Selfishly holding up a Mercedes

Shocking Footage of a Cyclist holding up an Important Person(tm) in a Mercedes not once, but twice.




This is in Oakfield Road, Clifton, where, despite the ongoing efforts by the council and the Neighbourhood partnership, cyclist are still seen. In the opening sequence we see two of them not looking at all intimidated and almost acting as if they belong in Clifton.

At 18s in, after letting an Important Person(tm) in a Range Rover past, the cyclist flips back their head to see what the vehicle sound is -where they spot a recent Mercedes. Rather than immediately get out of the way of what at this point is a narrowing road, the subsersive carries on, -again, acting as if they have a right to be there.

Once they turn off, however, they sprint ahead -why? to get in front of the Mercedes at the zebra crossing. If the car is turning left, it will be held up directly -and if it is going straight on the tax dodger can use the zebra crossing to clear the main road first, and then cycle in their way again.

Today the car is turning left, the cyclist dismounts and walks slowly enough in front of the car that the pedestrians coming the other way can get far enough over to again hold up the car. As the tax dodger dismounts and proceeds down Whiteladies Road, they glance back at the Important Car(tm) to see the Important Person(tm) looking unhappy at the audacity of a tax-dodger to hold them up not once, but twice.

Correct Parking Alignment

One of the ongoing debates in the country is "how far from the kerb can you park". Indeed, there is a (very abusive) web site dedicated to criticising drivers.

We are different, and strive to praise everyone for their efforts.


Here, for example we can clearly see that BX54FVC has managed to get their kerb-side wheels as close to the kerb as is possible without damaging them,  and both wheels are perfectly aligned.

This is skilled parking here on Brighton Mews, Clifton. Residents of Montpelier should consider themselves show up by such skill -except they have to fit into narrow gaps on the pavement, whereas this car probably didn't even need to reverse, just drive up on the dropped pavement.

FirstBus joins our campaign against Zebra Crossings!

The zebra crossing wars on whiteladies road are hotting up. The bus companies had put together a proposal to make it harder to walk over the road -replacing some zebra crossings with pelican crossings, and here, by Oakfield Road, moving the crossing away from "the line of desire" and zig-zagging it so as to stop anyone with bicycle from using them. By discouraging walking and cycling, those people who don't have cars now have no reason not to use FirstBus, so will be a revenue stream.

Sadly, the troublemakers -and we know who they are- pushed back, and this crossing will remain as is. What can we do? Well, FirstBus knows what to do, it's pretend the crossing isn't there. The more people realise that buses will go straight through it, the less tempted they will be to use the routes.

Congratulations, then to WX06OMO, for showing strength of will and not even bothering to slow down for the person standing by their bicycle waiting to cross this junction.

Whiteladies Road: a weekday dataset

Our last trip down Whiteladies road shows that on a weekend, yes, pedestrian shoppers did hold up through traffic. This implied that yes, the FirstBus/Showcase bus route plans to reduce pedestrian crossing options may benefit their schedules, but we were worried about the impact on us cars getting out from side roads.

This video is different as it's a visit by our expendable cyclist on a weekday morning, down the bus lane from Oakfield Road, and through the Triangle as far as University Road, where they head off. Commentary first, analysis later.

At 0:24 FH56CVV switches lanes early, but as everyone else in the RH lane who isn't turning right also goes left, they are forced to give way to the vehicles in front of them anyway.

From 0:29 to 0:40, a bike lane that even waltham forest would be proud of. Its worn-out nature hints that it's popular with larger vehicles, while the trees keep it bumpy.

At 04:40 A9VNG is in the ASL, but we suspect that it was in there when the lights change. Why the suspicion? One car in the pedestrian area and one in front in the yellow hatched "only enter when clear to exit" area stopping cross traffic from St Pauls Road and Tyndall's Park Road getting across. Incidentally, Tyndall's Park road (on the left) here is no left turn, St Paul's (on the right, into Clifton) is no right turn, so all congestion coming up from the Triangle is Whiteladies Road traffic. Note also this junction provides no time for pedestrians to cross when the traffic isn't actually allowed to drive -if only all major junctions in the city were like this, congestion would be much improved. The BBC offices are on the left, incidentally.

