Clifton Occupied by Tax Dodging Cyclists!

We were shocked and disappointed that we were unable to drive to Clifton in our Important Car, then cross over to Somerset and enjoy a round of golf with Liam Fox MP. Why? Tax dodging cyclists in the road —out road, blocked off to us,Important Tax Paying people, handing it over to olympic medal winners and the like.

Lycra louts who do things like blow their noses in public

If there was one redeeming feature, it is that a lot of other people were as upset as we were to see this lycra-clad vermin —and they were standing there screaming at them for bringing the city to its knees.


We we trapped in the city. Clifton was even begrimed with a large screen showing off that the portway and Bridge Valley Road had again been stolen.



This is exactly the kind of thing people voted against George Ferguson wanted to stop, but still the city wants to let people cycle around.

It's fundamentally wrong. Look at this scene from The Promenade

Where are the revenue-bringing shoppers? Or the high-income tax band residents? Nowhere. Just one person on a bicycle who probably lives in a postcode other than BS8.

This is unacceptable!

If there is one redeeming feature, it is that Clifton Village is still not set up for more than six bicycles at any time, as their three sheffield racks were overloaded. Some of the tax dodgers even went as far as leaning their bikes against the wall of The Mall pub and trying to buy beer inside.



This is not some run-down bicycle friendly part of town where you can lean bicycles against walls; it is trying to stay upmarket. Fortunately, most of the cyclists in the area realised they were unwelcome and cycled off to other parts of the city once the event was over, leaving us nearly the only people walking round an near-empty village. The fact that village was so empty shows precisely why such cycling events must be prevented.

But how to do this? We were going to spin up our automated cyclist-hating letter generator and have it email the Bristol Post. But what did we see on the Downs?



Yes —shocking, isn't it! Our paper, the one that hates cyclists, actively trying to sell copies to cyclists!

We fear that the Evening Post has, purely in the mercenary need to sell to people under the age of sixty, has decided to start trying to ingratiating themselves with tax dodgers. They may think that will help them, but all it will do is alienate their current readership. It'll be like when all the pubs in Hotwells, including the Spring Gardens, the Pump House and the Mardyke suddenly decided they wanted to post gastropubs instead of places to get drunk in and start fights with strangers. This isn't progress: this is a sign of the decline of the city.

Gregor heating - don't compromise on vehicle use!

Gregor Heating and Renewable energy.

We were worried that you were tarnishing the long fought image of the white van man. With your fleet of 35 clearly identifiable vehicles, we feared that they were too small to assert your position on the road and your near tree hugging business was too contentious to make a mark on normal society.

How delighted we are to have been proven wrong, and you are really just plumbers at heart. It is not the size of the van that matters, it is how you drive it that really counts.

Take this example. Posh people in Stoke Bishop don’t want to give up their cars – they want to feel better by installing solar panels to heat their swimming pools. So your driver is quite right to force this tax dodging cyclist out of the way in this quiet residential street on the way to a very important client no doubt.

Maybe the use of your horn could have been better. It was early but these tax dodgers really do need to know their place and it was probably time for Quentin to wake up and get in the 4x4 to school anyway. Transits have better horns, another good reason to consider bigger vans.

But we salute you Gregor Heating. Keep up the good work installing renewable energy for the rich tax payers of Bristol, and well done for treating a carbon free form of transport with the contempt it deserves.

We confess

Ok, we confess.

Just for once, we rode a bicycle, instead of using the van. In the spirit of investigative journalism, of course.

Here you can see a bunch of Bristol Traffic supporters, who turned out to photograph us (naked!) at the Council House on College Green. Shame they weren't naked too, but we don't ask that of our readers.

And here you can see why our fan-base is so attracted to following us.

For once, our copy of The Sun remained unopened. Page 3 is safe.

We feel for the unicyclist

The world naked bike ride

We worry about the sunburn for most of the participants, but for the unicyclist, the biggest risk is that they end up coming off the front of their toy. We can see from the photo that he has wrist-guards on, but aren't sure that will be enough.

We'd also like to see the video from the bloke on the left of the picture with the camcorder.

