Pop-up shop elitism

Trend of the month: pop up shops, in empty store fronts, rent-for-the-day cafes, and around our streets. Everyone is talking about these

Except, Bristol's traditional pop-up retails are being given a harder time than ever before, as signs on Fox Road now warn you that your details will be passed on the police.

What details? That a white van with no wing mirrors pulled up? What do you expect? Have you ever tried paid-for-sex on the back of a #20 FirstBus bus? There's the half hour wait, the extra costs and the kids filming you with their phones and sticking it up on youtube later. Then you are stuck somewhere waiting for the next bus home.

No, never do that again.

Anyway, this shows how elitist  his pop-up shop theme is

• stall in stokes croft selling local bread: welcome
• Local vendors of sex: criminals
• City-centre market selling finely curated local cheese: welcome
• man in Picton Square selling finely curated local ganga: criminal
• cafe selling premium fair-trade coffees imported from South America: welcome
• street outlet selling cocaine-products imported from South America: criminal

See what we mean? Those of us who work in the sex- and drugs trades are being unfairly discriminated against.

And that's without considering that the cost of fuel has killed all the surburban customer trade, those people who would drive down from Emerson's Green and Bradley Stoke in search of a bit of low-cost sexual gratification and some recreational pharmaceuticals. That customer base has collapsed as bad for us as it did for best-buy and Cribb's Causeway.

Yet neither the local council or central government have recognised the role our industry has in Britain today. It's unfair.

Traffic: a book. But will it have photos?

There's an article up on Salon about a new book, Traffic. It looks at the psychology behind driving, with some interesting quotes: signaling is revealing your intentions to the enemy.

Maybe, but that assumes you are signalling a wish to change lanes, rather than providing immediate warning of your intent to change lanes regardless of the presence of another vehicle, that being French-style signalling rules. In fact, despite all the claims that Boston is a hard place to drive, it isn't, not by European standards.

What is interesting in Boston is parking. There are parking lots to park in all day, but they are expensive. The alternative is to park where you aren't allowed to, and risk being ticketed. It all comes down to some simple equations. If P(ticketed) is the probability from 0 to 1 of being getting a parking ticket, and that happens one day in five then P(ticketed) = 0.2. If the cost of a ticket, is say , $50, then the daily parking costs are $50 x 0.2, or $10; less than a parking lots' cost of $20. It's cheaper to park illegally and get ticketed sometimes. So the drivers do.


In Bristol, the equation is even simpler. Outside the pay-to-park inner core, P(ticketed) is effectively zero, so the daily cost of parking where you want is 0. Whereas the cost of using a car park isn't, nor is the cost of using FirstBus. So what do people do? They drive close to the centre and park where they seem to be able to park without being ticketed. Because no other action would make sense.