Eastfield Road

Last week's coverage of Eastfield Road raised a comment by kebablog

I'm often on that road, don't usually have a problem with that particular car. The one that parks on the corner by the garage or the massive caravan thing poking out are much worse.


Odd also how there is no mention of the 3-4 bicycles that are often chained up at the bottom of the road, between them all being shackled to the railings and lamppost they manage to block the whole pavement. I make sure to give them a nice kick on the way past.

Well, we always respond to customer feedback. This weekend the caravan looks OK, but yes, there is a van on the corner

However, as this is a quiet road for walking down, the van WF05YFG is not inconveniencing anyone.

The other side of the road, yes, the bicycles and the bins are a problem. Especially with that little street sign thing making it hard to get round.

If you look closely at the bikes, you can see that the back wheel of one is toast and these thing are not in active use. They are possibly abandoned by the previous years' students -who have moved onto proper jobs with proper transport- and are now left to clog up our streets.

This is another argument in favour of bicycle registration and taxing: you'd be able to recognise an abandoned bicycle by its expired license and so remove it immediately, the way the DVLA clamp cars. No printed/human readable tags though, nowhere for them. RFID tags embedded into the frames. Easy to scan, easy to track, a nice source of data.

This also shows another potential problem with the cycle city program. If the council want's to get people out and about on their bicycles, that means getting the bicycles out, which means that residents may not want to carry them up stairs -parking on the pavement is the remaining option.It's bad enough with their bike stands taking up space on shopping streets, even the back roads will suffer.

Back to normal

The roads are all briefly snow free, as are the pavements, so they can be used again. Not by pedestrians, who we still think should be made illegal, but by car drivers who prevent congestion problems by parking entirely off the road.

Here on Eastfield Road, the Audi RK08KCJ has to park here as the owner, through no fault of their own, only has a garage big enough for a 1970s hatchback.

Up at Hampton Road, some students have been causing havoc with the wipers on this car R848CGS strategically placed to stop pedestrians crossing. This is why when we get our laws against being a pedestrian pushed through, the fine for being a student pedestrian will be double.

And on Whiteladies road, we can see another traffic island that is no use to anyone, and just makes it harder to swing past bicycles.

This car NS03YJP has a disabled sticker, so it is legitimately parked here, before anyone complains. What we really want to highlit is in the background - some of the new Whiteladies road bike parking stands. They are stealing our pavements, our car parking spaces, again.

Eastfield Road: view from the hill

Eastfield road isn't much fun by bike; there's a steep hill by Westbury that is the most hazardous: narrow pavement, downhill cars and bikes at speed, uphill cars trying to accelerate out of the Westbury congestion. This would seem the obvious place for a crash.
When we heard about the tragedy in Westbury, we assumed that is where it was. But it isn't, it's further back, towards the Southmead/Henleaze mini roundabout. This isn't a fun stretch to ride down, as cars are often impatient, it's hazardous (bends and side roads), yet sufficiently wide that can't easily control the cars behind you by occupying the lane. Even if you are in the middle of the lane they will go past you, upset, causing problems for you on the downhill when you need to get past them.

Here's the view from the pavement looking towards Henleaze and Horfield -where the car came from. Despite stories in the press saying the car "lost control", it looks from this angle that the car driver failed to turn the car into the bend, but instead skidded in a straight line onto the pavement and the adults and children on it.


Google streetview gives you shows what it is like to approach from from the Horfield/Henleaze mini roundabout.

View Larger Map

There's a a traffic light protected pedestrian crossing (sign of problems in the past?) and then a straight stretch with a bit of a rise.

If you follow the road along, you come over the hill, and reach a bend. That is where the crash happened.

While not a police "traffic forensics" expert, they have marked the road up with the same awful painted annotations that Cabot Circus now has -a history of someone's death, painted on the road and pavement. Those markings seem to indicate that the car didn't try turning either before or after it was skidding -it just went straight onto the pavement, going fast enough that the brakes couldn't stop them in time.

If the driver hadn't put the brakes on and skidded, if they had instead followed the turn of the road, then Sam Riddalls's parents, friends and family wouldn't be mourning his loss. So what happened, where did things go wrong?

We aren't skilled to judge, but it certainly appears that speed was be a significant factor in the incident. The skid marks are long, and you wouldn't end up having to hit the brakes and go up on the pavement unless you were going so fast down that road that the bend came up unexpectedly, you couldn't steer the car round it, and using the brakes was the only option that sprung to mind.

