Fixie Riders: don't Slipstream Mountain Bikes

It's January, and you can see who is out and about on their new fixie bike. This rear view video show our (expendable, tax-dodging) reporter turning off St Pauls Road, Clifton, onto Pembroke Road,
at a double-mini-roundabout put in to break Satnav. And coming up from the triangle, along Queen's Road, here comes someone in a shiny clean fixie, who decides to slipstream our reporter (expendable, tax-dodging).



This is where they a number of mistakes

1. Cycling behind someone on a bike without letting them know you are there. Risk: the rider in front might perform some manoeuvre without warning.
2. Cycling directly behind the bike, rather than off to one side, generally further from the pavement. Risk: you have to be able to stop as fast as the bike in front.
3. Cycling behind a mountain bike while you have a fixed wheel bike,
   albeit with a front brake.

We'll assume they were a bit drubbed from the climb and so didn't feel like passing, but they should have hung off to one side. At the very least, when they got behind our reporter (tax-dodging, expendable) they should have looked at the bike, and realised that it was a mountain bike.

In the video, you can see that the fixie rider (tax dodging, expendable, not so good at braking fast), gets to cycle behind the mountain bike until 00:30, when, in front of our reporter, someone on a phone steps out onto the zebra crossing. This puts our reporter into an aggressive-but-non-emergency brake. All well, until someone one a bike shoots up their left, almost into the aforementioned pedestrian. Which was a bit of a surprise.

It was only later, when the question "where did that rider come from", went through our reporters idle mind, that they went for the rear camera and had a look to see what happened. As you can see, they had their hands on the bars, drifted in right behind our camera, and, when the bike in front has to do that stop, nearly ride straight into the back of them, only avoiding it by swerving to the side.

Mountain bikers don't do chain gangs. They don't go along taking turns at the front, slipstreaming each other for performance, before hanging at the back to cycle no handed while you rummage in your back pocket for a gel with the same texture and flavour as baby food. Nor do they try and communicate with each other with little twitches of the hand, or pointing down and waving to say "there's something on the tarmac to avoid".

Instead they cycle along with enough of a gap between the rider in front so that they can see, enjoy and then learn from the mistakes the rider in front makes, rather than join in the crash. Food? Maybe, but they'll stop for that as they are generally lazy and view "cycling no hands" is one of the precursors to a trip to A&E. As for pointing out gravel, potholes or other surface hazards, those are not things to swerve around, they are there to jump over.

And, unlike fixie bikes with one front caliper brake, a modern MTB has hydraulic disk brakes, which, if the bubbles have been squeezed out of the cables, lets the rider bring the bike sliding to a halt with only the light touch of one finger on the brakes.

Because of that one-finger braking, mountain bikers are generally split into the "index finger faction": cycle with their index fingers on the brakes and the "middle finger faction", who use their middle finger. Whatever the choice, except on uphills, they're going to be cycling with their chosen finger on the brakes at all times. And when needed, they'll know to put that on, push their butt backwards to keep maximum weight on that rear wheel, with its 2.2+ inch surface on the ground, and so rather than skid, bring their bike to a halt faster than you could stop a British Leyland era Austin Mini (*).

When you come up behind a bike, see that its got wide tyres and disk brakes on the back, instead of cycling close enough to see whether the brakes are Shimano, SRAM or Hope, you need to think "this is a bike which can stop fast ridden by someone who may know how to use them", and not cycle right up their arse without even saying hello.



Do you know this rider? Are you that rider? Whoever it is: either hang off the side or stay back, especially to mountain bikes. Thanks

(*) MkI Minis had non-servo assisted drum brakes and to stop rear-wheel skid depended on that battery in the boot along with the WD-40, the hammer and the tow rope. As a safety feature, it was designed not to go very fast.

Cyclists -think before you walk round the city

Just as we think pedestrians should stay at home, we think cyclists should question their journeys
 
they won't be cycling -they'll be walking -and in doing so, selfishly, making traffic worse.

  
It's not safe and you know it -why else would you be cycling.

The cyclist above is not only endangering themselves, they are still trying to get their son to school -a child who is being endangered by being forced to walk in the road.

Be like the owners of these bicycles: have a day off
  

Pedestrians -please stay at home!

It's snowing out there -and a lot of people are still trying to walk to their destination

The conditions are so bad that many of these people are walking in the road. This includes all the students trying to get to their lectures -when they could be indoors talking about snow on facebook or twitter.

