YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT BUT MOST IMPORTANTLY YOU ARE DIFFUSING TOTALLY WRONG INFORMATIONS AND
I'M ACTUALLY AMAZED AND VERY ANNOYED THAT YOU CAN DO SUCH THING AND USE PHOTOGRAPHS THAT ARE NOT YOURS AND USE THEM AT YOUR WILL TO ILLUSTRATE YOUR POINT.THIS VEHICLE WAS MINE AND WAS PARKED (NO ONE WAS IN IT) LEGALLY ON THE ROAD AND THE DRIVER HIT MY CAR WITH THE BACK OF HIS LORRY.I WON THE CASE WITH THE INSURANCE (OBVIOUSLY) AND HAD 3 WITNESSES TO CONFIRM THE INCIDENT.INSTEAD OF TALKING COMPLETE NONSENSE YOU SHOULD CHECK THE ACCURACY OF YOUR FACTS MR SO CALLED BLOGGER. THE FACT IS THAT OVERSIZE LORRIES SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO ENTER SUCH NARROW AND TIGHT ROAD AS THEY'VE CAUSED SEVERAL INCIDENTS OF THE SAME NATURE IN THAT STREET.I HOPE YOU'LL HAVE THE DIGNITY TO PUBLISH MY COMMENT AND DIFFUSE THE REAL INFORMATION AND NOT WHAT SUITS BEST YOUR CASE. THE TRUTH IS THE TRUTH NO MATTER WHAT YOU MAY THINK OF IT.
Well, where do we begin?
You are correct, we have no idea what we are talking about.
The right to talk complete nonsense is a fundamental aspect of press freedom.
They are our photos.
One of our reporters pedalled past about 09:00 that morning, at which point the cardboard wasn't there, just a rear hatch that looked like it had be ripped off. Given the fairly distraught woman nearby, they chose to continue & not take pics. It was on the way back from work that this photo was taken.
Taken: 13/feb/2012 at 16:40, ISO 200 f/3.3, 1/30s, 25mm, Manual white balance: cloudy. The full resolution pics are 4000x3000 if you want them.
Now, we do have a reasonable amount of coverage of HGVs on our site. For example,
Now, we do recognise your complaint about narrow roads being unsuited to HGVs -but you have to recognise that in a modern society, HGVs need to be able to drive down every road in the city.
We're afraid that you'll just have to accept that losing 1-2 cars a week to passing HGVs is the price of living near the Miner's Arms and Farm pubs. We'll take submissions of other incidents, and you get to retain copyright of your images.
In the mean time, please enjoy the rest of our site.
As we said, the pavement provides extra parking options. First, note the bollards, They aren't designed to stop vehicles getting on to the pavement so much as to make it clear to pedestrians that turning vehicles can cut over that corner. Vans that want to park can just get up onto the pavement past the bollards
Some viewers may think "this road is four lanes wide in every direction, and the pavement is perfectly wide enough to have a good, segregated bike lane". Those people are missing the point.
The four-lane-wide road provides enough space for an HGV to do a U-turn. d
So letting it get up and park on the pavement in the direction it's going.
You couldn't do that if there was a cycle path here.
The sheer provision of a vast off-road "pavement" here is a fantastic facility for motorists. It's wide enough that street furniture can be kept far enough back to make parking along here easy -regardless of the length of your vehicle.
Bristol just lacks the imagination. Even that "let them park on the pavements" mayoral candidate explicitly mentioned Gloucester road as an example place where paveparking shouldn't be permitted.
Yet Gloucester Road is a shopping street -like this one in London- the provisioning of more pavement parking area is what is critical to keep it alive. Look at the one here -even with all this excellent paveparking it's barely surviving.
While doing one of our regular clifton deliveries, a quick detour to check out the road where the HGV got wedged a while back.
Yes, there is a new HGV shaped dent on the house at the top of Clifton Vale.
Looking up, this is the view the drive would have had.
What's not clear is where was he going: left towards clifton, or bearing rightwards. The latter is possibly marked as a straight line on the satnav, which it is, provided your car is nimble enough to swerve round and through the oncoming lane. Hatchbacks can do this, but things like estate cars have trouble.
What the HGV driver was thinking we don't know, especially as the hill is about 20% all the way up. At what point did they start to have doubts -and yet still decide to continue.