As we said at the beginning this doesn't look like a car "lost control", as the local paper is describing it, any more than it would have picked up excessive speed by "accident". This is a car whose driver chose to drive too fast for a city, way too fast, and as a consequence, killed a child.

The dark pavements of Westbury on Trym

For the second time in a week, we find ourselves visiting a roadside memorial to a pedestrian killed by a car. Last time, Troy Atkinson, age 15, killed at Cabot Circus. Now, Sam Riddall, 11, killed on the pavements of Westbury on Trym.

Everyone should go and see both their memorials, to spend a moment watching the traffic carrying on, while on the ground, yellow paint show the police marking up what they saw on the ground, as they try and determine what happened.

Here, the car slid down the pavement, after having clipped the wall. If cars were parked on the road, as it sounds like some were, then there would have been nowhere for anyone to run to, no way to escape, in the little time they had.

Further up the hill, you can see where the car mounted the pavement. You also get a hint of the energy involved in the collision -hitting a kerb like this could have destroyed the wheels, yet the car kept going.

Everyone knows that you can estimate vehicle speed from skid mark length; a full document on the topic gives the specifics. To really know, you need to conduct experiments with a similar car, and know the condition of the brakes. What is clear is that the car did skid a long way.

At the top of the hill, the police are asking for help: 0845 456 7000 is the number. Someone out there killed a schoolboy on Friday, and is now hiding.

No photos of the flowers and their messages -go and see them yourselves. And the ones in Cabot Circus. Last week was an awful week for the city -the loss of its children must not be forgotten.

11 year boy old killed by a car in Westbury on Trym

The police are reporting that an 11 year old boy was killed on Friday evening when a car went up onto the pavement in Westbury on Trym and hit a group of kids -the (female) car driver then ran off.

This is a really bad week on Bristol's roads, with two children, one 15, one 11 killed by hit and run drivers, as well as someone on a bike injured by another hit-and-run incident. A trend perhaps? It's too early to say. What is clear is that there is a single unified cause: a car. And there seems to be a unified decision by the drivers that the best thing to do is run off. Perhaps the drivers felt they could get away with it, or maybe there was enough alcohol in their blood that they didn't want a breath or blood test at the scene of the accident. Certainly when someone tried to run off from a car crash we were reporting on, alcohol was probably a cause of both the crash and them trying to run.

Everyone in the cycling/walking/street activist community will be pretty unhappy about this -as will, presumably, be the police and other emergency services. Every death of a pedestrian or a cyclist represents a failure of everyone's efforts. Yet what can you do if some people in the city are going to drive round in big metal boxes?

1. It would be useful to know if (enforced) 20 mph speed limits would have saved lives. That would make for a better argument to have wide-area 20 mph zones, instead of leaving the main roads at 30. In particular, would Eastfield Road -the narrow hilly route between Westbury and Horfield, have counted as a main road?
   
2. The Evening Post needs to keep an eye on the comment sections of any article involving cars crashing with bikes or pedestrians. The paper has put a lot of effort into pushing a bikes-are-the-enemy theme, and whenever something like this happens, the comments by some of the readers are appalling. They do eventually delete some of the comments, but by the time they do it's much later, when the damage has been done.
   
3. In fact, we wonder if maybe it is time for the E.P to back from its bikes-are-the-enemy theme, as it doesn't appear to be true. The vehicle that kills people on pavements is called a motor car.
   
4. When we look at the traffic logs of the web site, news of someone being killed on our streets brings a lot of traffic to this site. We'd rather that people didn't get killed out there; so that people didn't have to go to the web to get news about another tragedy. That web traffic is something to mourn.
   
5. There's a good case for setting up a serious web site alongside this one. It's hard to mix satire that argues in favour of helmets and high-viz clothes for pedestrians with reporting the death of people walking down the pavement. Something that carry's the city's cycling news and events and not much else. Volunteers to help with this would be welcome.
   

This is the second time this week we've had to express our deepest sadness and condolencies to the parents, friends and family, yet we know that nothing we can say will ever take the pain away, especially for the parents. When we said on Wednesday that it was a dark day for Bristol, we didn't know how bad the week was going to turn out. It has been a dark week.

All scheduled postings that were indended to be entertaining have been postponed for a week. There's nothing funny to say.