Laura Local: our favourite new tier-3 provincial journalist

We feel really sorry for the Bristol Evening Post. Most of the real journalists have moved on, leaving only a few people who are actually valued for their knowledge of the area and their willingness to type what senior management want them to write (Ian Onion), and, to replace the others, some unpaid interns trying to learn how to write HTML content to put local journalism as an item on their resume.

In the latter category, then, can we welcome Laura Local, who is now our favourite third-tier reporter for the Redland People subsidiary web site of the Evening Post. We think "redland people" is a bit overambitious, as it implies all the residents check it every morning saying "what's happened in our part of the city?", but that doesn't happen. Nothing much happens there except when some drunk students put some traffic cones on some cars, or the helicopter over stokes croft keeps people awake. Even then, reading about in the Redland People site isn't the way most people discuss some items. In fact, given their readership count, we believe the site would be called "Redland Eight People"; the eight being friends and family of the authors.

Laura, we are pleased to see, is trying hard to get the audience into double digits by printing an anti-cyclist rant. We do that ourselves, which is why our daily audience is in the high double digits, and we can see why a commercial site that tries to make money through advertising revenue would aspire to be as successful. Hence this lovely article, Redland cyclists among the worst in the Bristol? Here's the opening paragraph

I was turning right out of North Road by the Arches when a cyclist, who wasn't wearing a helmet I hasten to add, whizzed by in the middle of the road heading the direction I wanted to go - towards Gloucester Road. I pulled out behind him, as I would have done had he been a car and he stopped in front of me all of a sudden and started mouthing off before jumping the red light.

Maybe I was a little too close to him when I pulled out but I felt any criticism was rich coming from a guy who was bombing down the centre of the road without a helmet and straight through a red light!

We aren't going to defend the tax-dodger, but we will provide some constructive feedback to the author

1. It's not actually a legal requirement to wear a helmet. The only time you should criticise them for not wearing a helmet is when someone gets run over by an HGV driver on the phone, then you can say in the daily mail comments section "were they wearing a helmet" and so absolve the whole of society for their death. We do.
2. It's not illegal to cycle down the middle of a lane. Yes, it annoys us as it stops us driving above 25 mph, but for the troublemakers, it gives them more options avoiding being hit by redland residents who are too lazy to drive to the gloucester road shops, and who open their doors without looking or pull out without indicating.
3. If you were the first vehicle to pull out, and you were parked in the ASL under the arch itself, the cyclist may have crossed the traffic light while it was still green, then if you pulled out aggressively he may have had some reason to express concern.
4. Don't ever admit in print something like "Maybe I was a little too close to him when I pulled out." It removes your ability to take the moral high ground. We never discuss our own driving actions for this reason, or make videos from our van -the police might want them.
5. Gloucester Road isn't Redland. It's Bishopston, on one side, St Andrews on the other. When when it becomes Cheltenham Road it's called "the arches" until you end up on the disputed Cotham/Montpelier/Stokes Croft region where the new Tesco is. Not Redland. If you have to drive outside your own reporting area just to get content to rant about, well, that may show some weaknesses in the "Redland cyclists amongst the worst in Bristol" story. We recommend spending some time in Cotham Hill, which, while again not quite Redland, is full of pedestrians, cyclists, school-run parents and us vans, so creating a lovely mix for new articles, such as "Redland Van drivers amongst the worst in Bristol?", "Redland students amongst the worst pedestrians in Bristol", and of course "Redland school-run parents amongst the worst in Bristol". Together this will keep your article quota fulfilled for a month with only one morning's worth of research. Or you could walk along Chandos Road and have a geographically correct region for the "Redland parkers amongst the worst in Bristol" article.
6. Do try and back up your articles with photos other than faded bike path signs that may convince everyone, motorist and cyclists alike, that Bristol's cycling facilities are dire.
7. If you do want to get a video of someone cycling through the red lights on that stretch of Gloucester Road, stand there with a camera on a weekday evening and wait for one lights cycle: it's not hard.

Anyway, Laura -welcome to the tier-3 anti cycling rant pages of Bristol. Those of us already in the business welcome new competitors, as it keeps us on our toes. Just try a bit harder and we might even feel slightly threatened.