Following the cyclist who is commuting without helmet, body-armour or hi-viz clothing, we eventually discover what is holding up WL-road traffic, it's the "triangle" gyratory system, which our tax-dodger hits at 1:43. The underlying problem is that Whiteladies Road traffic is forced to give way to traffic coming from the right, which initially means traffic from Clifton. Further on, at 2:17 we get held up by traffic all coming into the city from the A4 or the Hotwells's Bridges and then up Jacob's Wells road.

There are four lanes here, one for parking, one turning right at the next junction, and two straight on, but that leftmost one is lost even to vans ignoring bus-lane signs, not just by the police car at 2:41 but by the taxi-rank at 2:53.

WN59UDP is held up by these taxis forcing them to wait with all the in-town traffic, so as soon as they can they cut left in front of the bicycle, through the pedestrians and up University Road -only to find that the Biffa refuse collection lorry is in the way and ignoring the important traffic being held up. Finally passing that, they can sprint up to Woodland Road, where as you recall the Evening Post was campaigning against two paid parking spaces going away, which we felt was overreacting as nobody parks their except arts students, and their tuition fee increases will eliminate that luxury.

However, today we can see that the paid parking area is also popular for parental dropoff outside Bristol Grammar School -and it actually makes for a nice, low-chaos dropoff area. Admittedly, there isn't enough of this short-stay parking right in front of the school, forcing some parents to stop in the double yellow lined areas, but the alternative would be parking on the other side of this (one-way) street, forcing the children to cross the road. Would you want your children to cross a busy road like this? Exactly. Parking on the double yellow lines outside the school entrance is the only safe place to drop your kids off and be sure they get to school alive.

Now, returning to the Whiteladies Road issue, what does the bus plan proposal change on this stretch? The Oakfield Road crossing will be moved further away from the road, so making it less useful to pedestrians trying to walk from Cotham to Clifton or bag. Plus one point. But, this makes it harder for cars to get out or over from these roads, so minus one point.

Heading in to town, the right hand turn to Clifton will be removed for all but buses. This will turn Oakfield road into the primary rat-run option, but as we've seen, the moving of the zebra crossing makes it trickier. What they aren't doing is extending the bus lane any further south, and they are leaving that toy bike lane in there. We say toy as its so half hearted that no rational cyclist will think they are welcome -what with the faded paint and tree roots, but its very presence implies that some people in the city do welcome cyclists. No, better to remove it and put a cyclists dismount sign up.

Entering the triangle is more informative. Congestion is caused here by traffic joining the road from other places (Clifton, Jacob's Wells Road), and whatever is slowing them down on their final journey. There are no pedestrian-only lights or zebra crossings to play with, so there's little that can be done to make pedestrians feel less welcome, no tricks to make the schedule more accurate.

And that's the key problem. The goals of the showcase route are faster bus journey times and a more predictable schedule. Removing and moving zebra crossings will only help with this out of hours, on weekends and midday, because on a weekday morning the problem is more fundamental: Erlang's Laws. Congestion is a result of the ingress rate of a queue being higher than the egress rate. The reason vehicles can't leave whiteladies road isn't that there are vast numbers of people struggling to turn up Cotham Hill (more on that another day), or any of the side roads, it is because the merging of multiple queues at the triangle creates a bottleneck which having one lane dedicated to bus stops and a taxi rank doesn't do much to help.

And do we care about mid-day firstbus schedules? No -and neither should anyone else. People using the bus at weekend and mid-day weekdays are either people who can't afford a car, people with bus passes, or people who have made some ideological decision to take a bus: passengers FirstBus can take for granted. If they want to make money, they need to get the commuter traffic, and quite frankly, changes to pedestrian crossings aren't going to do it. They may help us car commuters by reducing the number of pedestrians and cyclists, but given our dataset implies that the Whiteladies Road congestion is due to problems in the city centre, those crossing changes aren't going to help buses or our cars on whiteladies road at peak hours, which is when it matters to us as well as FirstBus.

