be on our side, but management isn't.
The nice thing about Xmas is that with less people about, you can celebrate empty streets and a chance to park in ASLs unimpeded.
Here in the city centre, tainted by the council's plans to put in a Bus Rapid Transit halt. Soon, the anti-car city will stop us being able to drive into these ASLs on red lights, by banning cars entirely. Y874KHT have a right to be happy, a right to be proud: they are standing up to this oppression!
Nearby, at Stokes Croft, you can get your whole landrover into the ASL unimpeded. Some people may whine at this, but note how N805YND is stopped for the red light.
A bigger issue with both these vehicles is that they are eligible for replacement under the cash-for-old-cars scheme, yet they are still on the road? Do these people have no concern about the economic plight of car-importers?
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.
We've decided to copy the other local media outlets and MPs hoping to be reelected, by starting to campaign against red lights. As the evening post rightfully points out, cars, buses, bicycles and pedestrians just need to get on better. That means you, pedestrians -stop blocking our way.
Rather than go through various committees, we are going to advocate ignoring red lights completely. Here's a start on Stokes Croft, as viewed from Ashley Road. You can see from the cars in the sprint-finish when the lights on the croft change, and then it all goes quiet as pedestrians get their 20 seconds.
You can hear an ambulance coming, which forces drivers to give way. What to do? Pull forwards into the junction? You could be blocking it. So S57HBW solves the problem by turning off the road, going over the green man.
Notice how some of the pedestrians were not looking around while they crossed on the green man; many had hoods on, others umbrellas. After the car has crossed, someone runs across -talking on a phone. That's dangerous; if she'd been hit she'd have been another "pedestrian on the phone" statistic. If troublemakers like Crap Cycling in Waltham Forest can go on about car drivers on the phone, we should be able to denounce pedestrians walking dangerously.
That's the kind of give and take we need: they give us the right to turn while they have the green man, and we take it.
While looking for an empty bit of bike lane to pull in and get a snack from Ritas, Slix or other nearby establishment, we saw this group of cyclists loitering on the junction of Stokes Croft and Ashley Road.
Should we praise them for their Bristol Traffic Approved hi-viz tops, condemn them for their lack of helmets, or merely report them to the police for loitering suspiciously, possibly planning to cross when the pedestrian light went green?
Time for a closer look. And there we we were shocked. Jon Rogers, local councillor and cabinet member for transport, Ed Plowden, transport department minion, Steve Kinsella -lead of the Bristol Cycling Campaign, and his bouncer Martin Tweddell, looking for any potential assassins from the Association of British Drivers.
We've been feeling fairly upbeat about Jon this week, since our post on the anti-cycling measures in St Philips, was graced with a comment by him, one in which he promised that future signs would be protected from cyclists by cyclist-dismount signs:
I will check out why "cyclist dismount" signs weren't included. I can only apologise.
I am also not sure why cars couldn't have been allowed to use the pedestrian/cycle lane themselves when there is a loss of a main carriageway lane. It does look wide enough, but I don't know what the access is like.
I have asked officers to clarify the situation.
This looked like "a man we could do business with", to quote M. Thatcher on Gorbachev. Yet what do we now see? The same man promising to make this junction safer for cyclists.
We were very demoralised until we set our lipreader to work out what Ed Plowden is saying to a glum-looking Steve Kinsella. He's telling Steve that the junction works fine and nothing needs to be done. "There has been one recorded cycle incident in 3 years on that
southbound stretch. During that time approximately 1,100 cyclists a day
cross the junction southbound, either to go down Stokes Croft or turn
left into Ashley Road." Accordingly, the risk is not as great as these subversives claim.
Reassured, we got back into our range rover and when over to Montpelier, where the breaking news is that the locals have stuck in their own in-street bike parking by the Thali Cafe.
Evening on the 'croft. now the line of deck chairs is full of a different shift of traffic engineers, all sporting their Bristol Traffic approved Hi-Viz tops, enjoying the evening sun with a faint hint of FirstBus diesel.
When asked "how did they get their cars onto the pavement without driving the wrong way down a one way road", they said "We have dispensation". Clearly doing a traffic survey not only allows you to park on pavements -seen that before- but drive a car down a one way street, all for the sake of the experiment. This must be a very powerful dispensation.
What could be so powerful as to give the cars HD02OVG and X636FWP the ability to drive and park where they like? For that is a power that everyone in Bristol would love to have.
