How much parking does the BRI have? 1.9 miles

One aspect of the greenwash letter on the new BRI multi-storey car park was its claim that the current multi-storey transport hub only had 200 spaces. That was a surprise, as if you ever spend any time in that part of the city you will know that UBHT property can be recognised by the way all garden areas have been converted into some form of parking.

Have the PR consultants forgotten to mention that detail? Hope that locals wouldn't pick up on that any more than they'd be expected to notice that you can't set an 8 floor car park into a hill when there's a child's play area right behind it? Whatever the reason, that failure to list all the parking spaces seems designed to make you feel sorrier for those who can't park -and again, by emphasising patients over staff, going for the maximum sympathy

Sadly, we are a data driven organisation, so set out to count up the spaces ourselves. Attempt 1 was on a Sunday afternoon, it took about an hour to get round and is too boring to share. What's surprising is how many little blocks and crannies they've managed to fit a car into. We estimate that in the combin f BRI and St Michaels hill hospital "campus", there are 400+ spaces, outside the existing multi-storey transport hub. That's not obvious to patients for the following reason: a lot of these spaces are dedicated to staff. As for the disabled? You get into double digits, but really -the majority of dedicated disabled parking is the double-yellow line areas on the council roads.

Here is our second attempt at a tour of the parking areas, starting in Dove St at the children's playground the BRI pretends doesn't exist, finishing off directly above it in Marlborough Hill place. This complete loop of the many transport hubs belonging to UBHT here takes 15 minutes, and covers 1.9 miles. That is not a typo. If you cycle round each bay in the car parks, one by one, the total amount of space comes in at just under two miles. There's a small amount of public road to connect all this together, but there's parking there -free form disabled, paid for visitors. How can the hospital PR team say with a straight face that it doesn't have enough parking when it has 1.9 miles worth?


What they should be doing is looking at the allocation of it: how much to staff parking, does facilities have theirs in the right places, how many people with disabled parking needs come a day -and are they satisfied. Instead, we get a grand plan to poison central Bristol, one which simply puts off addressing the big issue: why does everyone seem to expect unlimited staff and visitor parking at a hospital in the centre of a city?

Anyway, here's the video showing exactly how much parking there is for the UBHT to choose how to allocate. It's taken about 5pm on the first day any light drizzle had fallen from the sky, making the roads a bit skittery; you can hear the back wheel slide out at one point.


(Literal) High point: our (expendable) reporter discovers the base of the St Michael's Chimney. It just comes up out the ground, behind the asbestos waste skip and near the toddlers house. Maybe in future it will get the recognition it deserves as central Bristol's highest structure. We'll need a Banksy or two on it first though.

For those who hate our cyclists (expendable), skip to the end of the video and you can see them getting a "snakebite" puncture just trying to ride down one of the many potholed roads in the city. This is Bristol cycling. You can't even complete a two mile loop of the BRI car parks without getting a puncture on the small amount of council road covered on the ride. Interesting question though: given this is clearly filmed as happening on a council road, are the council billable for the replacement inner tube?

Finally, purists may fault us for not actually covering three of the for floors of the existing multi-storey transport hub. Can't get in there see: staff only. The secret that UBHT press releases dare not mention.

Downhiller Commitment on Marlborough Hill

Marlborough Hill is 25% gradient zero visibility at the bottom. When the council was asking for places to put in contraflows for bicycles, this was one where even the tax dodgers consensus was "no, too dangerous" -though as they have ninetree hill as their secret cut-through, they have less need of it than us motorists. Usually.

This rider is brave, and descends at a speed where there would be no opportunity to steer out out the way or stop were something big to come out of a side road.

You can see it in the video -and hear it to; the sound of hign-end knobbly tyres on wet tarmac. tyres which offer less surface area on tarmac that slick tyres, and hence can sustain less braking force in the wet. Mud, they work, but on road, not so useful.

We've covered the rules for aggressive downhill work before: runout, align, commit! This MTBer is aligned, and 100% committed, but the runout looks dubious. All it takes is a vehicle to pull out from the upper of the two road, the one he turned into, and it's game over.

What's also interesting here is the sheer number of people walking up and down this hill. Walking and cycling activists could make the case for downgrading this from a road to a pedestrian/cycle path. We're against that, obviously, because it would eliminate a secret rat-run from Kingsdown to Dighton Street -one used by cars, cyclists and pedestrians alike

Taking the moral high ground

The BBC has finally covered this alarming trend of cyclists to video their commutes then complain about them. Unlike most BBC new articles, where Adam Rayner gets paid to laugh at the cyclists, this article seems come out in favour of the cyclists, rather than say they deserved to get beaten up for being in the way and not paying road tax.