Walking in the road is dangerous and selfish

Please can everyone trying to walk round the city, think "is this journey really necessary". If not, don't go out.
 
If you must go out -do not walk in the road, where you may hold up a 4x4, such as this landrover in Clifton -someone important trying to get their child to school before driving over to Clifton Village to help the local economy in a cafe.

Think before you walk!

Clifton Expanded Parking Opportunities -consultation

Back in 2011, we looked at the Neighbouhood Partnership proposals for Clifton, adding more parking under a guise which even we were impressed by "to calm traffic". That's a great lie -one to use the next time we get told off for double parking while delivering some of our special adult entertainment products to the Clifton area.

We looked at -and supported- proposals for

• The removal of two bays in Hotwells
• Adding parking in the bottom of Pembroke Road and  further up
• Removing the yellow lines on Clifton Park.
• Adding more parking anywhere it could be found in Princess Victoria Street

It's been nearly two years and we suspected this plan had fallen by the wayside, as the traffic planning officers cornered the councillors and pointed out that the political price of adding eight to ten more parking spaces to the area wasn't worth it. Assuming unrestricted parking on Pembroke road and Hope Chapel Hill, 6 more residents (i.e. voters) would get somewhere to park overnight. If the clifton village parking added an extra four spaces, with a 2h limit, then an eight hour day would add 24 parking opportunities. That's 30 votes overall -max. Yet the political capital spent up on trying to fight the cycling city in one part of the city would be high -because you'd be having to say "we won't spend any money providing safe crossings of Pembroke Road, or the east end of Clifton Park" -issues that also matter to Clifton voters -and potentially more than 30 a day.

Good news! Over Christmas -when the schoolparents would have been away, the consultation for the Traffic Regulation Order to add these spaces has arrived!

Not only that -they propose to add a space by taking away a proposed on-road cycle parking buildout! Finally a part of the city has stood up to this invasion of bicycles, by opting to provide a short stay parking opportunity for a car instead  -leaving cyclists with some insecure bollards that only the foolhardy would use.



To invest in adding 30 parking opportunities a day over making walking and cycling safe is a bold move -one for which we congratulate the two councillors for doing! They must have felt that those thirty votes may keep the two liberal democrat councillors safe, despite the fact that their Westminster colleagues are widely derided as the useless lap-dogs of George Osborne and David Cameron, Presumably they recognised that the people trying to walk or cycle in Clifton are poor people, unlikely to live in the area -or if they do, unlikely to vote.

We in the Bristol Traffic team are overjoyed that in one part the city, the people and the councillors have finally listened to what we have  been saying since 2008; pandering to the cyclists and pedestrians is a mistake!

Looking back at the old days, when the late Chris Hutt was our Clifton Correspondent, what was the third post in our history? Photographic proof that Range Rovers didn't have anywhere to park near the schools except the pavements.


Clifton has always been a special place for us -as much a centre of the driving and parking community as Stokes Croft -albeit with less run-down vehicles-so are excited about this new proposal, part of what we now term, the anticycling-city.

We strongly encourage everyone who supports us, who wants our streets clear of tax-dodging cyclists, for us not to be held up by pedestrians trying to get over zebra crossings, to read the TRO, and respond praising it fully.

We would particularly like for respondents to draw out the proposal "to remove the cycle parking place in Princess Victoria Street (not in force on-site)". This is the best example of how this TRO represents a bold action by the residents and councillors to do something nobody else in the inner city has done -to fight back!

Pembroke Road parking opportunities

Driving further north on Pembroke Road, we come to an area where all the parking spaces are taken. But it's still a wide road, and you can easily get up to 45 along it. No junctions, no zebra crossings, no mini-roundabouts, nothing to get in your way. Perfect. Admittedly, there's one or two bicycles to swerve past, and few schoolkids sprinting to the safety of the traffic islands, but a quick tap on your horn sorts that out.

Look in the other direction, towards the city. The roads are wide, but now there's a bus stop, a pedestrian, and a cyclist.

And everywhere: double yellow lines.

This leads us to our real metric of "where is there room to remove double yellow lines?" It's obvious, when you think about it.

Wherever there is room for people to cycle without getting in the way of important people in cars, there is space to add more parking.