This is just going to lead to street clutter as every road from Hotwells to Cliftonwood is now going to have a sign prohibiting lorries -which can only inconvenience those of us who do know how to get our toys through the rat-runs.
Over in London the militant tax dodgers are asking the hard question "why are lorries and HGVs allowed in our inner cities?" An interesting question, but here's another one " why do tax-dodgers cycle on the roads that the HGVs have to use? There are plenty of back roads. In Bristol you can recognise them because they have hills on them. If the cyclists go down Gloucester Road or the A4 and say "there are lorries there", well, there are alternatives: the hills of Montpelier, Totterdown and Clifton. HGVs do not normally go there.
On the way up, if you can't see anyone in front of you, go for it.
On the way down, hang back enough to get a view, and go for it if nobody is obviously coming up. But swing wide before even beginning the turn in, or you won't be lined up to take the next corner
You can't do this in an HGV -which is why we deliver our "adult entertainment products" to the Clifton area in the official Bristol Traffic white van. It takes the corners, and if it gets a couple of scrapes on the way -not only does the van not look any worse, but it doesn't leave anything more incriminating than some white paint.
The militant cyclists are saying "It's not our fault that HGVs kill us -they shouldn't be there", and now they even have the Times on their side
We, and our sponsors, Tesco, say "HGVs are needed in our city to deliver an optimised supply chain, if anyone gets run over by one it is their own fault for being on the inside of the vehicle"
This is why a lot of cycle safety training in London is dedicated to
make it clear to people on bikes that they are invisible from a cab of
an HGV, so should never go up alongside them, or end up in an ASL in
front of one.
We have another group of people who need to be better educated.
Take this road, St Werburgh's Road.
If you were in Montpelier, a car with its rear window replaced with cardboard and big scrapes down the side wouldn't get a second glance -but here we are in St Werburghs. What is up?
Apparently, the owner of this car dangerously parked their car on the inside of an HGV.
The HGV -entirely innocently, as the car was hiding in its blind spot- scraped down the side of the car, caught the rear bumper and pulled it off. It also clipped the rear hatch, pulling that up, bending it, and in the process shattering the window.
Why did this happen? Because the car driver, recklessly, parked their car on the inside of where an HGV would go past some ten hours later. For this reason, it is their own fault.
We say: people like this need to go on a "safe parking near HGVs" course, rather than complain about passing trucks from destroying their vehicles. At the very least, they could use that spare space to the right of the picture, the "pavement".
There's been a lot of concern in the press recently about Militant Secularists, who are as despised as much as Militant Cyclists and feared as much as proponents of Sharia Law.
The cabinet has come up with a three pronged plan to encourage more prayer and religion in our streets
George Osborne will encourage everyone in the country to pray that his austerity plan will actually work, despite evidence to the contrary.
Andrew Lansley will be encourage people to pray for their friends and family to get better, and in fact this will become the primary front line medical care. When Britain was a Christian nation -right up until the militant secularists and their so-called Enlightenment brought evidence-driven medicine to the country, prayer was the only medicine people had. The NHS reforms will return Britain to its roots.
Eric Pickles will do more to encourage prayer in our cities.
The last is what interests us, as he has come up with a plan to encourage prayer not only in our local councils, but in our city streets.
In a special over-skype interview with us, Eric Pickles declared
For too long the militants -be they secularists or cyclists- have had free reign of our cities. I propose to correct this by encouraging cyclists to pray regularly. I have come up with a cost-effective plan to achieve this, which I call "doing absolutely nothing". This, combined with cost-cutting measures and the wrapping up of even half-arsed attempts to fund cycling in British cities -a European invention, I hasten to add- will make the cyclists less militant and more religious.
We are glad to agree with him, and include a video Eric was particularly proud of that shows how it only took one HGV at a roundabout to turn a Glaswegian cyclist back into a devout Glasweigan who now knows that cycling is not an acceptable form of transport.
Eric closed:
Having rediscovered God, we expect Magnatom to return to the traditions of this great country --going to Celtic and Rangers matches and paying for right to hate your fellow Christians.
We hesitated about pointing out to Eric that Rangers FC is currently in administration, as it would have made him appear out of touch. Nor did we raise the fact that here in the south west, we follow Other Gods. While our Queen declared that she is a defender of all faiths, we are not convinced those that involve human sacrifice were on the list of "all faiths" that she imagined.
