Chris Hutt: died, march 2010

Down at Zetland Road Last Month, we were comparing illnesses. Jon Rogers, has to nip down to the BRI with chest pains, one of our B.T reporters awakes to discover a paramedic in the room on account of an "incident" in their sleep, and Chris Hutt was considering an electric bicycle because of his newly developed Angina.

Sadly, it turns out that Chris's problem wasn't going to cause that much inconvenience. Jon Rogers sent an email out this morning breaking the news that Chris was found dead:

Terrible news

Chris Hutt was found dead yesterday.

Friday 26th February was the last time I saw him, when we were all together at Zetland Road.

John Grimshaw sent me this,

"Cycling has lost a doughty champion. He was also the best plumber in the west!

"I have lost a colleague of so many years, the best of route devisers and cycling companion, and a friend indeed.

"I know he was seen as a thorn in your side, but without his support I doubt that key cycle routes we now take for granted would have been built so well, or even at all.

"His last two messages concerned the ongoing threat to the railway path and the beautiful River Avon route to Hanham. Might you consider as a fitting tribute to this so dedicated Bristol Citizen, declaring the railway path inviolate and rebuilding the riverside path to a standard he would have enjoyed?"

As John says, there is already so much around Bristol that is the better for Chris's work and energy, and those two suggestions would add to his legacy. As far as I am concerned, the railway path is already inviolate, and the riverside path would be brilliant.

My last email to him said, "Aware that not heard from you for a week or so. Trust you are well and taking a well earned break!"

We will miss him.

Jon

Here are some of our photos from the Zetland Road visit; Chris is pointedly refusing to wear hi-viz or a helmet; his bike is the pink tourer chained to the railings.

Chris was not only prepared to argue the technical details of bike/pedestrian paths and crossings, he understood that a junction or stretch of bike lane is meaningless on his own -and that for Bristol to be a city you could live in without needing to drive, everything needed to join up, so you could walk or pedal around the city.

He helped found the Bristol Traffic site, as discussed in an email in May 2008:

I carry around a cheapo digital camera and use it to similar effect, although sometimes you've got to be quick. I've posted a few on my blog , but it would be good to have a site where we could all post such pics, something like "Bad driving in Bristol". It would be a public record which could be referred to the police and authorities

Obviously Chris missed the point, our site exists to praise our fellow drivers rather than criticise them, but we happily accepted his photos, and even have a couple in the pipeline. Chris did eventually come to see things our way, and so embrace our anti-cycling award process which he was unable to give to Jon Rogers:

While most known in recent years for his Green Bristol Blog and regular appearances on the Evening Post, where his role as Agent Provocateur to the E.P.'s usual stance was there to upset the readers, his key contribution to the city was -and will continue to be- the Bristol-Bath Railway Path. With John Grimshaw and others in the Cyclebag group, they built the Railway Path while nobody was looking. It was the West of England Partnership's plans to run BRT down this route that brought him back into the cycling activists world again, and ensured that the current generation of traffic planners came to fear his name. The R.P. not only gave East Bristol a better pedestrian/cyclist route than any other part of the city, it showed the country what a city could become.

He also organised some other rides, last year his Discover Bristol route took in the M32 underpasses, the Frome Valley and led to a lovely showdown between John Grimshaw and Chris regarding routing options.

We shall miss Chris, but we shall also remember him. Everyone who walks or cycles the Railway Path is benefiting from the work he and others put in to building that path, and it exists as a wonderful memorial to everyone who wanted to change our city, to make it a better place.

The Bristol Traffic Team.

Give it some heart!

As we said yesterday, it was unfair that bicycles could carry along the flooded A4 Portway at full "race speed" while cars had to slow down from 40 mph -with even that speed limit a recent crime against commuters coming in from Wales, Avonmouth and Portishead.

Yet again, an anti-car council fails to recognise the A4 portway is a premier commute route into the city.

We do think that bicycles should slow down, not just because there may be risk to them, but to share the suffering, we, the motorist, must endure.

For this reason we are grateful for the heart.fm car, RY07DMV, cunningly placed in the middle of the bike path "reporting on a live news story". The car in front belongs to Bristol Council and they parked to one side of the path and behind some signs, showing unnecessary sympathy to people who do not pay their fair share of tax in the city.

By parking widely, RY07DMV manages to remove visibility for inbound and outbound cyclists, increasing the risk of collision, and hence the chance of a live news story being bigger than "puddle on A4"

We say: Give it some heart!