Is "The Fringe" a sign that Cheltenham Road is being gentrified?

We like that bit of the A38 from the Arches to Stokes Croft: our bit of the city. Wide roads, bus lanes to drive and park in, and shops for our lifestyle. As well as the minicabs, there's the car stereo place before Kwik-fit.

Which is why, while we were out stalking the pedestrian from Cromwell Road that we saw something to shock us. A new hairdressers, the fringe.

Looks pretty, doesn't it? But what's that in the window?

A sign

CYCLISTS

SPECIAL

OFFER

(From Monday-Friday)

"HOP OFF & CUT"

£7.50

Apparently cyclists can bring their bicycles into the hairdressers and get a haircut while their bike is kept safely out of the rain, secure from theft or damage.

Can you do the same with a car? No. You can't even park in the bus lane for half an hour for a haircut, not with the CCTV enforcement that's now underway.

The sign in the hairdressers is is a terrible sign. What it really says "we are at risk of losing Cheltenham Road".

Men: bicycles are not the answer to your mid-life crises

We like seeing Bristol on TV, and right now the TV show that has coverage is the BBC's Mistresses, one that shows pretty women driving round the city having extra-marital relationships with men who are also driving round Bristol. Got that? There's a link there: cars=sex. 

This fact is important as there a lot of press right now saying that the new mid-life crisis toy is not a sports car, a motorbike or a woman half your age -it's a racing bicycle. These articles are appearing both in proper papers and socialist rags.

This is wrong.

Men: whatever issues you have in later years -  a bicycle will not solve them.

You may have seen the Tour de France, seen Andy Schleck go to-to-toe with Contador in the Pyrenees, and thought "I could do that", but sadly, you can't. You just penalise the rest of us.

Oh yes, it sounds nice, and makes for some articles showing shiny bicycles against mountain backdrops, such as here, Crater Lake, Oregon. Oh yes, you can dream of such things while stuck in the traffic jams on the A370, or the M32.

But look at those mid-life crisis cyclists. Has it really solved their problems? No, they just fill their lycra clothing too much for everyone else to enjoy, and have strange looking legs. The one on the left: drinks too much beer for that top. The one on the right, scrawny, and apparently has not only continued with his bicycle obsession, gone on to come in at #5 in the veterans category of US Cyclocross rankings, and dragged his daughter in that same obsession.

Well, it's their choice, their money you may think. But as well as damaging the family, we, the motorists suffer. You don't see it in those news articles showing the fat men gasping up the mountains, but we know. We get stuck behind them on our trips to cribbs causeway when we get held up by packs of these middle-aged lycra-louts on their Saturday training rides up the A38. We get stuck behind them on our weekday commutes when their training regime mandates mid-week rides. We get stuck behind them when they spend so much money on bikes and bits that they can't afford to drive and have to cycle to work -on our roads.

We even get stuck behind them in the mountains.


The photo above may look nice, but this is the Going to the Sun Road,  the road from the opening scene of the Shining, the only road through Montana's Glacier National Park, a road that last month the Guardian listed as one of the "must visit" roads in the US.

Yet it is somewhere a single mid-life-crisis roadie could hold up line of Recreational Vehicles, each of which could be towing an SUV carrying a quad bike and a jetski. There to enjoy nature, to bring revenue to the area, not faff around pretending they were six again. At least in the US, they recognise this and ban bicycles in summer, but that just means these people ride up illegally. Whoever took this photograph was not only a tax dodging cyclist, they must have illegally ridden up this mountain pass which is rightfully kept free for important people. Us.

Yet still they come, naively believing that spending money on a bicycle, some silly clothing and then pedalling round the mountains is a noble thing to do.  Then there are these "sportives", which is where hundreds of them come out and block through traffic, such as here, on the RAMROD "Ride around Mount Ranier in One Day" event.

As the cyclists block our roads -here there are even signs up to warn us of the inconvenience- the rest of society pays the price of your inability to settle into middle age with a few beers in front of the TV.

For all those men who have been spending too much time loitering around at Fred Baker's, Mud Dock or that fancy shop at the bottom of Park Street, print out this article and read the points below before you fritter away your money.

