A group of protestors are camped on college green, but apart from the "whiners corner" of the Evening Post, not having much effect.
A greater group of protesters have decided to come out in numbers and bring the city to its knees. Here they are on the M32
Their protest demonstration goes all the way up to Eastville junction.
Yet the mainstream media completely ignores this, even though these protestors include BMW and Mercedes drivers -the nearly-but-not-quite-1%, whose journeys in from the suburbs are crippled by the excessive fuel taxes the state is charging in order to keep the banks afloat.
The residents of the areas near the M32 are aware of this ongoing protest against the capitalist economy, and have been spraying signs of support against the M32 itself.
If there is one criticism, this protest has been going on for about forty years, and yet it has had little effect.
For visitors from out of town, Eastville park is the park to the east of the M32 flyover.
At least today. A large chunk of the park was given over to that flyover, with nothing but a Glasgow-style concrete picnic bench underneath as a memory of families coming down there for picnics.
We find it amusing that only now are people complaining about bits of the park being turned over to transport rather than greenery, rather than, say, 40 years ago.
More importantly, we worry that if the Friends of Eastville park have their way, they may not stop at the bicycle access. They may start asking for the bit of parkland that is known as the M32 motorway back. This would not be good. We hope, therefore, that the Friends of Eastville park are regular users of the M32 and can see the tangible benefits of it remaining in-situ. Be believe this is likely, given that they clearly don't cycle. And as nobody takes their dog for a walk on the flyover, the liability issue there isn't important.
Our coverage of cycling families endangering car paintwork created some feedback from one Tony John Cooke, who expressed some concern that some of our claims (helmetless cyclists are uninsured troublemakers) lacked proof. Tony, the fact that cyclists are threats to our city and its motors are Axioms; we don't need to prove it, it is self-evident. We -and the rest of the media- work forward on that axiom, just like most of mathematics works on Euclids set without worrying about whether or not parallel lines ever meet.
Our goal when we set up this project was simple:
Timely coverage of the city's real transport issues.
Project the motorist's point of view, not the watered down stuff that the Evening Post and Daily Mail pushes out.
To check we are meeting these goals we benchmark ourselves against the competitors and the cycling press. Tony -your very complaint re-inforces our conclusions that we are being strongly consistent with our messaging, so it cheers us up no end.
But is a complaint from one person enough? No, of course not. Which is where benchmarking ourselves against the mainstream press comes in:
We check that we are ahead of AA and RAC foundation thinking by looking for their press-releases reprinted unquestioningly by the BBC and other outlets.
We verify that we are consistent with the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph.
We verify that we are ahead of the local newspaper by reading it sometimes.
We compare our coverage with comments in the on-line press, to make sure we represent the real opinions of readers.
In particular, we keep an eye on our competitor, the Bristol Evening Post. For those readers out of the city, know that it is the city's premier daily newspaper, although we find that the South West Big Issue does tend to have more in depth coverage of economic and political issues. What the B.E.P. does have is a local news remit, though the reduction in staffing means that it is generally reduced to reprinting press announcements or criticising the council. Those press releases from Tesco, Bristol City Football Club and other major revenue sources are always welcome, but they do support some local pressure groups where their campaigns don't conflict with the needs of the supermarkets or BCFC.
On Thursday Sept 9, the coverage was on Snuff Mills and the proposals to replace the dirt track with a cycle path. This would be the continuation of the one which runs through Eastville Park, one we are aware of but haven't bothered to denounce.
Here a path runs along that bit of the Frome river which is not under the M32 flyover, providing somewhere for pedestrians and cyclists.
It looks like it might be a nice place to walk or cycle. But it doesn't really go
anywhere right now, not until a link to UWE has been sorted out.
Which is where the Snuff Mills connection comes into play. Now, as metric of how up to date we are - success metric #1 -, we covered this issue on 8 july 2009, when we expressed our concerned that the improvements may degrade from the wilderness experience of the park. That is a whole fourteen months before the Evening Post heard of it. This shows the advantage of our reporting tactic: getting out and about in the city, versus theirs: waiting for press releases from organisations like the Snuff Mills Action Group.
Now, this is where things get complicated. According to the Snuff Mills people:
we reached a compromise with Cycling City following a meeting on site a few weeks ago. They agreed a narrower path and other changes to the scheme, but then emailed us the following week to say this was no longer acceptable because of the needs of the 'disabled community'.
We don't know anything about that, but we do encourage readers to go to the Snuff Mills Group, look at the proposals, come to their own conclusion and contact the council. We suspect that even the cyclists may be despairing about the effort being put into creating bike/pedestrian conflict here, while inner city troublespots -like Stokes Croft- have been abandoned. There's an obvious reason for that, nobody wants to take on the motorist.