Breaking news: we can confirm that a representative of the Bristol Traffic Project will be at the Cornubia Pub tonight, starting at 7:30 to 8 pm, to tell off the cyclists of the Bristol Cycling Campaign and drink some of the beers that the pub has to offer. Normally we would demand, indeed expect unquestioningly that our representative would drive there before downing 18 pints of Hidden Quest Beer and heading home, but apparently the DVLA have just revoked our representative's license for reasons they refuse to discuss, and they will be forced to walk. We understand this is not through choice, and forgive them, as long as they do not get in the way of any cars trying to get over zebra crossings. We believe that this is more evidence that the DVLA is anti-motorist. In the US, even when you have a license revoked for Driving While Intoxicated you are still allowed to drive to and from school and work, yet in the UK once a license is revoked you are not even permitted to pop out for a few pints of beer.

BRT still planned for the Railway Path? Have they forgotten?

While listening to the cycle campaigners whine about features to see which one we should award a prize to, we heard one of them complaining that apparently due to pressure from South Gloucestershire council, the Bristol-Bath Railway Path is still on the route map for Bus Rapid Transit.

Now, we in Bristol Traffic don't use the path, for obvious reasons: pedestrians and bicycle routes are not for us. Readers may suspect therefore, that we are in favour of this proposal. No we are not!

We  are opposed to any plans for BRT here because we remember the whole 2008 BRT-on-RP debacle.

Within a few months of  the proposal becoming public, cunningly slipped out in a survey of transport users arranged for a weekday when all cycling representatives were meant to be at a meeting in Oxford, a joint campaign between the people living along the path, and anyone else in the city who used it, got the council to change their minds. A success for them, but a disaster for us, the pro-car pressure groups.

1. It was only going to be for buses: no benefit unless buses got removed from other routes, yet they wanted to keep the existing bus lanes around.
2. We don't like bendy-buses as they are harder to overtake compared to double-deckers
3. We may not like the path because cyclists and pedestrians are always walking or cycling to and from it, but having buses go to and from it would be worse.
4. The economics are atrocious, and it will fall to us, the road-tax and petrol-tax payer to fund it. We have enough government and banking misjudgements to pay for, thank you very much, given we live in a country whose financial problems are somewhere between Greece and Portsmouth F.C.
5. It created the militant cycling and walking activist organisations we now have to deal with. Before: a few losers who would sit in a pub and complain about how traffic lights endanger them. After: many more losers who sit in a pub and smirk about how they get the council to fix traffic lights that endanger them.
6. Their protest blocked the city for a day. Yes, they protested on a Sunday, but you weren't driving a minicab, being blocked on Baldwin street and when you start shouting to the cyclists about MOTs and road tax, having hundreds of protesters argue back.
7. The Evening Post betrayed us. Day one, on our side "tough actions are needed". Soon, sob stories of walkers and cyclists on the path, from nature lovers, from other people standing in the way of progress. We can no longer trust them. Last week for example, a whole week's coverage of the parent school run and resident parking plans: no criticisms of cyclists, even in the comments. Even the B.T. Approved-commenters, the mad people who have their browsers set up to use green fonts for their comments as it reminds them most of green ink, switched sides.

The WoEP targeted the Railway Path for BRT even though the economics sucked because they felt it would be politically less controversial than anything that went near the M32. Well, they were wrong, and they created the enemy we all have to deal with today.

We do despise those path people and their park -look at out our past coverage - but it was  these BRT plans that started this mess. If the WoEP wants to finish off some old unimplemented plans, they should dredge up the Motorway-over-the-harbour plans from the late 1960s, the ones North Somerset commuters will really appreciate, not this anti-car but still anti-bicycle disaster that will only make things worse,

Speaking of the activists smirking in their pubs, some people may have heard the rumour that a member of the Bristol Traffic team will be giving a presentation at the Bristol Cycling Campaign meeting in the Cornubia Pub on Thursday March 4, 8pm. We deny any knowledge of this, and suspect that it may be someone pretending to be from our organisation to give us a bad reputation. If it is one of our team members, we hope that they denounce the troublemakers, give them some advice on how to drive, and get bought beer from the cyclists' tax-avoidance money.

Antibicycle Awards: Bristol Zoo wins, Bristol Council loses

The judges met on site and have decided to give the Bristol Traffic antibicycle award to Bristol Zoo and Bristol Downs together for their 600 car parking spaces on the Downs with 6 bike racks that don't work for towing children to the zoo.

To make this an unbiased process, what we did was invite some of the cycling activists in the city to see what feature they hated the most, and gave the prize to that feature. Here they are, Terry and Chris on the right, talking to Adam Crowther of Bristol Council, about the Zetland Road junction that got nominated for the award.

This is where Bristol Council lost the race. Because they are going to try and fix things by changing the signal times slightly. Not just for the cyclists, but pedestrians too. While the troublemakers were loitering, one of these pedestrian people came up and joined in. She saw the hi-viz people with clipboards and assumed they were professionals, so came up and joined in with her own problems.