There you have it. A nice simple metric of where we can put more parking. And its important to do this, because otherwise, the pedalling and walking factions, who are secretly defying the Waltham Forest faction in the council, would love nothing better than to put in bicyle lanes along stretches of road -and in a road this wide, they could even try segregation. Because of the double yellow lines, nobody is going to fight back to say "No! This removes the place where we have parked our car for years!"

This is why we need to Walthamize this stretch of Pembroke Road -because it is the only way we, the important people, can resist the so-called "progress" of those subversives, a progress that is really the continuation of the War On Motorists in a different disguise.

Pembroke Road: where should Barbara Janke remove the yellow lines?

Barbara Janke, leader of the council (at least for the next few days)- has taken on the challenge of ensuring that traffic safety "can be improved" by adding extra car parking in Clifton. Of course, we, the tax-payers, know that this is technically "bollocks", but we also know that anything which discourages walking and cycling does reduce the numbers of Killed and Seriously Injured, so provided you don't actually measure foot and bicycle traffic, you can claim improvements. This is the tactic used by central government to claim that the UK's roads are safer than ever, so there's no reason why the Clifton Councillors can't use it.

First, the bottom end of Pembroke Road as it approaches Queen's Road. Look at that -two wide bits of parking area, almost completely wasted. Only one vehicle has dared to pre-empt the proposed removal by doing a bit of paveparking -and they were only loading up.

In the other direction, a happy family walks over the zebra crossing.

Look how much parking space is being wasted here! Not only is there a zebra crossing -encouraging people to endanger themselves by walking- the zig-zags are taking up space for at least eight cars.

Some readers are thinking "more than eight cars", but this is Clifton, remember. Big cars, for important people, like Ranger Rovers, BMW X-series toys. Some of the students do have smaller cars, but Mini Coopers are acceptable -provided they are the new BMW version, not the old British Leyland editions.

If Barbara wanted to live up to the expectations of her local electorate, especially the Keep Parking Free team, she should remove not just all the yellow lines in these photographs, but the zebra crossing too. This would allow much more parking, and hence more traffic calming

Downfield Road: Clifton's secret 20mph zone

While doing our Clifton research we discovered something the area had been keeping secret -there is in fact a 20mph zone up by the Downs, between Pembroke and Whiteladies Road.

The entrance is on Downfield Road

With the 20 mph signage, parents will be as safe with their pushchairs in the middle of the road as they would be in Montpelier. Except of course, there aren't any pedestrians, this being Clifton. It's a neighbourhood watch area, and anyone walking is worth calling the police about. Presumably the 20 mph zone is to protect wing mirrors when paveparking isn't sufficient.

Looking at the school warning signs people may think that its for the kids, and the double yellow lines for the parental 4x4 dropoff

Except since our last visit, the school keep clear markings have been removed, leaving it for residents.

Overall then: odd. The area is too windy to be a decent rat-run, there's nobody on foot or bicycle to push for it. Residents wanting quiet or wing-mirror protection have to be the only reasons. Even so, it's selfish. Imagine if everyone wanted 20 mph zones! And this one is in Clifton, making it the thin end of the wedge. As far as we know, this is the only 20 mph zone in the quarter of the inner city from Cheltenham Road to the A4.

Breaking news: parking restrictions encourage higher vehicle speeds

The new "neighbourhood funding" schemes are great for us, the drivers, as we can use our money to get what we want: parking, without any city-wide initiative like public transport, sustainability or cycling getting in the way. This is why we are delighted to cover the "DEVOLVED TRANSPORT SCHEMES FOR 2011/12" for Clifton and Cliftonwood, which will be up for discussion on Tuesday at 19:00 above Jack's Brasserie behind the waterfront TSB building.

The important people in Clifton have been successful in adding one-way streets by Clifton-college, so making easier to do Range-Rover and Volvo XC60 dropoff, and held up the provisioning of bicycle parking on the grounds that it degrades the listed buildings. However there still aren't enough places to park our important cars. How to add more parking, without appearing blatantly selfish? The answer is obvious: push for it on road safety grounds.

This is the tactic planned for tomorrow, with the following proposals in the set.

• Lay-by at the bottom of Hope Chapel Hill: Existing parking restrictions encourage higher vehicle speeds
• Pembroke Road (St.Pauls Road end). More on-street parking would reduce vehicle speeds.