Sorry FirstBus, but whatever datasets you have on congestion problems on Whiteladies Road, they were clearly collected by FirstBus or Council staff during their working hours, rather than during am or pm rush hours. This is the only explanation why your proposals don't just do nothing for us drivers while making pedestrians and cyclists suffer, they don't appear to help buses either.

That's the irony there. This proposal has already got the cycling campaign saying "oppose this it's anti-pedestrian and anti-cyclist", it's also anti-car, but we think it manages to be bus-neutral at the same time. That takes skill, that does.

More Whiteladies: The Oakfield Road crossing

Continuing our Whiteladies Road coverage, here is Oakfield Road, the zebra crossing by it, then the bus/bike lane leading up to the double parking area by the BBC. Note that when the Kingsdown RPZ is rolled out, the council will steal the double parking opportunities here, which will reduce the parking capacity of the street by about a third.

We've covered this crossing before, and yes, cars do often drive through without stopping. But today, its an inbound bike that goes through the crossing ignoring that outdated bit of the highway code that says you should stop for pedestrians. We don't agree with that law ourselves, so aren't going to criticise a bicycle for doing what we'd do, if only the van parked in the bus lane wasn't stopping us getting into that lane and doing the same trick.

Bristol Traffic announces a campaign against zebra crossings

A lot of people complain that all we ever do is take photos of cars parked badly and make fun of them. Well, we don't actually make fun of them -we are praising their innovative solutions of the problem of how to park in the city, now that the council has taken anti-car actions such as adding a new 5000 car car park in the centre purely for shoppers.

But we need to branch out, we need to raise the bar. And last week's coverage of Southmead shocked us. There were children: outside the house. Some of them on bicycles. None of them with helmets. Do they not know how dangerous this is?

The BBC coverage has shown us that we need to do more, so we have secretly stuck some cameras on pedestrians and cyclists round the city, and are seeing what it is like from their eyes. This does not mean that we support walking or cycling around the city, only that we want to see what it is the troublemakers are whining about. We will interpret the videos as we see fit, not what our undercover camera crew thinks.

Here is video #1, a pedestrian crossing whiteladies road at a zebra crossing.

As you can see, the red car CH51RLY decides that it is too important to stop for the pedestrian and instead decides to drive straight over the crossing, 5cm away from the pedestrian.

Is this wrong? Not at all! The driver clearly has to get to work, is probably tired and on the phone. Anyone would do the same thing.

It's not as if they are running red light or anything! We don't understand why these pedestrian rights groups are whining about cars endangering their right to cross roads safely. They have no such right!

And zebra crossings, just like traffic lights, create congestion. Imagine if the driver had had to stop here? an extra 15 seconds on their journey, right? Now scale that up to the number of zebra crossing and pelican crossing you might see on a commute in to work. At least ten more. That's three minutes of your commute time being spent waiting for pedestrians to toddle over. Of course the driver runs the lights -its the only way to keep the city moving.

For this reason, Bristol Traffic is pleased to announce our new Campaign against Zebra Crossings. Every zebra crossing in the city creates congestion. Every zebra crossing says to pedestrians "It's OK, you should walk round Bristol", leading them to walk round the city, eventually having to cross roads that don't have zebra crossings -getting into accidents, and blaming us, the car driver!

Join the Bristol Campaign Against Zebra Crossings today! We will print a manifesto in the week and ask all the parties and leading celebrities for their support! Sign up your support below!

Zebras belong in Zoos!

mobile phone criminals

Crap Cycling and walking in Waltham Forest -which we only keep an eye on to make sure that Boris is doing a good job at keeping those tax-dodgers in their place- is picking up on the threat that cyclists on mobile phones present.

Our thoughts exactly. There should be laws against this kind of thing, and if the cyclists are not going to obey them, car drivers should be allowed to enforce them, vigilante style, probably by overtaking them then braking suddenly and turning.

