Bristol's Parking Problem: 2016 style

There's an article up on the evening post saying for the first time in a generation, a majority of people are using either buses, bikes or walking to work instead.

This is fascinating. Too bad there is no coverage of the methodology of the survey other than it's "a survey of the commuting habits of thousands of city residents". How did they conduct this survey? A random call of Bristol numbers? Did it include s survey of the rural backwaters of S Gloucs and N Somerset? Did they look at the distances travelled to measure commute-miles, rather than just journeys? Did they ask firstbus and wessex bus lines for data, along with ANPR logs and phone company travel datasets? These are the things we need to know.

Anyway, in the list of people the paper called for an opinion, they reached for their Fax Machine contact list and got in touch with Hugh Bladon, Bristol's member of Association of British Drivers, who is always woken up from his sleep for a quote. Hugh Bladon actually lives in Weston Super Mare, a town which is still looking forward to 1974, so it's always surprising that they can contact Hugh for a quote. That's 20 miles away, a distance quoted by Google maps as 38 minutes drive from Stokes Croft on a Sunday evening. If Mr Bladon really does commute into Bristol every day, he'll be spending an hour each way, first on the A370, A38 or M5+ portway, then in stop-go mode through town to finally reach his destination. And for what? To live in Weston? That's the place where Banksy hosted his Dismaland Exhibition —and that's not a coincidence. Probably the main problem they had there was people walking round town laughing at stuff and taking selfies in front of the sea front, not realising they weren't actually at the exhibition yet. Why would anyone voluntary live there? If you have children, think of what it does to their minds? And, think what it does to your life, with 2+h a day sitting in a car.

Essentially, you can't trust the judgment of anyone who lives in WsM of their own volition. So the fact he is called on to be the ABD spokesman is a bit worrying for them: can't they find anyone else?

And what did he have to say? Rather than go for the survey methodology —always the first line of attack—, he accepted the findings and then blamed the council

I suppose people are getting fed up with travelling into the city. here is not enough provision for people to park, and I suppose more people are using the park and rides. I would also think George Ferguson and his 20mph scheme are frightening people who think they might get a ticket for doing maybe 23, or 24mph Those are the sort of things that drive away people.With the expanding economy, I would have thought more people would be in cars. It might also be there is not enough parking. Cycle lanes now take up a lot of tarmac where road parking used to be.

This is hilarious. We have never heard of anyone too scared to drive into the city in case they get a ticket(*).

Blaming the RPZ for removing a large amount of free-at-point-of-use commuter parking is something he should have gone for, but instead he imagines that people are scared of getting a ticket for driving at 24 mph. That's like saying people are scared of using the M4 in case they get a ticket for driving at 74 mph. They aren't, you don't.

As for the "Cycle lanes now take up a lot of tarmac where road parking used to be.". He must have a different cycle map than everyone else. The purpose of cycle lanes is to provide short stay parking. Even bus lanes are only closed to parking for 3 hours a day, 21 h a week.

But he does have a bit of a point: there isn't enough parking. Only what you want to park has changed.

Look at this video of a Bristol (not a WsM) resident cycling to the shops on a weekend.

1. There are no cycle lanes.
2. There are still people driving, not scared of getting a ticket for driving at 23 mph.
3. A lot of the people driving don't seem to looking where they are going.
4. None of the car parking space has been re-allocated to cycle lanes.
5. There are lots of bike racks,  about 8 opposite where Havana Coffee used to be, two over the road by that, then more by costa coffee and sainsbury's.
6. All of these bike racks are full.

There is nowhere to park a bicycle



Our reporter cycles down hill, avoids getting hit by the 4x4 turning from Aberdeen Road without looking, and the hatchback pulling out from the other side of the road without looking, carries on a bit, having to wait with a car in front for a driver taking their time to reverse park, then pulls over themselves to find somewhere to park. First rack: 12 bikes; no room for more. Visible across the road: two racks, four bikes, no space. They continue down to Whiteladies Road. On the far side of the road, there's space for about 30 bikes, looking fairly full. On this side of the road, 6 more racks, space for 12. Except, again, full.

One of the bikes there half of an abandoned frame, lying on its side. So the the tax dodger gets to do something nobody who drives in from WsM can get away with; they stick their own bike on top of it, lock up, and go to the shops. So we see approximately six cars worth of space allocated -all from the pavement, we note- for bicycles, which is a fraction of the space allocated to car parking. What we see in this video is, on Cotham Hill alone, 32 cars, two spaces free. For bikes, 48 spaces: all taken, albeit some with dissolving relics.