Only one thing has that power: Hi-Viz tops. Admit it -if they weren't in the shiny yellow, they wouldn't be people in positions of authority, they wouldn't have respect from the population. This is why everyone should embrace the yellow tops -they are the first step to achieving power and influence in this city.
A week after someone ends up under a lorry here, a day after coverage on the local BBC news, and we have the council survey team out in force on Stokes Croft. There they are on the deck chairs behind the (shiny new) bike racks, just past the car up on the pavement by the double yellow lines. One of the big problems in any scientific measuring experiments are the effect of the observers on the behaviour of the system. In particle physics, the Heisenberg Problem surfaces -measuring something's mass slows it down; measuring something's velocity stops you weighing it. With humans, it is often the Hawthorn Effect: the act of being monitored changes people's behaviour. Either way: the observers get in the way. For this survey, the risk is that the survey cars will impinge on the flow of traffic, so altering the number, placement and velocity of the vehicles. The survey team have anticipated this, and yet still managed to park their survey cars as close as they can to their deck chairs, by driving both their vehicles V127LEU and GK57YZS the wrong way down the Nine Tree Hill one-way section. They have not approached Stokes Croft at all, not even before the experiment began. This leaves road unmodified; the bike lanes in Stokes Croft in their "raw" state, unobstructed by any more vehicles than normal.
Tax-dodging cyclists reading this blog may wish to save and print out a copy of the survey team and vehicles contraflowing the road and nipping up on the pavement. That way, when they are stopped by the police for illegally mimicing the same operation, they can declare that they are part of the Bristol Traffic survey team, and merely following the same scientific rigour when approaching the Stoke's Croft junction: to observe without interfering.
One of our many reporters was on Stokes Croft to catch the aftermath of this weeks's second bike/lorry incident, this one with a skip lorry turning left over a bike (which may have been going straight on).
The reporter "S" says:
I was heading out on stokes croft, had turned right and was in picton street when the incident happened, so didnt see it. I did see that the vehicle in the front of the left turn lane was the orange truck involved. I think there may have been a bike in the ASL, but my memory is vague as I do that route too often. If I am correct, that bike was somebody else anyway.
The lorry was turning left from cheltenham road and the arches, but as it wasn't moving I could catch the green light first and turn into ashley road, then left into picton street, where I was busy feeling smug that I had cleared the junction so easily today. Suddenly there is really load screaming, that doesn't stop. Everyone nearby starts rushing up, saying whats happened?, looking around.
There's a woman on the floor screaming, not much blood. A PCSO runs up and starts to look after her, and calls for support. The nearby shop brings out a blanket and everyone comfort the cyclist until the paramedics and then the ambulance turn up. I'm not giving you any photos of her -the lorry driver is the man in orange to the left of the photo.
The ambulances came fast
(ed: 6-minutes from the first photo to the one with two ambulances)
The ambulance took her off, there was some suspicion of a broken leg/ankle. The bike is toast. By comparison, the cyclist seemed fairly uninjured
There we have it then, three bike/lorry collisions in a week -one on Park Row, one outside the Evening Post, this one. We all hope that everyone involved recovers rapidly. It's too early to assign blame here; the reality is that in any bike/lorry collision, its the person on the bike who loses. What is obvious, when you look back at the route they were using is that the bike lane leads people on bikes into exactly the wrong place -inside vehicles on the left turn lane. We've been here before, praising vehicles for blocking it out of safety concerns, and here you have evidence that it really is something to avoid. This is a pretty hazardous junction all round, its where the same reporter had their A&M Motor Road Rage incident, heading the other way.
Some truly advanced stopping by this white van shows how to beat pesky cyclists at the Sussex Place/Lower Ashley road junction. T735KDA claims its rightful space at the head of the queue, whilst barely infringing on the dedicated cycle stopping zone. Providing a dedicated safe area for bicycles to wait behind other traffic reduces the risk of accidents and keeps our city safe.
On my way to The Croft last night I stopped at the lights and heard sounds, so I got out the camera...
This is obviously a new highways experiment combining street musicians and Bath Ales delivery vehicles to force cyclists into the correct position for getting to Stokes Croft without being flattened by cars turning left into Ashley Road.
The van K329PHW parked in the bike lane just by the Stokes Croft/Ashley Road junction is making the junction safer for bicycles.