Apparently vehicles turning right from Zetland Road have nearly run over pedestrians who have the green man to cross the bit of the A38 the cars are using. She wanted it fixed, yet the obvious solution: don't give pedestrians a cross phase, didn't get a mention. That was it, the final straw.

Here is Cllr Jon Rogers, still smiling, still thinking he is in with a chance at winning the prize a junction where the police ticket bicycles for cycling on a pavement that cars can park on, and a light sequence designed to kill tax dodgers. But if they plan to stop the tax dodgers dying, it's lost our vote.

Chris Hutt breaks the news. Apologies for the sound quality and wobbly camera, but we had to get out of our truck for the video, and we were shivering a bit in the bitterly cold wind. The key point: he promises to do better next year.

We must also say, gracious in defeat. Always handy in a politician that.

Cyclists interfering with residents parking

More breaking news, the local cycling campaign is getting involved in the Kingsdown Resident Parking Proposals.

Look at their ten page document!


Not only do they support this plan, they have recommendations which shock us

1. Parking must remain restricted on Nine Tree Hill -to do otherwise is to create danger for pedestrians and cyclists where there is none today.
2. Enforcement of blatantly dangerous parking -on zebra crossings, completely on pavements, blocking bike lanes- should commence today, so that such restrictions are not associated with the eventual RPZ rollout.
3. Zebra crossing safety on Cotham Road south is unlikely to be addressed by these proposals; we advocate the installation of a pair of in-road sheffield racks, to remove the zig-zag area as a parking option for delivery vehicles.
4. We have made some suggestions on assessing traffic within the city; these should be considered. In particular, RFID-tagged resident/disabled parking permits would prevent permit forgery/theft as well as enabling data collection and reducing future data collection costs

You see that? Not only are they pushing for existing double yellow lines on Nine-Tree Hill to be retained purely for the benefit of tax-dodgers walking and cycling to Cotham Grammar or Bristol University, they are advocating that existing rules about parking on double yellow lines or zebra crossings are enforced! In Bristol! Then they come up with some ideas to make it harder to create resident or disable parking permits, and to measure traffic flow in the area.

They are even asking that their campaign members send emails to respark@bristol.gov.uk supporting their proposals and referring to "Proposed Kingsdown RPZ"

This is shocking, and we hope that no readers of this, Bristol's Premier Anti-Cycling web site (despite how hard the Evening Post is trying to copy is), follows the cycling campaign's suggestions and writes in.

And again, those subversives, to add insult to injury, use our photographs! What do they think we are? Some kind of city-wide database of what actually happens on our streets, to be used to generate defensible data to support the cycling campaign? This a fundamental abuse of our goal, which is to celebrate the everyday solutions that drivers have to come up with to cope in an anti-car city.

Bastard Hills of North Bristol? Bastard Cyclists more like

We have another web site of those bicycle under-people to criticise: Bristol by Bicycle.

Clearly they have plans to encourage more people to get in our way, to deny FirstBus revenue, to slow down important car drivers and taxi passengers. We shall keep an eye on them.

Their current coverage is about a forthcoming Bristol Cycling Campaign ride, The Bastard Hills of North Bristol. This is apparently a tour of the steep road climbs north of the river, from Montpelier to Clifton by way of Kingsdown and Cliftonwood.



Well, you would have to enjoy suffering to cycle round BRS: the hills, the rain, the wind, the abuse. The fact that these people are celebrating the harsh bits of the city just shows how strange they are. They will probably spend Christmas training, rather than drinking beer and watching Eastenders.

Whoever these subversives are, they are keeping an eye on us. We know that. How? All the photographs they are currently using in their coverage of their route are ours. Pro-car, anti-bicycle photographs. Yet these troublemakers are using the same photographs to actually encourage people to come out on a bicycle -and are trying to pretend that it will be fun.

We despair.

Some of us are debating attending the route and hurling abuse at the cyclists, but as the route will go through central Bristol, there will be other people doing that anyway, usually from the comfort of a minicab.

Wilderness near UWE

We've celebrated this before: a bit of the wilderness near UWE. A river crossing. Something that forces pedestrians to turn back, and ensures that the only people who cycle through are doing it on mountain bikes. When they get to their destination they can feel pleased with themselves, and justify the extra expenditure on suspension and disc brakes.

We car drivers like it because it makes commuting by bicycle more miserable.

Which is why we have some bad news. This feature is no more. This week the builders of the housing estate behind MOD Abbey Wood dug some ditches, and as a result, the water feature has drained away.

This is part of a local anti-car conspiracy. They should be turning this path into a road for more driving options between Lockleaze and UWE and its business park, just as they did for the Old Filton Road, but instead this: wasting money on tax-dodging cyclists. Worse than that, tax-dodging student cyclists!