There's a lovely piece of advice for anyone naive enough to believe that they'd be welcome cycling up the dedicated contraflow cycle lane or Arley Hill. It says "try the lanes of corwall"
What WA58BVD really means is "dont' try these bike lanes". We thought it was funny.
If there is one criticism -a minor one- the lorry is making it hard to get down the road and hence to the M32 for those of us who have paid for the privilege. A bit of forward planning, like, say, coning/dustbinnining off the front of the house would have let the removals van load up without taking any road space away from us.
We're reproducing a message sent out today, in order to prevent any misunderstandings if our email became public through other channels, just like that recent incident involving "Quercus", twitter and a naked man on a unicycle. First, we need to make clear that we do not in any way support the use of bicycles or public transport in the city. We are, however, concerned that the delivery and shopping processes of the Cheltenham Road Tesco Mini-mart are making it impossible for us to drive down the bus lane then swing left into Ashley Road, so avoiding the bearpit roundabout while heading out of town on the M32. Furthermore, the congestion caused by buses trying to swing back into the single-lane traffic is creating tailbacks as far as the Gloucester Road/Zetland Road junction, which makes nipping into Booze express harder. We couldn't come out and say this as it would make us appear shallow and self centred, so instead we pretended to have unified interests with the people that Jeremy Clarkson only this week denounced as anti-capitalist subversives.
Here is the letter
---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Bristol Traffic Date: 21 June 2011 15:17 Subject: Express Cheltenham Road, Bristol To: expressqueries@uk.tesco.com
It appears that you are looking for feedback w.r.t the Tesco Express, Cheltenham Road, Bristol, the one that recently became nationally famous due its unfortunate history of catching fire late at night.
The Bristol Traffic Project wishes to provide some feedback about the newly re-opened mini-mart.
In case you are unaware, we are a web-based community project to build a defensible dataset on who drives, parks, cycles and walks badly round Bristol. Our stokes croft coverage dates back to 2008, and so forms one of the largest dataset on road usage in the area. As a result, the search terms "Tesco Stokes Croft" invariably lists one of our articles in the first page of responses, despite the recent national and international media coverage.
One conclusion of our three year dataset is that the number of people cycling along Cheltenham Road is increasing. This is something which the council believes is a good thing, which is why the Cycling City program deliberately set out to encourage people in Bishopston, further up the A38, to cycle to work -down Cheltenham Road. For this reason, the Greater Bristol Bus Network offers a mandatory bus lane during some parts of the day; this ends outside Tesco Cheltenham Road, where a non-mandatory cycle path begins. While historically the bus lane only ever existed on those rare days that Bristol Parking Services enforced the rule, the roll-out of in-bus camera and CCTV enforcement of lane-blocking legislation means that compliance is now higher, except amongst those entities that are prepared to view the penalty as an operational expense.
Within the last ten weekdays of the supermarket being "live", community contributions show that
There is invariably a large HGV blocking the end of the bus lane and the beginning of the bus lane between 10:00 and 10:30
The official Tesco deliveries, while scheduled for 10:00-10:30, render the bike lane inoperable for a minimum of 30 minutes out of every working day. This bike lane being, as mentioned, the primary cycle route into the city from north Bristol.
This official blocking of the bus lane impacts bus schedules, inconveniences passengers across the city, and may even lead to financial penalties to FirstBus.
Other organisations with an apparent relationship with Tesco (e.g. G4S) are prepared to block the bus lane during its operational hours, and therefore presumably view parking tickets as an OPEX. This reduces the availability of the bus and bike lane even further.
Customers engaged in a park-and-shop process are prepared to short-stay park in the bus/bike lane through out the day, so rendering it unusable to buses, cyclists, and anyone coming down of Arley Hill who wants to nip down the bus lane before turning left on Ashley Road towards the M32.
Customers engaged in a park-and-shop process are prepared to short-stay park outside the shop during the evening bus-lane hour, so creating congestion that runs as far back as Zetland Road and so has a negative impact on all road journeys.
Overall, then, the combination of scheduled Tesco deliveries, possibly scheduled visits by partner organisations, and short-stay parking by customers has effectively rendered this bus and bike lane unusable to anyone in a bus, bicycle, motorcycle or taxi, or anyone simply prepared to nip up the left lane to get to St Pauls, an action to which a blind eye has historically been turned.