1. The main mid-life crises toys for men are sports cars, motorbikes, and a women closer to the age of your offspring than your own year of birth.
2. Motor vehicles -especially the open topped car, help you get that woman on the side.
3. Motor vehicles reward those with money: the more you spend, the faster it goes.
4. It doesn't matter how much you spend on a road bike, you will still be overtaken by the 22 year old riding a fixie one-handed while texting a friend and smoking a cigarette
5. That student girl you were after will find that 22 year old fixie-rider cuter than you.

Think about it. Open topped fast cars have a purpose, road bikes don't. 

More on this topic another day. In the mean time, we are watching you. Act your age -get a sports car.

For Immediate Release

A press release from the cycling campaign reaches our inbox.

The Bristol Cycling Campaign wishes to extend its deepest sympathies to the family and friends of the cyclist who died following a collision with a lorry on Winterstoke Road on Tuesday August 11.

This tragedy is part of a series of bicycle/lorry collisions in the city over the past week.

1. Thursday August 6th, A collision at the junction of Perry Road and St Michael's Hill, left the cyclist in a serious condition in the Bristol Royal Infirmary.
2. Tuesday August 11th The junction of Winterstoke Road and Brunel Way. The cyclist, struck by a Mercedes Sprinter van, died.
3. Tuesday August 11th Old Market. A DAF lorry cab turning left collided with a bicycle outside the Evening Post. Again, serious injury -this time pelvic, leg and head injuries, and again, another customer for the Bristol Royal Infirmary.
4. Wednesday August 12th Stokes Croft/Ashley Road - a female cyclist left with a suspected broken leg.

This week of tragedy comes exactly three months after two teenage children were killed walking in the city by hit and run drivers in separate incidents.

The Bristol Cycling Campaign calls for Bristol Council to come up with a design for the city's roads that ensures that pedestrians and cyclists can get to their home, work or school without having to travel in fear for their lives.

It is impossible for Bristol Council's targets of doubling cycling to be achieved without increasing the numbers of collisions, unless there is a step change in the way that all of us in the city treat the most vulnerable road users.

Here of some examples of ways that we could improve road safety in the city:

1. Bristol must follow Portsmouth's lead of slowing down the speed limits on the approaches to the city, to stop drivers coming straight off 70mph roads and into the narrow streets of the city - and to stop them speeding up as they get closer to the motorway.
2. Roads, and especially junctions, need to be designed to reduce the risk of collisions. As a specific example, the Stokes Croft/Ashley Road collision involved a bike lane which is on the left side of a left-turn only lane. The collision here is not "an accident", it is the inevitable consequence of the design of the road.
3. As lorries appear to be disproportionately involved in the recent incidents, Bristol Council needs a plan to make their movements less hazardous to other road users. In London, for example, Transport for London is running a special cycle/lorry share-the-road training and publicity campaign.
4. Everyone needs to be encouraged to attend the Council-supported cycle training courses. As well as teaching cyclists how to cope with dangerous road designs, they will give drivers better understanding of the dangers that cyclists face.

Martin McDonnell, secretary of the Bristol Cycling Campaign said: "With rising obesity levels, congestion and road pollution, encouraging cycling is more important than ever. We call on the Council to fulfil the Cycling City vision by making the city safe to cycle around."

We wish a speedy and full recovery to all the Bristolians who are currently in hospital because they chose to cycle around a cycling city. We also wish to express our appreciation to the emergency services, who have responded excellently in all these incidents.

mobile phone criminals

Crap Cycling and walking in Waltham Forest -which we only keep an eye on to make sure that Boris is doing a good job at keeping those tax-dodgers in their place- is picking up on the threat that cyclists on mobile phones present.

Our thoughts exactly. There should be laws against this kind of thing, and if the cyclists are not going to obey them, car drivers should be allowed to enforce them, vigilante style, probably by overtaking them then braking suddenly and turning.

