Clifton: riot of the self-entitled

The Economist has discovered the Clifton Popular Front in their article Four wheel Fever.

This shows what press a tank in a city can have.

The paper did fail to note what bad press a tank in a city can have, such as when the driver of the tank feels that a protest against an RPZ in Clifton is more important than a protest against bombing of UN refugee centres in Gaza


As the paper nodes, "CLIFTON, in Bristol, is an unlikely hotbed of political activism. ". It is however, a hotbed of self-entitlement, be it the right to park your 4x4 on a double-yellow-lined corner near your fee-paying school, the right to double-park near your house -and the right for commuters to park on pavements.

Which is the problem: a clash between a mayor trying address the traffic problems for the city with a part of the city that believes in the inalienable right to drive the kids to school even if there is no parking, to drive to the local shops even if there is no parking, and to drive to work even if there is no parking.

A lot of the city believes that, but Clifton is one part of the city that has come out in protest against it. There's also the Aberystwyth Faction of Gloucester Road, but they have gone quiet. And in Clifton, its the traders who believe in the right to drive to work that are being most vocal.

The article is interesting, we just have a few points to add

"Bristol is one of the most congested cities in Britain. Traffic during the evening rush hour moves more slowly than anywhere except Belfast, Edinburgh and London. "

That's something we've looked at before. "Congestion" is an odd concept; for Bristol it is often defined as "the city with the highest variance between peak hour and non-peak hour traffic". Bristol becomes easy to drive around between 09:10 and 16:30, whereas outer london is always near-stationary. Another metric "average traffic speed" fails to consider that journey time is defined as distance/velocity, so if the distances are short, so is the time. In London, people travel further to work.

"Locals will pay £48 ($81) for the first permit to park near their homes."

Locals in some of the city already do, Kingsdown (KN) and Cotham South (CM) being examples. Nobody protested there, showing that it's not the residents in the inner ring that have the issues. It's those people who have adopted a lifestyle that assumes that free parking will be available near their place of work, and consider congestion to be something imposed on them, rather than a consequence of their own decisions.

"In Clifton, a suspension bridge links Bristol with North Somerset. “Everybody and his daughter will park there and walk across,” predicts one resident. Rather than solving a city’s traffic problem, Mr Ferguson might just end up pushing it elsewhere."

If you ever visit Abbot's Leigh on a weekday you will see that it is already full of park+walk commuters. Why? You save on the £1 bridge toll, adding up to £10/week for commuters. There's also more chance of finding a parking space there. Claiming that the RPZ will force commuters to park elsewhere really means "the expanded RPZs will force commuters to walk further". Oh, and as the Downs is out of the zone, park+bus and park+pedal from there will continue to be as popular as it is today.

What the paper does pick up on is the fact that South Gloucestershire council has a big chunk of the Bristol metropole —and a very different transport policy. S Gloucs has the "Leeds Strategy": wider roads. They've had the space for this, but all it does is amplify congestion in the North Fringe. That conflict between strategies is going to place Bristol and South Gloucestershire in head-on conflict between long.

Get your tanks off my lawn!

As d-day for the Clifton RPZ rollout approaches, already tempers are getting hot. What will happen? Will it be tanks up Whiteladies road a-la Soviet Liberation of Berlin, or will be house-to-house battling like Stalingrad?

We know this: it'll be noisy.

Clifton Resident James Gadd sends us this video of one of the pre-RPZ skirmishes -one where the Clifton Popular Front and their tank are nowhere to be seen. Here it's commuter vs resident, soon escalating to the police and then finally the builders. As anyone who has spent time in the city will know, builder's trucks are some of the most damaged out there, and so have little qualms about banging up against someone's car while they get their scaffolding out. Which is why that's the time even the police should consider their exit strategy.

Part one: opening skirmish



Part two: the residents come out with their pitchforks



Part 3: here come the Polis



Part 4: I see your police car and raise you a Builder's Lorry


Part 5: call it a draw



James -thank you for these, and we look forward to more as rollout day arrives!