Given the role of the road and the fact that the loss of this lane is leading to congestion morning and evening, we consider this outcome unacceptable.
We would recommend some actions to mitigate this. Sadly very few actions spring to mind other than the closure of the mini-mart.
Your cost model is built around an optimised supply chain that uses the same vehicles for delivering to Tesco Express outlets as other Tesco sites, so the HGVs could only be eliminated by the adoption of a new city-friendly supply chain.
Your cost model does not include the external costs of the impact on the journey times of non-customers, or other externalies such as the increases in their fuel use and pollution.
Passing motorists popping in to shop may have been explicitly or implicitly included in the business model of the shop. It may be possible to enforce a "do not sell to people who park in the bus/bike lane" policy by refusing them entry, however this will not help customer loyalty.
It is hard for you to enforce policy on how your strategic partners such as G4S arrive and park outside your premises.
What is possible is for the local council to act in such a way as to mitigate such issues, independent of any of your actions:
Use the CCTV camera at the junction of Cheltenham Road and Arley Hill to enforce the existing bus lane parking rules. This does not require any legal process and could be rolled out almost immediately.
Use existing the CCTV camera to enforce the 15 minute loading/unload time limit. Again, no legislation necessary.
Uprate the cycle lane from "optional" to mandatory, so earning all vehicles which park there a £120 fine.
Enforce the then-extended cycle lane driving/parking rules using the same CCTV camera
Increase the physical presence of Bristol Parking Services staff, so offering more of a visual deterrent before 10:00 and after 16:30.
Being a data-gathering exercise we shall be using the FoI process to track the number of parking tickets issued in this area, so see if it correlates with the increase of delivery and customer parking which our data implies is happening. We shall also encouraging our existing community base to collect more photographs of the situation, which we shall then place online along with the vehicle registration numbers, and so help build up a better dataset of who chooses to block this invaluable facility, and when.
Please thank your staff, partners and customers for their participation in our experiment.
The Bristol Traffic Team.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
As stated, do not interpret this as some form of subversive activity. It is just that the tailbacks prevent us getting down and parking on the pavement outside Ritas or sprinting over to the M32. We are, as people should recall, a data gathering and analysis project, so we welcome documentary evidence from everyone on this issue, even people engaged in un-British activities like walking, cycling, and getting on a bus as opposed to standing there hoping that one will turn up. The threat of using FoI information to collect ticketing statistics is real, and we enjoy the irony of having the CCTV camera put in "for the mini-mart's own protection" being used to ticket people parking in the bus lane during its hours of liveness. Expect updates in future
A quick trip in our van at 09:59 shows the delivery van YR59YUD happily ensconced in the bus lane, waiting to deliver to tesco.
We say waiting, because apparently as long as they don't start unloading until 10:00, it's OK. This actually makes sense. Anyone who is trying to use public transport or cycle at that time of day are clearly low-income people whose time is effectively worthless, according to the D of Motoring spreadsheets.
What is more interesting is later the same day, now at 18:37, we spot the "Mighty Banana" van of Stokes Croft, now parked outside Tesco. Has someone driven up from the Croft to get their weekly shop in?
Possibly, but they would have found their way blocked by a large group of strangely dressed people. That said, anyone driving up from the croft wouldn't find this unusual, or interfere with their daily shop.
What could, however, would be the police enforcement of parking rules. And here is where we saw something so shocking we almost dropped the mobile phone from our steering wheel hand (the other hand is for gear changes and the horn). Yes, a policeman actually went up to the van to note its registration number. We were in shock. This could destroy Bristol as we know it. Watch the video.
You see that? Panic over. It turns out that the "Mighty Banana" Van, W878MDC, is actually Chris Chalkey's van, and the police are only doing it for a laugh. In the voiceover you can hear Cllr Jon Rogers -whom we suspect of not being in the Waltham Forest Faction of the LibDem council- explaining this and why it's all a setup. Chris see's what's happening, starts waving his masonic hand-waves at the police and all is well. Masonic Handwaves, incidentally, are the van drivers' version of the Masonic Handshake -make the secret wave to any traffic police and they'll let you past.