Here we see someone on the phone on a quiet empty road in Clifton on a Saturday afteroon. The greenery are something that has been causing a problem recently, as apparently the street lighting is poor. The greenery makes the streets darker and more edgy here than in say, tree-free inner-city areas like St Pauls or Upper Easton. With the reduced lighting and the illusion of green and pleasantness, the risk that a pedestrian will blindly step out in front of a cyclist is increased -it is far more likely than on a busy main road. Yet this man is making phone calls while going along, instead of wearing the high-viz clothes what would attract the attention of pedestrians, or a helmet to reduce the damage he causes them when they step out in front of him.

If these subversives had vehicle numbers, we would be able to report them to the police, instead of being forced to stick our head out the window and swear at them as we drive our landrover discovery past at 40 mph while taking these photographs one-handed.

Fixies? Fit or optimistic

We've heard of fixies before -fixed wheel bikes, courier kit turned into fashion items in London and NY. But those cities are mostly flat. you can get away with a single speed bike with no brakes other than your own two legs. To ride fixie in BRS, now that would take someone with serious hill climbing thighs, or they would have to commit to only visiting one part of the city.

This fixie rider was spotted making his way towards Cotham Hill, that is, a bit of the uphill. "It gets a bit hard sometimes" he says

As he rides off.

Leaving us behind.

More Hill work

This is why fixed speed bikes are still a rarity in the city: its hilly, and after a while you seem to end up with small children attached to bits of your bicycle.

This particular cyclist is doing the school run from Montpelier to Cotham by way of Nugent Hill, and claims to be breaking the proposed 20 mph speed limit in the process.

We will reassure this cyclist that the proposed zones will not affect his journey time. Nugent Hill is not in any proposed 20 mph speed zone. Furthermore, looking at the photograph's metadata in the appropriate image editor shows that this photograph was taken on a Panasonic camera with a 100 ISO "film", F3.3 and a 1/50 shutter speed, yet the image of the bicycle is not blurred. We estimate the uphill speed to be below 12 mph, possibly below 8 mph, and therefore well within range. Please work on you and your children's hill climbing ability before claiming that you will break the speed limits on the way to school.

Edinburgh commuting

Nice little Youtube channel of someone who cycles in to Edinburgh with a camera on their head -sometimes they film the drive for comparison. The footage is all a bit dark -if you are wondering why there are so many cars driving around in darkness, that's scottish winters for you; the films are probably taken at 08:45 in December with daylight some months off.

Best video is this one


It is either an argument in favour of helmets, or in praise of maintaining some distance between you and the vehicle in front, especially if the vehicle in front is bus. Remember: whoever crashes into the back of someone else is viewed as liable.

It's interesting that there so many buses in these videos: a reminder that there are some cities in the country the same size as Bristol which have a functional bus service. They're getting a tram line too.

Welcome to Bristol -cyclists dismount

The city likes to present a message to people arriving over the Hotwell's Bridges. On the main road, the car route, it says something like "welcome to Bristol, a sustainable city" or something thereabouts.

For those arriving by bike, the sign "cyclists dismount" lets them know their place in society. Below pedestrians, though possibly above anyone misfortunate enough to depend on FirstBus for their transport needs

Think of the children

Its a common sight in the mornings: bored kids in the back of the 4x4, playing on the Nintendo DS while they sit in traffic jams. Some people say that things would be better if the kids got to walk or cycle to school. The people who say that are not small children.

Look at the expression on this girl's face. She's just had to come up Cotham Brow or Nugent Hill, both of which hurt enough as a grown up. As a child, pushing an overweight and underfit parent up, with nothing to look at but their shiny clothes, well, you'd be unhappy too.

RTA at the harbour

Chris Hutt mailed this in: "This is from this evening 5 pm down outside the Museum of Bristol. A female cyclist has come off when crossing the rails where the points are. She and her husband are staying at the caravan park at the other end of the floating harbour, visiting Bristol (perhaps encouraged to cycle on the basis of the cycling City news?). Injuries turned out to be minor and she was eventually able to walk away"

The Evening Post recently had a two page special from some visitors to the city staying at the same caravan park, complaining about the bikes cycling along the mixed-use bits of the harbour. Perhaps this week's will have some other visitors, complaining about the quality of those mixed use bits of the harbour. The underlying problem is that railway tracks are slippery in the wet, and you really need to cross them at right angles rather than slide up alongside them -that drops you: hard, but according to Chris, fixable. The ongoing building works don't help as they constrain the route, and then there is the car access and parking which is viewed as essential to retain, forcing cyclists and pedestrians into a limited bit of the route -the place where things go wrong. And there is no north-of-harbour alternative yet.