Questions for anyone claiming RPZs devalue houses

There's a 3500+ petition up on the council web site demanding a rethink to RPZs in Bristol. This shows how effective the Clifton people at organising defence of their rights. Or, as the late Glaswegian father of this team member said "The extension of the M1 to Swiss Cottage was stopped because it went through Hampstead. The inner glasgow motorways went through the Gorbals because it went through the Gorbals". Anyone who thinks this petition is about RPZs anywhere outside Clifton are wonderfully naive.

Again, this petition is repeating the claim that an RPZ is bad for your house price.

Some questions for anyone who repeats that claims?

-Why is nobody from Cotham or Kingsdown protesting about the RPZs, saying "the RPZ devalued our house prices"?

-Have house prices in Cotham South and Kingsdown either fallen since the RPZ -or even just increased at a lower rate than Cotham North?

-Why do estate agents in Clifton emphasise off-street parking as a feature when selling houses?


-If, as is claimed, an RPZ will eliminate shop staff and commuter parking on weekdays, is that £50/year going to buy you the ability to park near your home, without having to pay that off-street parking premium?

-When the asking price for a house in or near Clifton is £1.5M+, who is suffering here? Because the only people that can afford a house like that is going to be someone selling up a flat in London and moving west,  someone in Clifton earning large amounts of money and still overcommitting on the mortgage -or someone with money making an investment in buy-to-let and expecting prices to continue to rise.

-Why are the Clifton RPZ protesters so concerned about the limit of the number of cars/household, or the cost of registering an overweight car, when a large fraction of the inner city don't even own one car, let alone three?

As the Bristol Blogger observed the last time we covered this, the RPZ is potentially going to increase value of your house. "In the Clifton West RPZ" means that you are officially in Clifton, and will have the right to drive your SUV round the corner to Clifton village for a latte.

More interesting is not so much "what will it mean for Clifton houses costing £1.5M", as "what will it mean for St Pauls houses?" Or, phrased differently, "will all-day residential parking it St Pauls increase gentrification and so break up the community there?"

That's something to discuss, but it's hard for the Cliftonians to complain about a destruction of community, as there is none. Everyone hates their neighbours as they are competing for the same parking spaces. And that's speaking as a former resident who was taken aback when moving to Horfield that neighbours actually say hello to each other.

Yes but who will think of the children? (part 1)

Say what you like about Tank Commander "Wolfie" Miles and his right-to-commute-to-work campaigners, call them "lost in time" or "selfish and missing Clifton's underlying issues" -they are good at PR.

They've realise that demanding the right to park outside the estate agent where you work, where you can charge a premium of thousands of pounds for any form of guaranteed parking, makes you look hypocritical. So instead they've found a commuter group that they can call on: school teachers.

The best one yet is how the introduction of an RPZ will force a teacher in Colston Primary School to resign as she'll have nowhere near to park after 45 minutes driving from Bath.

We've covered Colston Primary before, showing our datasets go back years, and can so place things in a historical context. We also know that the school is already in the CM zone, so can do before and after footage. So over today past the traffic jam chaos that was the st michael's hill school run jam, and what do we see -and how does it compare with the equivalent photos from 2009.

Before: Parked cars provide exciting things for small children too look at





After: empty crossing with good visibility



Before: congested dropoff zone outside the school, with the only place for parents to pull over the keep clear zone

:

After: emptiness. Those parents do doing dropoff can do it without going on the yellow lines -and so risk earning a ticket.
 

This carries on up the hill -where you can see the small kid scootering up and down while waiting for a parent with a push chair to catch up.





Finally, rotate pi radians  from the first photo -that's 180 degrees to people that stopped doing maths at 16 and don't understand data science- and what do you see behind the pleasant park with a play area where the younger brothers and sister of the colston primary age kids are playing on their scooters?

A train station.



Colston's Primary is three minutes walk from the Severn Beach line, which has a regular service to and from Templemeads -it takes 12 minutes, costs 1 pound 60 or thereabouts return, and hooks in to the trains to bath. If you do make the choice to live in Bath and commute into Bristol, this school is one of the few places where you can actually do it by train conveniently.

Whereas the parents with they schoolkids? They get a no-worry area where they can walk their kids to school, without fearing for the kids running ahead, without having to cross roads with zero visibility -roads congested with cars driving round in circles waiting for a space freed up by a resident.