Is this an unusual event? Not really; the same situation was encountered on Gloucester road an hour earlier: one space outside Maplins, someone else queueing for it before the tax dodger had even unlocked. Because on that side of the road, there are about eight bike stands, from Zetland Road up. In contrast, if you wanted to drive there, there's more space.

Essentially, we are seeing a shift to cycling as a transport option in some parts of the city —and we aren't seeing the city adapting to that.  Hugh can complain about removal of parking, but there is significantly more space allocated to parking here than any other other form of transport.

This little stretch of Whiteladies Road is interesting, as it is what the ABD use in the videos calling the council "bonkers", showing how shops have suffered from a lack of parking and have had to shut down.



Well, our anecdata beats theirs, at least in terms of being up to date, and what it says is "Bristol does have a parking problem, but it's not just for cars".

(*) If you have —or know someone who has— stopped driving around out of fear of getting ticketed at 23 mph, please get in touch.

The "improved" Southwell Street Shared Space

There have -apparently- been complaints about this shared space. We don't know who, we don't see anything wrong with it except sometimes people get in the way of where we want to drive or park.

Whoever is complaining clearly must be walking or cycling, so not contributing to the national economy,

Yet they want things "improved". What improvements will help us? None.

Southwell street represents all that is inner Bristol. A road on a hill, old houses, the pavements turned into parking and barrier in the way to discourage people from walking and cycling. To attempt to change this is not just an attack on the hospital, it is attack on modern British society!

Censorship

There's an article up on the independent about the war on motorists.

Our fellow travellers, the Association of British Drivers added a comment:

Whilst we are pleased that the penny is beginning to drop with regard to taxation, it is sad that the author refers to driving as a "bad habit", when it is in fact merely a means of going about one's business.

We agree! Accordingly, we replied stating this fact:

We in the bristol traffic project agree. Some people view us driving our van around a narrow city, while texting one hand and sounding the horn at pedestrians and cyclists in our way as "antisocial", our activities, as the ABD says, "a bad habit". Yet as they say, this is the only way to get on with your business. When you are held up by pedestrians on a zebra crossing, of course you have to sound your horn. When you are held up behind a cyclist, of course you have to text ahead to your destination to warn them you'll be late. Yet still this anti-motorist country, with its zebra crossings, its traffic lights and its double yellow lines persecutes us.

And what's happened? Our comment has been "flagged for review" and it is no longer on the site. It has been censored by an online press that cannot accept the truth!

update: we posted asking why praising the ABD for being the voice of van driver is being suppressed and the ABD replied

the Independent is just trying to ensure comments are reasonable and well balanced. Whilst comments like those you made may have been acceptable during the last decade, the country has moved on to more reasoned debate.

That's good. We thought somebody had felt we were taking the piss. That happens all the time.

Kingdown RPZ and the school run

The government still pushes out its lie that the war on motorists is over. How can that be while the cost of oil is so high -and the exchange rate with the dollar so bad? The only way to end this war is for the price of oil to come down, which could done by  revaluing the pound -regardless of its consequences to industry or the economy. After all, that's what Thatcher and friends did in the 1980s, back when they were on our side.


Yet not only are Cameron and his cronies in London secretly cycling round, laughing as they pedal past petrol station, here in Bristol, the libdem allies in the coalition are making it harder for commuters to drive to work, by not providing enough free parking -and taking it away from the park-and-walk zone nearby. Kingsdown was ideal for this, not just because it was somewhere where your car would probably still be there in the evening, mostly unscraped, but if you drove in from the western end of town, you could void the anti-car features of "the triangle" and "park row".

Now, one interesting consequence of the RPZ zone is up here at the western end of Cotham Road, looking at Cotham School.

This area here is going to be mixed resident and pay to park - with 15 minutes free parking. This is actually going to make school dropoff easier, especially for people within the zone, who will also have the ability to park near their home after doing the dropoff. Until now, nobody in Kingsdown could drive their kids 500m to Colstons, Cotham, St Peter and Paul or St Michael's schools, because some commuter would steal their space while they were gone. Not now. With space at both ends, the school run just got easier by car than by walking.

It's also easier than cycling, on account of the hills. Here we see a couple of cyclists who have struggled their way up the hill, in the cold. Do they look happy? Not to us.

They are just getting on with their suffering while a whole new short-stay parking area awaits us, the important people.