False alarm: panic over. There's no problem with parking in the mornings, no problem in the evenings either. We were worried there, but at least everyone has come to their senses and realised that if there's one group of people in the city not to mess with, it's us van drivers. Those videos of people shouting "whose streets? Our streets?" wouldn't stand a chance against a roadblock of us going "whose short-stay parking areas? your bike lanes!"
Yesterday we mentioned that one problem with parking on the abbeywood cycle paths was not just the new bollards, it was harassment from cyclists. Here, sadly, we have an example.
This is V134DYC, a lorry minding its own business, parked on one of the Abbeywood cycle/pedestrian paths. By getting almost entirely on the path it is not interfering with any passing traffic.
Yet our cyclist reporter felt that there was some need to criticise the driver, to take a photograph of them, "for the database".
Fortunately, our lorry driver sees their gambit and raises it by pointing out that they too have a camera in their lorry, and the cyclist looked pretty silly -which, coming from a professional hi-viz person, are pretty harsh words.
We aren't convinced that the driver saying that Hitler used to disappear troublemakers like our cyclist report actually wins the argument.
Godwin's Law implies that whoever reverts to analogies with Germany's National Socialist government of 1934-1945 automatically loses the argument.
It's not clear that that government did persecute cyclists except when their religious or political beliefs were not aligned with that of the government.
It's not clear how this possibly incorrect bit of history deals with the problem that now there is nothing to stop cyclists taking videos and photographs of vehicles in their way and sticking it up online.
Our coverage of one truck driver giving the pedestrians the abuse they deserve has proved very poplar. We know this as Youtube sent us an email saying "your video might be eligible for the YouTube Partnership Programme, which allows you to make money from playbacks of your video.", which implies more than eight people saw it.
We also got many comments on the video, some of which were sadly negative towards us. luckyeightball said
the only crime here is decent hard working blokes trying to earn a honest living, get pin pointed by some p**ck who walks around filming people, i bet he takes the videos home and masterbates in his garden shed to the thought of knowing he's caused someone grievance, probably lives with his mum too, gimp
Bristol Traffic is a team project, everyone in the city participates. Those of us who work in the Bristol sex industry supply chain don't need to sneak off to the garden shed as we have discounted "access" to the professionals who provide their services down in Stokes Croft. As we are regulars we even get rebates when things don't work as expected. Plus the wifi doesn't get to the shed.
Humpski2817 said
If I was this driver I would go to you tube and quote their Privacy Complaint Guidelines as I am quite sure you do not have permission to use his image and as the say in the account policies "let us know if videos or comments on the site violate your privacy or sense of safety."
We've discussed this before. You have to give up some expectations of privacy on the streets. Public Place = public. Private place = private. It's an interesting issue though, with Google Streetview being the cutting edge. To launch that service in Germany, they've had to remove the houses and gardens from the view, which means that street views have entire houses missing, so limiting their value. We are glad therefore for your awareness of these issues, though feel you have some more learning on this topic before your statements come off as well-informed. But it's a start.
The most insightful comment came from SuperJonah2010
"i personely believe as a hgv driver that bristol is a hard town to be in.and that the actions of the guy with the cammera are intimidating and the driver would of seen him as a threat!as he said he chased him down the road in his own posting!i would of thought about my load and is that guy pulling a knife or a gun out of his rucksack!it happend to be a camera!my actions would have been the same if not alot worse!what planet is the idiot who posted this video on!"
That really explains some of the issues HGV drivers have in the city. Our taxi driver acquaintances fear late night customers to the edges of the city, bus drivers are scared to stop on Crow Lane (update: plans to sell of the greenery may make it safer). What we hadn't realised up until now was that HGV drivers are scared of pedestrians.
Up until now we viewed them as a hazard. Admittedly, mostly to cyclists, but such incidents close off busy roads for hours, even to vans, - and parked cars. And, because they have better negotiating power in narrow roads, we aren't that fond of HGVs . But we hadn't realised that they were scared of pedestrians! That changes the whole view of things. They must be terrified of doing any of the "shared space" roads like Cotham Hill or Picton Street. Anyone walking down the middle of the road may suddenly get out a firearm or knife and hijack your load! This continuous fear of pedestrians must make the entire city a stressful place to do deliveries -far better to stay in Avonmouth where you don't see people walking around, and if you do, you can call the police and report them.