Hill Work

For anyone with a small child, be aware that they do help a bit when on a tagalong, so you don't have to get out and push up the hill.

They do, however, lack the thighs needed for decent acceleration across mini-roundabouts or across busy roads. Those are the troublespots.

Danger on the Hills

What do we have here, on Nugent Hill, on a wet Monday evening?

Yes, it's Peter W. of the Save the Railway Path campaign, bringing his daughter back from play school at the top of the hill -where he happened to have downed a couple of glasses of wine. On the way home, he's got the phone out and is discussing what to pick up on the way home.

So let's see. Very steep downhill, wet evening, small child on the front, alcohol, and using the phone. Can anyone see what's wrong here?

Exactly. He's got rim brakes. Peter, if you are going to do Nugent Hill one-handed in the rain, upgrade the front of your bike to a nice set of hydraulic disk brakes, one that stop just as fast in the wet as the dry, and which will bring you screaming to a halt with only one finger lightly on the levers. Trying to do this kind of thing safely with V-brakes on a wet day is a recipe for disaster.

Footpath Closed Cyclists Only

Terry Miller sends in this photo of some of the "improvements" near Cabot Circus, on the junction of Bond Street South and St Pauls Street.

Terry states that although he got off his bicycle to take the photograph, he was standing on "an open shared use pavement" so there was little risk of the police giving him a spot fine for walking or standing in a cyclists only junction. He also says:

If these will stay:-

• gaps are dangerously narrow for 2-way cyclists to safely pass
• signage is needed to divert westbound pedestrians BEFORE they reach this BLIND CORNER crossing.

We look forward to the opportunity to write letters to the Evening Post complaining about pedestrians getting in our way, as having someone using a cyclists only facility in the city is as as wrong as those fell runners who go round the Ashton Court MTB trail because they like the mud. Cycle facilities are for cyclists!

There is, however, one little question. Why do this? The purpose of road crossings is to provide a safe way to cross roads. If the crossing gets taken away, will the people suddenly not cross the road? Or will they just run out anyway? It would be interesting to have a discussion with whoever designed this junction to discover what assumptions about pedestrian (especially child) behaviour they had made, what experiments they had perform to test the validity of the aforesaid assumptions, and whether they were to engage in long-term monitoring of the facility to see if the assumptions held up in the field. Civil Engineering may not be a science, but there is no reason why it should not be scientific in its approach.

Now seeking: photographs of pedestrians ignoring these signs and inconsiderately inconveniencing cyclists.

France: motorcycle parking

One recurrent complaint from some of the Bristol Cycling members is motorbikes using their bike parks, and so making it harder to park bicycles. But the motorbikes are forced there because the parking areas allocated for motorbikes are usually full of cars. Unless parking a car in those areas is an enforced offence, motorbikes have to park where they can, which means bike parks.

Here in France, a different approach has been tried.

The reserved motorbike parking area have sheffield-style stands in them, so that both motorbikes and bicycles can be locked in them. This provides a place for both vehicles to be parked, out of busy pavements. Thus even pedestrians are not inconvenienced.

Cars cannot use them, although they can double park in front of them.

This is clearly a simple idea that would benefit motorbikes, cycles and pedestrians. Why then, is it not going to be used in Bristol? Because it would remove valuable car parking spaces in the city. Pushing the bikes and motorbikes onto the pavement saves space for cars. As for pedestrians, well, who cares?

The joy of autumn

Autumn is one of the South West's best times to be on a bicycle. The sun, the dappled leaves and the dry paths after the summer baking makes it very memorable.

Yes, some people may have memories of a nice September. But if you are a mountain biker, this month's rain lets you test out your skills every day, even on normally boring bike paths. Here is the Lockleaze to UWE path, which two days in a row have had a stream running from the new roads being built to the left of this picture, a stream going over the path at 4-5 inches depth, and then draining into the woods.

This makes it an excellent place to safely practise river crossing techniques