We'll keep an eye on this area to see how it pans out.

It's only once the university students are back that we'll see the full consequences.

One thing we are worried about is the BRI physio department at the end of the road, because its paveparking area (yellow lined) is now a paveparking area in a resident parking zone. Will the pavement by the dropped kerb at the mini roundabout no longer be a staff parking area? This we will watch.

A dream of the past

There's a lot of fuss going about Council plans to do things to "The centre", namely stop vehicles other than buses, taxis or bicycles getting to and from Baldwin Street.

Obviously, some people are against this, such as Robert Bull, presumably the Bob Bull of the Bristol and Somerset branch of the Association of British Drivers. Bob proposes an attractive roundabout with an attractive pedestrian crossing:

Cars need access east/west also from the south ie Baldwin street, perhaps a large traffic light controlled roundabout with attractive central area for pedestrians, wait a minute thats how it used to be

Revert to a roundabout with some attractive high level walkways for pedestrians, job done.

This is missing the point. There are no roundabouts so attractive that families pop down there for a quick picnic, nobody says "It's a sunny saturday, lets' go down to the Bearpit or the Lawrence Hill roundabout and have some sandwiches there while the kids play with a ball". There are no high-level walkways in the city that pedestrians find attractive. Nobody thinks "I will take my dog for a walk over the M32 pedestrian walkways as its more attractive than the bits of the downs that aren't used as zoo parking".

These commentators don't realise this as they do find the M32 and roundabouts attractive. These are the people who take their family on holiday up the M6, not to enjoy the lake district, but to enjoy the view from the Lancaster service station, the one with the restaurant overlooking the motorway. They do this in their beige Austin Allegro, while wearing drivers gloves and a special driving cap.

You see, those of us who have to get round the city know that bus lanes are hint, like no parking and no-entry signs. Important people can ignore them. We do! Because of that, while making more of the centre bus, taxi and bicycle only irritates us, it is only mildly inconvenient.

By pining for the old days of the roundabout, these people are fighting not just a losing battle, but an irrelevant one. And in doing so, they forget what the council really stole from us: the dual carriageway through Queen's Square to Redcliffe.

Who remembers the old days, when this was a busy, useful, dual carriageway joining up Templemeads and its flyover with the Centre? Always in use, always popular. And then one day it went away. For some years the road remained, in the park, but now even that is covered over.

We believe that the dual carriageway is still hidden under this grass, and that removing it and the parkland would return a valuable missing link to the inner city.

We don't care about bus-only signs, but the loss of a dual carriageway through heart of our city has left it crippled. Empty. Dead. Bring back what they stole from us!

Product Placement: R.P. Glass of Bristol

It's notable that our denunciation of the 20 mph zones came out on November 17 -it was 24 hours after we broke the news that the Evening Post discovered the news.

As you may recall, we also complained that the so-called mainstream press would be seeking quotes from such organisations as the Association of British Drivers, and not us, Bristol's premier pro-car news organisation.

When will they realise: the ABD do not represent Bristol Drivers!

Look what they say about this proposal:

"It's difficult for drivers to stay at 20mph in modern cars, you have to keep it in third gear and keep your eyes on the speedometer. You could be skittling over pedestrians at 20mph that you would have seen if you were going 30mph.

It could make the situation worse."

See that? The ABD are worrying about the safety of pedestrians. When did we, the city's drivers care about that? We want them banned from the streets along with their bus using and cycling friends. There shouldn't be any pedestrians out there for us to worry about.

But what really hurts us is this claim that having to keep an eye on the speedo will cause drivers to take their eyes of the road. This shows us, sadly, how out of touch Captain Mainwaring and the rest of the ABD folk are. They may go out for "quick jaunts" in their beige Austin Allegros, taking care to top up the windscreen and radiator water levels, and wearing both driving gloves and a flat cap, but the rest of us have moved on. Driving round town is not about watching where you are going: it is about phoning ahead to your destination complaining that you will be late because there is another bastard cyclist in the way. You don't look down to see the speedo, you look up from the phone where you are trying to compose a text message.

These people have just lost touch. Pity. We could have made a great team.

Now, if you are going to use "safety" as a reason to argue for 30mph limits -you really need some good arguments that are up to date with modern driving techniques. For this end, we have co-opted the white van of R.P. Glass, on their way up Shaldon Road to Kellaway Building Supplies.

First, an apology not just for the sound but the placement of the camera, our unwitting cyclist is still trying to adjust it to get the "light" to work. If only only they knew.