Anyway, returning to our benchmarking theme, we checked out the comments. Remember how we are campaining for a new dual carriageway to be built across purdown to provide a fast route from an expanded Lockleaze to the M32? Some of the green party people in the city think this is some kind of joke. Sorry, but if you look at the comments of the Snuff Mills article, you can see that we are merely slightly ahead of the mainstream press.
"I used to live in this part of town, and what that area really needs is a link road connecting Fishponds Road to Broom Hill, through Wickham Glen and Eastville Park. This would relieve the traffic around Blackberry Hill.
But will we, the law abiding, tax paying motorist get this perfectly reasonable request granted? No, of course not. We're not blathering cyclists.
James Carmichael, Highridge"
We see his point. The council is spending our tax money on paths, but no new roads have been added to our city for some time -despite the parkland being up for sale. We propose the DfT should buy the parkland and add the roads or city needs.
The fact that we came up with our vision, some weeks before the most vociferous of the Evening Post commentators proposed a new road through Eastville Park, shows that we really are setting the agenda in this city. We aren't just reporting on news months old, we aren't even following press releases or comments in news articles. No: we are laying out a vision for a new city, one with the ring-roads back.
There you have it. Our web site is upsetting cyclists and pedestrians enough for them to complain to us, we are years ahead of the B.E.P. in covering developments, and months ahead of their readers. The AA and RAC "think tanks" aren't even beginning to think at our rate, let alone on our agenda. We are in charge.
We close, then, with a video of what the completed bit of the Eastville Bike and pedestrian path is like. Look at it, and think how much lovelier it would be if you could use this as a ratrun alternative to Stapleton or Fishponds Roads?
Bristol Traffic: more than just a news site -creating the new city.
Lovely sign up on the pavement under the M32, near Tescos
"DO NOT CROSS M32
3 pedestrians killed
here in the last
12 months
please use
formal
crossing point"
We could be pedants and point out that it really means "Do not cross M32 approach road"
and just like most other signs in the city "no parking", "school keep clear" "speed limit 30", it is completely ignored
As a few shoppers bravely sprint back from the shops to their houses, in between the cars
The interesting question to consider is why are cars driving at 60-70 mph along here?
The roads are set up for it, barriers and signage are optimised for speed, you don't feel welcome on a bike, and pedestrians are simply forbidden. Except they keep coming, and death follows.
There is an alternate option to consider. You could drop the speed on the M32, and then cars wouldn't be pushing to get up to motorway-merge speeds (60mph in theory here), on that road. Instead the cars would only be doing 20-30. Instead of it being a high-speed route in and out the city, you try and make it a low-turbulence, high-throughput route, with safe pedestrian access here and on the St Pauls/M32 roundabout.
Just a thought. Until then, easily updated signs that get ignored.
Contributor "Q"posts in this scene from Ikea, a 4x4 with horse box having to use four spaces. As Citizen Q points out: this leaves some lovely bike parking
When you consider how much a horse box + horse weighs, this is actually a valid use for a vehicle with bigger engines and all wheel drive. What is surprising is taking a horse to ikea. Having taken a small child round the shop -indeed, having had a small child run off in that shop- it is clear that taking a small child round is a pretty stressful experience. But doing it with a horse? That is bold!
Some news updates on Cabot Circus. Or, Tricorn 2, for anyone who remembers the Portsmouth Tricorn building; most hated shopping centre in the country until it was destroyed by the militant wing of the Royal Society of Architects.
Bike parking: Apparently this was a requirement in the local plan since 1997. Why then, was the place granted planning permission without it? Car parking. The spaces there are extra large, long enough to take an estate car or even a Range Rover. This shows the reasoning behind providing car parking over bike parking. People with bikes have no money and cannot buy things. Even people with no money who come by bus are more welcome; they can carry shopping home. Congestion: the car parks were signed as full at 12 noon on sunday; the traffic jam was not quite as far as the St Pauls Roundabout, so slightly better than a normal weekday. Presumably anyone not going to carboot circus turned off at that junction, so bringing extra weekend traffic to those streets. There was also a long queue to ikea off the M32 northbound throughout the day. Either the shoppers who could not park in Cabot Circus turned north to buy self-assembly furniture instead, or out of town visitors combined a trip to Harvey Nichol's with visit to Ikea and Tesco Eastville. If they chose the latter option, then more city retailers will benefit from the traffic.
Finally, in some news that does not bode well for the project, John Lewis reported sales at Cribb's causeway down 25% on last year. Now, that could just be people opting not to hang round Cribb's when there was a new shopping centre to visit, but they report similar figures in out of town centres in Southampton and High Wycombe, both areas outside the footprint of Cabot Circus. Other factors may be at work. The issue for Carboot Circus retailers then is not how to get visitors, it is how to get the visitors to shop.
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