That lane is a way to die, as the left turn lane is to the right of it. If a bike turning left comes up the inside of a car which turns over it, death. If a bike tries to go straight on while a vehicle turns left, death. The safe option for this junction is to acquire and retain the entire left hand lane, then either turn left or go straight on (into the bike lane there), as appropriate. Yet the signage misleads bicycles and sets up the wrong expectation in cars
By parking where it has, the van makes it clear to cyclists that they should not be in that lane.
By taking up half the left turn lane, the van stops cars, buses and lorries from using that lane
Therefore, it the lane becomes a bike-only lane. This is exactly what you need to get out of this junction alive.
Some people may be worried that the sudden appearance of vehicle across a bike lane and half the traffic lane may catch traffic out. This is why another vehicle is parked half on bike lane, half on pavement further back along the lane. This will push the bike out into the traffic lane, which is where it belongs.
I have an allotment. Keeping the weeds under control requires prompt and regular attention: failure to deal with weeds can make them extremely hard to eradicate, and many spread rapidly, popping up suddenly in other places due to fast growing underground suckers. Vehicle parking seems to have parallels: This is Upper Cheltenham Place, Montpelier prior to 'pavement blockweed action day'
As detailed on this blog the aggressive attack on this 'pavement blockweed' led to weed free pavements (below)
....though neither bike nor pedestrian have adjusted to the new weedfree space and prefer to use the road. The pedestrian in particular seems to be wandering in a state of shock)
The purge lasted for around 10 days, then as always the green shoots reappeared...
and in three weeks it was fully regrown.
The local police unit are no doubt doing their best but the growing season is upon us: it takes a lot of resources to keep weeds under control. On neighbouring Ashley Road, patrolled by a different police unit, a lack of weeding over the winter has allowed the pavement blockweed to take hold in several places:
This weed W659VGC has been allowed to take root here for five days without any attempt to uproot it. Possibly this is the front garden of the flats next to the pelican crossing but fortunately hasn't yet spread onto the zigzags, which are there for the safety of those crossing the road. Similar weeds (Y403WDO) have taken root outside the Criterion pub -the manager clearly isn't a gardener.
We do not resource the police to do pavement weeding more than occasionally, which is why we also pay the council to do it. Bizarrely, some people have been complaining that Bristol City Council Parking Services are completely useless at dealing with this problem. Really? Seriously? Obviously, its the Allotment office we should be calling. So what are the options? The traditional approach is to spray with chemicals: Not for me, I prefer organic approaches, but in weeding terms that means dig it out. No thanks. I like the permaculture approach: call it a 'Pavement Blockweed Control Workshop'. All you have to do is provide free cider, decide to work with nature instead of against it and watch your friends cover it with fruit bushes, comfrey and nasturtiums. Sorted!
These signs may appear to be positioned just to catch out cyclists, but at least pedestrians won't hit them. More importantly, nobody should cycle down that bike lane. If you are turning left, occupy the full left-hand turn lane to avoid getting clipped at the corner. If you are going straight on, occupy that same lane, but go on straight. The bike lane is for cylists who are tired of life and wish to die on Stokes Croft rather than in a mountain biking adventure that would make for a popular youtube download. The sign forces people out early, and so keeps them alive.
Looking in the other direction, there's a van outside a building site occupying the northbound lane. A bit more of an inconvenience. But not much. Not really, as the roadworks bethind the lorry have already taken the lane away.
Given how further in to town these lanes are alway occupied by parked cars, we really have to question the value of these lanes. If it is for cyclist safety, then a 20 mph speed limit would actually work and allow people doing deliveries, roadworks, parking outside their shop, etc, to get on with it. All the bike lane does is create unrealistic, unsustainable expectations by both cyclists and drivers.
The new contributor "AW" has promised to send us more details on the secret driving and parking tips of Ashley Road and nearby areas. That's handy, as a lot of the searches that come to this site are looking for "secret parking bristol" or areas inside Bristol, and we don't want to disappoint them. Their first contribution is some secret out-the-door restaurant parking, as modelled by the BMW W612TRX At first glance, the large potted trees and similar street furniture may appear to be creating a pedestrian area. But they are really there to force pedestrians and bicycles in to the narrow bit right in front of the shops, leaving the widened pavement as a safe place to park a vehicle, safe from both pedestrians and passing cars. It is also well-lit at night, to help ensure your car remains secure.
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