Fortunately, the commenters noticed this, and corrected the bias. Hopefully they will be writing in to the BBC to complain about a lack of balance too. We'll quote a select few

177. anjuna

We have cycle lanes all over Rutland, which are regularly ignored by cyclists. Instead the choose to ride 2 abreast on the road, causing hold ups and hazards. I think cameras in cars to capture bad cyclists would be a good thing. How about "identifiers" on cycles, so the police can prosecute bad cyclists?

Problem: it's not currently illegal for bicycles to cycle in our roads and hold up traffic behind. We understand why it makes you want to kill them, but then you not only lose the moral high ground, you have to stop the email you are composing on your phone.

208. Flaunder

When are cyclists going to have to pay to use the road? why shouldn't they have a registration plate on the back, or a speed metre when they are going at super speeds down a pedestrian footpath! Some cyclists don't even wear a high vis vest or have lights! Why shouldn't they be fined on the spot! Most cyclists have no regard for cars on the road! maybe we should film them!

Problem: we just checked the highway code and nowhere does it say "cyclists MUST wear hi-viz clothing". This makes it hard for police or PCSOs to fine them on the spot for non compliance. Now, you could push for it to be a law, but really that doesn't address the true problem, which is they shouldn't be there in the first place.


226. Barton71

Obviously the van driver in this story was out of order and his reaction was way over the top, but as a van driver myself, I understand the frustration cyclists can cause. There is nothing worse than having to slow down to 10mph every few hundred yards, because a group of cyclists have all bunched up or because there is no room to pass a single cyclist who is struggling to get up a hill.

This identifies one of the real issues. It's not just that these unpaid criminals are on our roads -they are in our way on the roads. They slow us down, then whine when we sound our horn, or criticise them in the local or national press.

One thing we do have to fault some of these community reporters for is making unsubstantiated claims. We like defensible data, yet people were saying "all cyclists run red lights", which isn't true. You only see the ones running the red lights, so end up self selecting. It's disappointing to see such use of inadequate datasets, and with defensible photographic data being key aim for our site, it's time to look at the issue in more detail.

First, Whiteladies Gate/Whiteladies Road pedestrian crossings. Our unsuspecting cyclist reporter dismounts with their small child and walks over a zebra crossing and then the whiteladies pedestrian crossings.

Note how the white van waiting to turn gives way to the pedestrians.
At the pelican crossing, the family waits for their turn to get across. The lights change frequently here, giving them 15s to sprint across.

Except what happens today? Someone on a bicycle just rides up through the crossing. Yes, he does have hi-viz and a helmet on, so commenter Flander will be happy -no need to fine him- but he does cycle straight through the red light that is being used by pedestrians including parents with children.

There we have it then, 100% of cars, following the law, 100% of cyclists: criminals.

Now, the cycling campaigners will say "But what about cars that...", but that is only a subset of cars. We know this, again from our defensible datasets -such as  on Marlborough Hill last week:

See? Four cars drive up the hill, before one car, BP52XAR, drives down past the no-entry signs and the big paintwork saying no-entry.

Five cars, only one completely ignoring the signs. That means the number of cars choosing to break the law this weekday morning is 20%, compared to 100% of cycles in our previous survey.

There you have it then. All cyclists are criminals who should be fined on the spot, while only some drivers are a bit naughty. And when drivers do something to get round this anti-car city, they get videoed and their actions appear on web sites like Fight bad driving -with their registration numbers. Whereas when the cyclists appear, all that can happen is people who know them will say "hey, you made Bristol Traffic!" and they can snicker amongst themselves.

Because of this clear evidence, we, the drivers, can retain the moral high ground.

Incidentally, this whole thing has made BikeSnobNYC. Funny.

Selfish Parents

The same time we were getting a video of one driver, X108YDY, prepared to fight the anti-car city and use the secret rat-runs of Kingsdown, we were also getting some shocking footage of parents walking their kids to school.

Some were clearly going on to cycle to work, so instead of driving their children to school in comfort and safety, they were being forced to walk alongside a bicycle -while the parents push them without even a helmet on!

Others were actually encouraging their children to cycle to school.

Such actions not only endanger the children, they threaten the bodywork of those of us who drive the wrong way down one-way streets as an alternative to traffic lights. Can't these parents see that we are in a hurry!

KTT86LT takes the easy direction on Marlborough Hill

The Bristol Traffic Project is a Big Society project, a community database of those people bold enough to stand up for their rights in an anti-car city. Today we are pleased see it at work.

This is Marlborough Hill, "nominally" one way. We say "nominally", as it is wider than most two-way streets in nearby areas. While over in Waltham Forest, Freewheeler complains that one-way streets increase traffic speed, our niggle with it is that it increases the expectation by cyclists that they should be on the road.