As you can see, the cyclist is pootling up a hill at 10-15 mph, the van is coming up at 30+. As it passes the cyclist, it has its left turn indicator on, indicating it is about to swerve in front of the bicycle and enter the building supplies site.

The only way this operation can be accomplished safely, for the van to clear the bicycle, is at speeds of 30 mph or greater: proper speeds. At 20 mph the van isn't going to go fast enough to get past the cyclist, it's going to end up having to pull in right over the cyclist. Which will then be the fault of this cyclist, who is clearly guilty of not following Transport for London's Cycle/Lorry safety guidelines; guidelines which tell bicycles not to get on the left of left-turning lorries. But it will also be the fault of all those cycling campaigners who pushed for lower limits. Yet who will get the blame? That's right, van drivers like the one driving R.P. Glass of Bristol on Tuesday November 23.

Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Systems

This is the A4174 Ring Road heading from Emerson's Green to the M32. It is a weekday evening, so even the high-occupancy traffic lane is full of single occupant vehicles not moving.

Campaigners for the removal of the 2+ lane during the morning rush hour dream of this exact same situation on their morning drive in.

This jam is pretty predicable; morning and evening: traffic jam here. There is no cause other than traffic volumes on the ring road, caused by M32 congestion, caused by an inability of vehicles to get off the M32 at Muller Road, St Pauls and the city centre, which is caused by buses and bicycles taking up space, and the excessive number of pedestrian crossings, according to our strategic partners the Association of British Drivers.

The ABD have recently flagged up a new concern, that the EU is building a new in-car spy network -CVIS . For those of us building city-wide vehicle spy networks, this is news, as EU funding would be very handy. This led us to the CVIS home page, and a recent workshop on intelligent roads. At this point we feel we must disappoint our ABD fellow-travellers with the bad news that this is not an attempt by central government to track everyone's movement. That can already be done by monitoring mobile phone movements across cell quadrants; no need to force upgrade-every car, as it covers old vehicles and pedestrians. No, this is actually an attempt by the car manufacturers to render the entire current fleet of vehicles technically obsolete.

A key problem with today's vehicles is that they last too long -hence the German and UK old car scrappage scheme -people just aren't buying new cars at a rate that sustains the EU car industry any more, and there is a limit to what can be done on the mechanical engineering side of car design and the appearance of cars to make them obsolete faster. By adopting a high-tech interior, from MP3 and SatNav to DVD players to children, you can introduce an obsolescence rate driven by the lifetime of technologies, not engine longevity. The CVSI scheme takes that idea and raises it, by having the in-car computing communicate with peers (warn vehicles nearby of ABS-hard braking, ice conditions, crashes), and with roadside infrastructure.

The best summary of the work is New Transport Paradigms of the 21st century. Ignoring the fact that new Transport Paradigms of the late 21st century are likely to be a horse and cart and a sailing ship, it's an interesting read. On P28, for example, a key feature of the system will be that it will tell you that you can drive down a bus lane. In Bristol, we do not need to wait the rollout of an EU-wide car-to-car communication infrastructure to do that.

From a datacentre-state, the CVIS infrastructure isn't that interesting. We can already track vehicle movements, so the only issue here is that the city is trying to provide data back to the cars, such as where there is a parking space, then reverse parking for you. But how do you prevent non-CVIS vehicle owners from ignoring your rights and stealing that space first?

The other amusing entry is from the French Autoroute Operators, which on page 17discusses their objectives: profit

Factors of success of cooperative traffic management

1. New actors in traffic management (automotive industry, telecom industry, equipment and content providers,…) work with road operators.
2. The business model recognizes the economic value all along the chain of the information production.
3. To give evidence that each driver need on board reliable traffic information and pay for that as he does for tyres, energy or airbag.

This is pretty profound. It implies that the road operators view the road safety data -traffic information- that they collect as their property, and only something that should be shared with the cars if the drivers are prepared to pay for it.

This is not a police state, no, its just another source of revenue for the road operators and the car manufacturers.

Footway Closed

There is a new activist group forming/reforming to push for pedestrian rights in the city, Living Streets

Hi, we are mailing you as you are listed as a supporter of Living Streets in the Bristol Area.

We are going to rebuild the group in Bristol: this is much needed. Transport dominates the agenda locally and all forms of transport except walking seem to have strong lobbyists.