This gives them a low stress stretch of the journey, which lasts until they get to the No-RPZ areas, such as Montpelier




That's why we think this sob-story is just that: something dredged up by tank command to make a point, but which doesn't hold up to scrutiny

1. Colston's primary is served by both a train system 3-5 minutes walk away
2. It's 15 minutes walk from the central bus station, where buses go to bath
3. The primary users of the school -the families nearby- benefit, where they are walking, driving or cycling their kids there.
4. There's nowhere that says it is compulsory for schoolteachers to live in bath

Central Bath has been nothing but RPZ for ages -anyone who lives in Cotham and who works in Bath isn't going to find any free parking except out past Victoria Park or other places more than half an hour's walk from the centre.

If the teacher lives in central Bath, she's going to have an RPZ permit on her own car. If she lives out of the core, well, she'd be just as inconvenienced teaching at a school in Bath as she would be in Bristol, so doesn't make a defensible case for the Tooting Clifton Popular Front.

Clifton : bring out your dead

After the Tank visit, we felt that a trip to Clifton was in order.

We took our stolen bicycle to the area. Just as there is no tank parking, there is no cycle parking in this part of the city -something they are proud of, rather than something they campaign about.

We ended up using the "no cycling" bit of tarmac where the tank had been.


Here's the video from a quick spin round the area


Key points

1. There's nothing happening
2. In the centre of the village, there is no legal area to park left.
3. Even the parking for under 2 hours is full -showing that short-term parking restrictions do not stop shop customers coming.
4. All four bicycle racks are full, and cyclists are inconveniencing pedestrians and endangering motorists by chaining their bicycles to railings and lamp posts -they do not take a hint, do they?
5. at 1:18, outside the parking limited zone, the residents are double parking. This extra parking area is going to be lost come the RPZ.
6. all vehicles bar the one a 3:49 have wing mirrors
7. There's no decent graffiti -hence no motivation for modern tourists to visit it.
8. Nothing is happening. There's a few people wandering around, but that's it
9. Despite all the echelon parking on Sion Hill and York Crescent, there's only 3-4 parking spaces there. The residents have to be grateful that they are powerful enough to stop the council taking the echelon parking away and putting in something anti-Clifton like a safe cycle route to the bridge!
10. Down in Hotwells, on Hope Chapel Hill, the RPZ is being painted in.
11. Civilisation has not collapsed down there, there are not legions of zombies walking around chewing the limbs of people with resident parking permits.

No, Hotwells's RPZ is not zombie country. Clifton village is, sadly. For all those "Clifton Will Die" posters, clifton is already dead as far as the rest of the inner city is concerned -they just haven't noticed.

Which means that rather than worry about whether the removal of shopkeeper and local business staff parking will kill the village, the Clifton Popular Front needs to think about how to get customers who aren't local businesses in there, competing with other parts of the town that are getting a national reputation.

Stokes Croft: exciting.

Clifton: an afternoon with an elderly aunt who smells of cat wee.

Clifton and 4X4s

After our post on the Clifton Popular Front, we got a complaint by way of Twitter from one LittleGibbo.

We were told not to be so rude:

@bristoltraffic don’t make assumptions. We don’t all have SUVs. Don’t be so rude.

and later, when we questioned her assumptions:

@bristoltraffic sorry if I am, but how? Was that tweet not suggesting that people of Clifton drive SUV’s? It’s how it read….

Notice how we said "Clifton has always had a reputation for being Bristol's 4x4 country,".
We didn't say "Clifton is Bristol's 4x4 country" -only that it has a reputation. We were declaring a statement of fact -a reputation- without considering whether it was valid.

well we don't like assumptions, we're a data-driven organisation.

Time to take out a vehicle to see. We lack a tank and they aren't very fuel efficient, so stole a bicycle and visited the area. This was a mid-week, mid-afternoon visit, so is at risk of collecting statistics on the 4x4 ownership of shopkeepers in the core village, not residents -so we went over to a residential street nearby: Canynge Square

And yes, we did find some SUVs.