This fear of highway robbery must also trigger the use of classic military tactics, the key ones being: keep moving and take the high ground.
We can see an example of this at the bottom of Cotham Brow, looking towards the Arches. Our white van is stuck at the lights. We aren't worried about anyone stealing our load as we'll just report to the police that someone else has stolen a "Edmond and Cheggers Inflatable Doll Party Pack" and they'll drive up the A38 following the laughter on the pedestrians until they find the culprits. The Nisa Today lorry was facing the same direction when it swung left into Kingsley Road and got into that debate with the pedestrian about whether they should have indicated before the turn. The answer from a game theory perspective is of course: no, don't signal your intent -it makes it harder for them to plan their attack.
Today we are held up by some lights, cars coming from Cromwell Road are heading up from the Arches to Cotham Brow. This is a narrow road with parking spaces on either side of the road almost deliberately laid out to create conflict -conflict the parking review will leave in. For example, those cars on the left? Short stay parking, with only 40cm of pavement alongside there's no room to get wheels on the pavement, so it creates a choke point -a bit of traffic calming. And a place where a malicious pedestrian could attack a lorry driver and make off with their payload.
The small cars, like the council car, don't have a problem, they pootle up the road. But what of the SITA van S788NNK? The choke point here exposes them to attack -anyone could pop out from the side road hold a knife, a gun, a rolled up newspaper (we've all seen that Bourne Identity film -we know newspapers are weapons), and take their valuable payload of ready-for-recycling cardboard.
How will the SITA drivers handle it? With Military precision.
They seize the enemy territory by going straight onto the pavement. Notice how they do it. No halfhearted "protect the wheels" actions, but a full "take the high ground" operation to get along the pavement and then drop down once they get past the narrowness.
By keeping the forward momentum, the oppo team is left on the defensive, and without the pavement they can't hang back and hope to jump up into the cab as it goes past.
Together, this ensures that the SITA cardboard will reach its destination securely.
This whole notion that lorry and HGV drivers fear pedestrians is going change some of our thinking. In fact it's profound. It explains a lot of city design -like the pedestrian underpasses of the Bearpit, St Paul's and Lawrence Hill roundabouts. They must have gone in not just to keep motor traffic speeds up, but to reduce the risk of pedestrians attacking trucks. It also explains why money needs to be invested in making pedestrians and cyclists feel unwelcome in those parts of the city popular with HGVs -because the drivers don't want them there.
The implications of this discovery are still trickling through our brains, so expect more coverage of the topic in the new year. Until then, all those pedestrians whom we now suspect read this blog -remember, the HGV driver is more scared of you!
This video has gone up early so that the owner of a red nissan micra further along Cobourg Road has more details of the van YK57BHZ- that scraped their car on the way out of the road. The camera was off at that point, but that bit of pavement where your car was is narrower than this stretch, and as you can see here, it's a bit close, and one has to question why the lorry chose to continue, instead of going up to Fairlawn Road. Indeed, one has to question what it is doing in the area in the first place.
At the end (above the camera), the top of the approaching van is touching the van heading away; people have to help push the smaller van's body away to reduce the scraping it would otherwise get.
Clearly this is an anti-van part of the city, one where it isn't wide enough for two to pass each other, even when both are up on the pavement. So why don't the drivers' satnav units start sounding off the moment anyone picks up a route that goes anywhere near it, like those airplane collision avoidance systems that shout out "Pull up! pull up!" should do the same for any large vehicle approaching monty. With narrow streets and -soon- 20 mph limits, we've lost this part of the city.
There's a lot of fuss about corner parking -how it's dangerous, how some bits of the highway code say you mustn't do it. What does it say? Not park within 50 feet of a corner? Ridiculous. That would never work, not in a modern city.
No, sometimes you don't just have to park near the corner, you have to stop completely on it. Yes, it does force traffic to go round without much visibility, but, well, it's not as if you have any choice. Here we are in Easton/Lawrence Hill, at the end of St Gabriel's Road. The HGV is parked on the corner, but because it's articulated, it has managed to stay close to the kerb all the way along. Cars approaching from the north will see the vehicle and pass safely.
From the south, well, it does appear to be hiding a bit under the trees. But see that paintwork on the road to the left? Slow. That warns vehicles approaching this junction that they should slow down, and so nobody should be surprised to see an HGV parked on a blind corner rather than on the empty road adjacent to the corner.