* The bus network is receiving long term attention and investment through the 'Greater Bristol Bus Network'

* FOSBR and others have successfully won improvements to local rail

* Cyclists are no longer just a 'loud and articulate minority', but an organised and highly effective loud and articulate minority, who have won millions of funding through cycling city

* Even the ludicrous 'Association of British Drivers' has a regular media presence

Who is speaking out locally for pedestrians? No-one, well not in a co-ordinated way.

This is odd, given that we are all pedestrians to some extent. We can see with our own eyes and through blogs like Bristol Traffic, Southville Parking, On the Level and Green Bristol blog that pedestrians are increasingly marginalised.

Current issues include:

· There are unacceptable delays to pedestrians using the light controlled crossings at the new road arrangements at Bond St and Cabot Circus.

· Changes are planned to Blackboy Hill which will include replacing zebra crossings with light controlled ones, to favour traffic and delay pedestrians.

· Pavements are blocked by vehicles in the inner city for days on end as the owners know there is no enforcement.

We think it will be relatively easy to get a better deal for pedestrians and are asking you if you want to help. The door is part open: the new transport executive Jon Rogers states that they will be improving enforcement of parking regulations, supports 20mph limits in the city and is committed to an open style of government. We will not only keep him to these promises but ensure pedestrians are properly represented in all road proposals.

This is an interesting idea, though sadly inconvenient for the rest of us. Take, for example, these roadworks on Cotham Brow, primary foot route from Gloucester Road to the university and Clifton. The pavement is closed for roadworks, pedestrians expected to cross the road.

Where another set of roadworks ensure that there is no safe route on that side either.

This level of anti-pedestrian activity is not an accident -it is done this way to ensure that no cars are held up. If this Living Streets group had their way, these roadworks would have required the road to be shut down, returning it the quiet and peaceful lane it was last summer -and so preventing anyone from commuting through this route. Commuters bring money into the city! Shoppers spend cash in the city! Pedestrians take up valuable space that can not only be used to park cars, it can be used to house mobile phone masts and electricity substations. These are effective uses of pavements. Not this walking thing.

Anyway, the announcement continues

The plan
At the moment we want only an expression of interest - ' yes, count me in'. Please respond to this e-mail if you’d like to be kept informed about the activities of Living Streets’ Bristol branch.

We will have the minimum of bureaucracy and will not flood you with emails, promise.
Please let us have your comments on what the problems are where you live, and ideas for tackling them. In two weeks we will mail all those interested with a summary and an invitation to draw up a strategy.

You can find the national Living Streets strategy here

We look forward to hearing from you!

Steve Meek
livingstreetsbristol at gmail dot com
Coordinator
Living Streets Bristol Branch

So there you have it. Either a militant pedestrian group to push for pedestrian rights, allies with Association of British Drivers in the war against bicycles, or an attempt by the cycling campaigners to create a mock dissent group, like an Eastern Bloc trades union group. At this point in time, it's to early to tell which.

How bus lanes slow down traffic

Our strategic partners, the Association of British Drivers, have a special dislike of Bus Lanes. They make some valid points. One of their criticisms, for example, is that they make buses more popular, hence more people get on them, hence the bus gets slower. That is an important issue, for which all existing bus passengers must thank the ABD for looking after their needs by fighting bus lanes.

Another criticism is that they slow down traffic by creating congestion, forcing two lanes of traffic into one. That's a bit simplistic, as Amdahl's Law implies that the bottleneck is always the single lane stretches: you have to make everything dual carriageway. Still, the idea merits investigation, on the showcase A38 route, down at the Arches.

Here we can see that they are in fact of so little value, even the buses do not use them.
The problem is that solid lane markings mean that car drivers cannot use them. The double yellow lines mean that law-abiding car drivers cannot park in them.

This means that only drivers like that of L794FWO who refuse to recognise double yellow lines park in them. which renders it useless to buses and taxis, and is of no value to anyone wishing to ignore the restrictions and drive down it. Yet it is still of no value for anyone wishing to park legally.

Clearly the solution to this is to downgrade it from a bus lane to a car parking lane, so that anyone can park there. That way, it will have some value at least. Right now, with even the buses blocked out of it, it is a waste of valuable road space.

We are very grateful for the ABD drawing our attention to this problem, and encourage every grateful bus user to contribute to this forward-thinking organisation by purchasing one of their recommended driving CDs.

Idiot comments

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.

The Watchman has arrived

When discussing what looked like a bus lane camera, James Barlow, author of Bristol's second best web site, noted that it was a watchman. More research was called for.