Here we see someone on the phone on a quiet empty road in Clifton on a Saturday afteroon. The greenery are something that has been causing a problem recently, as apparently the street lighting is poor. The greenery makes the streets darker and more edgy here than in say, tree-free inner-city areas like St Pauls or Upper Easton. With the reduced lighting and the illusion of green and pleasantness, the risk that a pedestrian will blindly step out in front of a cyclist is increased -it is far more likely than on a busy main road. Yet this man is making phone calls while going along, instead of wearing the high-viz clothes what would attract the attention of pedestrians, or a helmet to reduce the damage he causes them when they step out in front of him.

If these subversives had vehicle numbers, we would be able to report them to the police, instead of being forced to stick our head out the window and swear at them as we drive our landrover discovery past at 40 mph while taking these photographs one-handed.

Dangerous Dropoff

Parents care for their kids. Here is one who is trying to do everything right. He's bought the 4x4 for its extra safety. He's driving the kid to school, not walking. He's parked the car right on the keep clear markings on the corner outside the nursery school so the distance between car and school is least. All designed to maximise child safety.

Yet right at the last minute: gets the kid in the truck V054EVP out from the roadward side of the vehicle. On the corner. Now, a 4X4 is wide enough you probably can't reach across from the other side, but surely this dad takes their little one to nursery regularly, and would know what to do. You park the car in the same place it is now -the keep clear zone on the corner- but facing the other way. You just need a drive-to-school routeplan which pulls the car up outside the school with the kid's door on the pavement side -better yet, up on the pavement itself.

Just as Transport for London has a web site to plan walking routes, we need something that shows parents the safest way to drive their kids to their schools

Success!

On Monday in Oakfield Road, there was a car getting a warning note for parking on the pavement. Did it work? Was the car deterred.

Yes. On wednesday the car that was warned was not parked at this corner, instead the parking space was occupied by the city-pickup WX56GMO, one sporting a visible logo to build brand awareness from parking vehicles

And on Thursday, the rental car PB56XAS.

Neither of these cars were the one that received a warning note from the police. That car has chosen to park elsewhere, freeing up this corner to other vehicles.

Well, that worked, didn't it?

Here's an interesting question. If Bristol Parking Services actually enforced parking issues, would it have any effect?

Oakfield road.Monday Nov 24, 08:41. The car T790JAD is parked on the corner -and is sporting a ticket.

Clearly it is being victimised for trying to park in anti-car Bristol. What will it do?

Tuesday, 08:51, Oakfield Road. The car T790JAD is parked on the same corner


Ths time: Further out.

A ticket? Why?

Here's a BMW on Oakfield Road, Clifton, just opposite a nursery school. Its not blocking visibility of traffic turning left, and there is enough room for pedestrians.

The car is parked in front of a tree, so any pedestrian walking along here would run into the tree -this car is not making the pavement any narrower


Yet it appears to have a ticket. Why? What has it done?

Nothing -it's only a warning. False alarm. That's all right then. Clearly the car R455ORU will feel suitably victimised and complain about harassment.

Incidentally, this photo was taken in the morning; this is probably not a commuter. A resident? Forced to park on the pavement by all the commuters and shopopers blocking the road? Perhaps the alternative would have been to walk.

Insensitive Bike Parking

As part of our ongoing campaign against dangerous bike parking outside schools, here we have footage of bike outside a nursery school in Oakfield Road, Clifton

By taking up limited pavement space, the cylist is making it harder for the Toyota Rav 4 T477LLE parked on the keep clear markings to open their door and get their small child out the back and into the nursery safely. What insensitive bike parking! Whoever did this should be ashamed! They probably even cycled onto the pavement before they stopped.

range-rover parking

We do now have a photo of one -exactly one- range rover that is parked in compliance with the highway code. This is not it; this is the range rover G1UYA in Oakfield road Clifton.

The owner has tried to park it in the driveway, but the presence of other vehicles, like a fiesta and a scooter. Inconsiderate vehicles that have forced this one out into the pavement.

Where there is barely enough room to get a bicycle by.

One interesting question about the proposed CPZ parking scheme, is will it increase pressure to overfill driveways. If you pay the #2 vehicle fee for a second vehicle, then you save a lot of money by parking half in the drive, half on the garden or pavement. Indeed, you could probably earn money by renting out such space.