One photograph isn't a defensible dataset, so we did a complete circuit of the square



this shows some important facts

1. Although it claims to be a square, it is in fact a triangle
2. There's a lot of cars at home, even on a weekday. 
3. Most of the cars are new, shiny and dent free
4. All have their wing mirrors attached.
5. Yes, there are a lot of 4x4s there, even if you discount the volvo XC70 estate car.

Anyway, we can look at the video and say "from our survey of clifton a lot of the locals have 4x4s".

Which means that the reputation of Clifton being Bristol's 4x4 country is clearly valid. We have nothing to apologise for -and expect an apology of our own.

No doubt some people will be pointing to the inadequate size of our sample set, and our failure to compare a control group of another part of Bristol, or indeed look at national statistics of the ratio of 4x4s to practical cars in the previous two to three years. But we must pre-emptive dismissly their arguments.

People are trying to shape the parking and driving policy of the area without any data at all -so our sample of a single residential triangle is in fact more valid. If we'd stopped at the photo we'd have been selective, but showing the entire circuit provides more defensible data than all content by other parties..

In comparison, the downs committee voted against a 20 mph based on a single experiment conducted by a single councillor - an experiment for which the councillor is failing to provide the data on.

Meanwhile The Clifton Popular Front are using results of their surveys to claim that 99% of businesses are against having their all-day staff parking converted to short-stay shopper parking. making exaggerated claims to residents about how that loss of staff parking will damage their life, and completely missing the point that Clifton already has a parking problem: nowhere legal for customers to park precisely due to all that staff parking.

To summarise: We have conducted a survey of Clifton village and observed a number of 4x4s in residential streets. Anyone attempting to dismiss our claims as inadequate will be required to provide defensible data for their own assertions about Clifton, parking, and how an end to free staff parking will bring about the downfall of the area. Otherwise: be quiet

The Clifton Popular Front: parking or war!

Clifton has always had a reputation for being Bristol's 4x4 country, indeed, one of our first ever photograph was someone being forced to park their 4x4 outside a fee paying ecole.


Well, the "clifton or death" campaigners, who are campaigning for "right to commute by car" have escalated beyond the mock tanks to the real thing,


If you look at the footage, they are saying "loss of parking will destroy clifton" -yet as you note in the video: there are are no free spaces. Which means that the combination of residents and staff parking has destroyed the parking opportunities for any paying shop customers. Which means that the number of customers that can drive to their shops is reduced.

More formally: if the number of free spaces is zero, the the number of hours of free parking you get is also zero.

You can see this at 1:10 where the tank is forced to park on Clifton Downs, just behind the "No Cycling sign".

Which is where the whole "RPZ kills the village" story falls apart. As it appears to be granting free parking where none exists today.

Ignoring the fact that they are really fighting for the right to drive to work, they threaten to take their battle all the way to David Cameron if they don't get their way.

Here then is the second video of their war against the RPZ, taking the battle to westminster itself!



Support the Clifton Popular Front in their campaign! Rise up and overthrow the oppressors that is Bristol Parking Services!

Clifton Parking or Death

There's a web site, Tufton or Death, where campaigners are trying to save the lives of people that use a turn-off on the A34 "Chievley Services" Road.

This is relevant, as some Cliftonians are now campaigning about their RPZ plans, with signs round the area placed perfectly at eye-level for anyone driving a little urban 4x4 -meaning exactly the kind of people that Clifton depends on.



One thing to call out here, if you step back a bit, what it looks like


     Not
Clifton Will
    DIE

Which can then be parsed as "Clifton Will Not Die"...

Anyway, interesting to see the signs. In today's BBC Radio 4 Costing the Earth program we got to hear a someone describe the residents of Clifton as "In the driving seat". That was not a metaphor: it is a statement of fact.

Imposing time limits on parking in Clifton is either going to force residents to walk a bit, or destroy the village the way it did to Southville. We shall have to see what the outcome is. Of course, Southville tried to address the problem by adding bike parking -something Clifton has strongly resist on the basis that it is out of keeping with the area. Is the RPZ plan a first step to forcing Clifton Village to actually have bike parking?

Meanwhile, keep an eye on what happens here. What's impressive is that someone had the money to print some nice posters. Elsewhere in the city the protests were limited to bits of paper run off home printers. This though -professional.