The watchman series of cameras include ANPR, 3G data modem, high-resolution video camera and a local hard disk drive capable of storing number plates (2 million, they say), and video shorts. If you are speeding, they actually get a video. They can also do bus-lane violation checking, which may worry the Peugeot 307 seen doing exactly that. To verify that a car shouldn't be in there it is not enough to say "is it a car"; you need to check it isn't a taxi or minicab. The Association of British Drivers have a list of proposed allowed vehicles, including lifeboat crews. Before sending a ticket to the '307 driver, the council will have to verify that the drivers/passengers were not on a lifeboat callout, on their way to Bristol docks.

The Watchman is not designed for simple speed-traps; it is a monitoring tool. It looks like it may be able to measure traffic numbers and all vehicle speeds, which could be used for datamining. As it is not currently part of the national ANPR network used to monitor and log all motorway traffic "for homeland security", this may be data we could get hold of.

The camera comes with software that sends polite notes warning drivers of their behaviour; warning notes. Their purpose is to remind without penalising. If you get a ticket, you have to pay, the insurance company ups their charges, and you may get disqualified. If you get a polite note, you can ignore it, unless eventually you start to get tickets.

Will it work? The device itself can find out. Start by monitoring peak traffic speeds before the notes begin being sent out, and their registration numbers. Then start sending notes out, and see if peak speeding speeds drop -or if the previously noted vehicles get seen repeatedly. Again, this could be a simple datamining exercise.

The sales brochure implies the cameras can be set to look for specific vehicles; download a number in and the camera will send an alert out when a specific car is seen. With a hard disk, you've got room to store a lot of numbers to search through.

Security wise, the over-sturdy mounting point is probably designed to resist a truck driving into them and getting away. You can still drive a truck into them, but it will leave noticeable damage on your vehicle. The manufacturers are proud of their security measures, though they also give away the windows software needed to connect to the cameras. The attack points for this devices are no longer the yellow box, they are the network. The camera will have a mobile phone number and a password to guess; the computers used to access it will have to stay up to date with Windows monthly OS patches or they become a target in their own right. That's the problem with networked applications: you think your device has just discovered the Internet, but in reality, the Internet has just discovered your device.

Dangerous Crossing

The cotham hill/Abbotsford road junction is very popular with shoppers, hence the dedicated one-hour-only shopping areas on one side of the road. Of course, if you want to go to a shop on the other side of the road, they are no, you have to improvise, as the minivan GU04HUH appears to be doing.

Given the traffic volume, it is worrying to see a pedestrian using a phone while crossing the road, as they are clearly not paying attention to what is happening around them.

Can she not see how dangerous it is? How cars turning left into this road would have to swerve round the parked car FG08KGU without warning. Pedestrians like this need to go on a safe-walking course before they should be allowed onto our streets. This could be one of the campaign points of the Association of British Drivers: make all pedestrians pay a walking tax proportional to the number of miles they walk a year. Only if pedestrians pay for the upkeep of the roads should they be allowed to get in the way of tax-paying cars.

Insensitive Bike Parking

Here, in front of Christchurch School, clifton, there is a bike parked on the pavement.

any child that made it safely back onto the pavement after navigating the delivery van unloading something for one of the houses and parked in the "School Keep Clear" zone would find their way blocked by this bicycle. No wonder the Evening Post and Association of British Drivers blame bicycles for causing so much of Bristol's traffic problems.

Spoof web site: Association of British Drivers

Although this web site is a datamining project to build a statistically valid dataset on vehicle activities in our city, some people seem to think it is some kind of spoof. Not us

If you want to see a spoof site, go to the Association of British Drivers, who only this week have announced that they are going to organise a meeting in Almondsbury (North of Bristol -you'd need to drive there) to complain that Bristol is Anti-Car. One of their complaints is that Cabot Circus is anti-car! That's right, the changes made to the junctions to allow an extra 2500 parking spaces is somehow anti-motorist.

This organisation is not only better at understanding what causes congestion -its the bike and bus lanes- but they actually believe to be better global warming scientists than the entire weather pattern and paelometeorology community, and that it is entirely a big conspiracy. Presumably one by bristol council. A good example here is their Anti Bus lane page, which argues that bus lanes are wrong because people will use buses more, so creating ticketing delays and making journeys worse for public transport travellers.

With such campaigning organisations, there is no need for the Bristol Cycling Campaign to do anything satirical. We just watch.