Update: we forgot to thank RHP Transport HVG DX03XFF for their provisioning of a new traffic calming build-out in Easton. Thank you!
The Cotham Hill incident has brought home to all the cyclists how important it is to avoid trying to "sneak past" lorries. You cannot predict which way they will go -you can only guess, and guessing wrong can kill you.
Here are pleased to see one of our cyclists-under-observation not trying to get past this lorry in Saint Andrews. There is no easy way to predict which way round the blind corner the lorry is going to go as it reversed round the blind corner on Derby Road, and again, reverses blind from Derby Road onto Sommerville Road, just near the park and the zebra crossing.
Now, theoretically reversing from a side road onto a main road is a highway code no-no, rule 201, "Do not reverse from a side road into a main road. When using a driveway, reverse in and drive out if you can." That's for cars, as well as lorries. But the Keyline Building Materials lorry had no choice: with only one driver there was no way a spotter could walk out a clear the way, so it had to do next best thing: put on its flashing lights.
Remember: with your hazard lights on, it's OK to reverse large vehicles round blind corners.
The Evening Post is reporting that a cyclist ended up under a turning lorry at the Park Row/St Michael's Hill Junction. It is handy for the BRI, and while they have a broken thigh bone, they are apparently going to survive, which is good.
The E.P comments section is the usual mess of assumptions and abuse, but there is also commentary from someone who was there, which we reprint in its entirety
I saw the aftermath but not the actual accident. I was waiting to cross the road at the traffic lights just up from the St Michaels Hill junction, the traffic lights were changing and the lorry was one of the last vehicles to go past me and was turning left up towards St Michaels Hill. The next thing I heard was a massive crushing sound - like a massive coke can - which of course turned out to be the bicycle - and heard screams, I looked round to see a horrible scene, one that you never ever want to see.
I believe that the cyclist saw the traffic lights start to change and went to cross the junction at the bottom of the hill and didn't see the lorry coming around the corner. The lorry obviously didn't see the cyclist either...so blame probably lies both ways.
Wishing the man a speedy recovery, I'm just glad it wasn't more serious.
I expect the truck driver is scarred as even if he was partly to blame - to get out of his cab and find somebody under your wheels screaming in pain is not how he would have wanted to start his day.
Also in the traffic news section, we are informed that on this Thursday evening, that the A38 is closed between Aztec West/the M4/M5 and the Southmead/BAe roundabout. Bomb squad called out for a suspicious package at Rolls Royce, apparently. Looking out the window over the North Fringe sprawl, the A4174 ring-road is congested no worse than normal for a weekday evening.
As the Credit Crunch grows from a minor liquidity issue to something that takes down countries and governments, eating out is declining. Take aways are up. Sadly, some people are unaware of the local chain, Thali Cafe, serving premium quality vegetarian curries for 6 pounds for a meal for two, and instead want pizza, delivered pizza at that. Domino's Pizza is doing OK, though cost cutting issues have forced them to replace the scooters with driver-supplied cars, which is creating a bit of a traffic jam on Cotham Hill and then Whiteladies road, as videoed by local councillor Neil Harrison
According to Neil, "the driver with his car at the back of the area by Travis Perkins needed to get out, so they had to reverse three others back out first. He then decided that he needed to go the other way and so did an eight-point turn by the zebra crossing. Note also the car parked on the pavement outside Dominos again, making it harder for people to get around on both the pavement and the road."
The other time there is a parking issue is the morning rush hour, which appears to be the time that their pizza HGVs turn up. There is not much pavement to park on, but they manage to leave just enough room for a thin person to get by.
One might think that timing the delivery van MX03WXA to come after 9am would be better for traffic and passing schoolchildren -but the driver isn't in charge, the SatNav unit in the truck will be reporting him to the central Dominos Pizza datamining facility to flag that deliveries will take longer than expected, with the driver getting into trouble if they take too long.
Of the evening cars -which does make it harder for inebriated bar and pub visitors to get home safely-, Neil says "ideas to address this gratefully received."
Well, if reversing out is the issue, it may actually be better for them to reverse in and drive out; avoids breaking that "don't reverse into a busy road" rule. Otherwise, the more people who opt to get their meals from the Thali Cafe chain, the better.