Look at this video of the polish-plated BMW KTT86LT heading doing a bit of contraflow on Marlborough Hill.



The driver is giving way to cars coming up the hill, on the narrow one way bit he even slides to one side to let the bicycles up this 1:5 hill. Yet are the cyclists grateful for his generosity? No, they abuse him. At least he is generous enough to laugh politely while shaking his head, but then he is probably in a hurry. Why else take this contraflow rat-run on a Sunday morning?

Returning to our community database project, note how we always omit spaces in registration numbers. This makes it easier to index them in large distributed column tables and other fancy servers, which makes it easier to find them in the search engines of our strategic partners, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! included. Today we can see that KTT86LT has already been seen in Stokes Croft. We are slowly building up our dataset on who is prepared to stand up against the oppressors -and who the little people are.

If you have not yet had the honour of being on our site -you are probably one of the little people.

Hail the Rebel! X108YDY

We celebrate people who stand up against oppression, who fight an anti-car council in and anti-car city. This why we are proud to celebrate the driver of X108YDY as he drives down Marlborough Hill, from Kingsdown to Jamaica Street.

For some reason he didn't seem to appreciate that he was on camera and thought it was a stokes croft weird person who had come up the hill, rather than a member of the Bristol Traffic reporting team. The parents walking their kids to school through Marlborough Hill Place and then the hospital car park were giving funny looks too, hence the explanation at the end that it's on camera.

It is only by driving the wrong way down this street that motorists can get rapidly from Kingsdown and without getting stuck in traffic on Horfield Road. It should be made two way. Admittedly, there isn't room for two cars, but it's wider than your average Montpelier street, so why the problem?

Finally! Some suffering!

After the shocking scenes of happy cyclists, we managed to position our camera the next day to catch some cyclists looking unhappy about the hills in the city.

First, this one at the top of Marlborough Hill

Later, this one atop Cotham Vale

And here, at the top of Constitution Hill. The sheer expression of suffering is heartwarming it should be the cover photo for the next council-funded cycle-in-Bristol newsletter.

Finally, someone suffering up Bridge Valley Road.

It is good to see these people in pain, makes up for the space and money they cost the city. Odd that whoever they are, none of them have helmets and hi-viz on, just T-shirts and fixed wheel bicycles, but that just makes them suffer more, which is how we -and clearly they- like it.

Contraflow

We must apologise for the lack of interesting photographs or videos, but it has been a dull week. Our secretly "instrumented" cyclist has not been doing anything dangerous or exciting, apart from an incident with a car on shaldon road that did not appear on film. This is a pity, as the "you cyclists don't pay road taxes so should get out of the way" lecture the tax-dodger apparently received would be worth sharing more widely.

What we do have is this video of one of our monitored subversives cycling the wrong way down a one-way street.

It is only through the selfless actions of the red car that chose to drove the wrong way down Marlborough Hill, that no oncoming traffic could endanger the cyclist. We praise this car for recognising the dangerous situation which was developing, and addressing the safety issue in a non-confrontational manner. This is why the car drivers of Bristol deserve more praise than the cyclists and pedestrians -whine, whine, whine, that's all they do. But this car, sees a dangerous situation "bicycle going the wrong way down a hill" and rather than complain or create conflict, just slid in front to protect the bicycle. Sadly, we cannot see the vehicle's registration number to award it the full recognition it deserves, it will have to go down as an anonymous samaritan.

Not No-Entry, Slow-downs signs

In our Friday Brain Teaser, some people commented on the no-entry signs at the entrance.

These people need to get a newly-updated "Bristol Highway Code" document, which will bring them up to date with recent changes in the meaning of signs. For the particular Red Circle with White Minus, it's severity has been downgraded.

Old: Do not enter this road
New: Slow down when entering this road

The vehicle heading down Marlborough Hill, WR09FRJ is adhering to the new signage, as the brake lights show that they are slowing down on entering the one-way system from the low-priority entrance.

Bristol Traffic welcomes contributions showing this sign's new meaning being followed, as well as other recent changes in the meaning of other signs.

New Road Layout

This is Marlborough Hill, Kingsdown, the secret road through the BRI. The sign says "New Road Layout Ahead"

The changed layout was a narrowing of the road, so as to discourage cars from driving the wrong way down a one way street without noticing. It is based on two assumptions: the driver notices, and that the driver cares. For those drivers who do need to use this high-performance route from Kingsdown to Marlborough Street -and hence the M32- the main problem with this new road layout is that the road is now too narrow for you to squeeze past bicycles. Fortunately, it's a very steep hill and bicycles will be grateful for any excuse to rest.