We think everyone needs to stop being "surprised" by the fact that wherever you have a little grocery shop or newsagent there are vehicles parked outside -regardless of what the signs say. Just as we've all grown used to the drive-in-free parking superstores, so the little shops in the city have to meet those same expectations -and the only available parking outside such shops will be yellow lines, zebra crossings and the like -short stay parking only, because everywhere else will be occupied by commuters and residents.
It does mean, of course, that when companies like Tesco apply to build another Tesco Express outlet, the reality of customer access has to be taken into account. Rather than pretend that double yellow lines will ensure that all customers come to shop by sustainable transport, all those lines will do is ensure that there is a low-cost short stay parking area for customers in a hurry.
Here we have Tesco Express Clifton, approaching it from the side. The no-parking signs are here to ensure that there is visibility at an otherwise dangerous junction. Today, though, it provides somewhere for the Tesco HGV WX05GXL to unload.
And behind that, a dairy truck SF05KHU. There is only room for one customer to park between the two vehicles.
Looking from the other road, you can see that visibility it totally nonexistent. The dairy HGV is partly on some zebra crossing lines, the Astra going past it has to be partly in the oncoming lane, and the car turning into this road will have to get about half-way out before it can see what is happening.
It is impossible to blame either of the HGVs for parking here. This is the only place they can park to unload their foodstuffs into this Tesco Express outlet. The underlying problem is the decision of Tesco to put in an outlet here -because they have prioritised their revenue above road safety in the city. It's different spreadsheets, see. Tesco don't have to pay parking fines on any ticketed customers; they don't suffer if someone walking, cycling or driving round gets injured. All they care about is the customer segmentation and the fact that BS8 is a high-revenue postcode where they lack any significant retail presence.
Somewhere in Tesco central will be a GIS mapping system showing the revenue opportunities of every postcode in the country and highlighting those areas where the customers are some distance from a Tesco outlet. When combined with their loyalty-card data, they can even datamine which Tesco outlets do have customers from this area, then look at the contents of their shopping trolleys to see if the BS8 customers who do shop at the Tesco Golden Hill store buy more high margin items than other customers, and so decide which items to include in the portfolio of goods to put on the shelves of the mini-outlet. Then the same HGV that delivers round to the big stores gets directions on its satnav, pops over Clifton, unloads a few crates, and then pop off to the next destination.
This is something other areas in the town that are having issues with Tesco's plans need to include in their opposition to those plans -there is no way that you can safely have multiple HGVs delivering on aggressive schedules without seeing things like this. We see it Clifton. We see it on Bedminster's "pedestrian" road, where Tesco have to park to unload as their vehicles are too big to unload round the corner. Knowle will get to see it soon too.
This then, is our photo submission topic for the week. Vehicles taking advantage of the corners of corner-shops to park there while they pop in to shop. Send the pictures to bristol.traffic at gmail dot com, and we'll discuss why parking there is so important.
Here are a couple of snips from the St Philips Causeway area. This is very car friendly. It has dual carriageways with 50 mph limits, a bridge that bans pedestrians (who still walk along it) and the junctions are all roundabouts. Best of all, for a car, all the bikes are pushed out the way.
Here's one example, a bike junction that encourages bikes to turn off the approach lanes and go under an Heavy Goods Vehicle instead. When the lorry clears, you can see that the 'approved' way to cross the road consists of trying to cross -with no right of way- the vehicles entering and exiting the roundabout. The best bit, a little green sign that says "cyclists please give way to pedestrians" If you actually follow this signage, you switch from being a road vehicle with rights of way into not just a second class citizen -a pedestrian- but a third class one. Everybody cuts you up. Nice.
Furthermore, having explored all these back lanes, it slow and not that safe to zig-zag round behind the KFC drive-in restaurant, through the back of the showcase parking area and then up through Barton Hill. For an efficient commute, and indeed a good walk, the Saint Philips Causeway is more direct and faster. Possibly safer too, were it not for a 50mph speed limit, which creates two expectations from cars: (1) there are no bikes and (2) they can go at 50mph.
Perhaps dropping the speed to 40mph and making one lane each way walking/cycling would be a bike city improvement we could aspire to. Then again, probably not. With all the car showrooms round there, its our own little bit of Bristol - Car City.
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