These claims are far better than the ones for Clifton Park and Princess Victoria Street, both of which just say "existing parking restrictions are too extensive", by which they mean "the bit by the side of the road where people cycle could be used by important people".

We hope all our local supporters turn up for this, and support the proposals and so make sure that we outnumber any cycling/living street troublemakers who sneak in and start calling us selfish gits who are more concerned about having somewhere to park our third car outside our houses than doing something to fundamentally improve Bristol's liveability. Those people don't realise that having somewhere to park our third Landrover -it's more than just a car- does improve Bristol's Liveability. Certainly it makes it easier to walk from the Landrover to our house, and by saving us driving around, reduces pollution and the CO2 emissions from our 3L V8 engines.

Futhermore, once that parking is in, it will be that much harder to put in bike lanes, so any ideas for adding some segregated route up Pembroke Road -our secret high speed alternative to Whiteladies Road- would be killed forever. It's important to do this now, before alternate transport plans progress.

Yes, those troublemakers will say "if we want parking we should have voted for the RPZ", but they miss the point: that would have restricted the number of vehicles we could own. Furthermore, by reducing the number of vehicles parked on the roads on a weekday, vehicle speeds have increased and Clifton is now a more dangerous place to walk. We have a spreadsheet we've just made up to prove it!

Note also that a large number of the other schemes (Ambrose Road, Cliftonwood Road, Alfred Hill, Westbourne Place and Redcliffe hill) are complaints by people about how parking is interfering with pedestrians. It is important to attend to stop this, otherwise the troublemakers will pick up on the complete hypocrisy of pushing for extra parking to calm roads in some parts of the area, while having to introduce bollards and dropped kerbs in other parts. We want parking everywhere, and no RPZ in our way.

Walthamize the planet, and have a nice day.

WX02UNH and critical sections

In computing a critical section is defined as something in which only one entity can have exclusive use of at at time, such as, say, a stretch of road or a single-lane railway track. The different bits of the system need to cooperate to gain access to these areas. One way of co-ordinating this access is the semaphore, a concept from the Dutch Computer scientist, Djikstra, based on the old railway notion of flag waving.

Of course, if a French or Italian person had come up with the idea, they'd have used a different name, like "l'indicateur", the car indicator. Because in these countries, to gain exclusive use of an overtaking area, you put your indicator on -way before you are ready to pull out. In the Alps, to put your indicator on before the turn has finished, before you can see if it is safe to pull out, tells everyone else that you intend to, that you have acquired exclusive use of the oncoming traffic lane.

This is why we have one little criticism of the Corsa WX02UNH on Pembroke Road.

We aren't going to criticise it for overtaking the bus on the wrong side of a traffic island. Yes, you aren't meant to do that, but if the anti-car council is going to conspire with Firstbus to put a bus stop in a traffic island, how else are you going to pass it.

Yes, it may be between 8 and 9 am, peak school run hours, but it is also peak commute hours, so the driver may be in a hurry.

No, what we are going to criticise them for is failing to indicate when they pulled out. They just assumed that nobody else was going to be aggressive and take the overtaking opportunity, when in fact any driver in front or behind could have -and because WX02UNH didn't indicate, they would have no warning that the other car was about to pull out. If two cars had collided while trying to drive the wrong side of a traffic island to overtake a bus -now that would be a complex one for the insurance company.

This is why our driving strategy is "Signal then commit". Your signalling is not a hint "I'd like to pull out", but a warning "Here I come", something people should see. But if you don't do such a signal, you don't help others to get out of your way.

Sunday Cyclists vs GN56FJA, RV10OBJ and RO57WFG

The trouble with a nice spring Sunday is the Sunday cyclists come out -with their kids attached. Unlike commuters, who know their place: the bottom, these militant parents have unrealistic beliefs.

First up Cotham Road, 14:15 on a Sunday Afternoon - GN56FJA is forced to aggressively overtake a bike which shouldn't be in the way.

It's not too dangerous, the oncoming golf doesn't even flash their lights -and they have given the bicycle lots of room. They even waited until the top of the hill had been cleared, so there was enough visibility to see the oncoming golf before pulling out. You wouldn't see such courtesy in London.

A short while later, probably 14:25, the tax dodging family are walking their bike across a zebra crossing on Pembroke Road. We love Pembroke Road -a fast alternative to Whiteladies Road, not a single light, speed camera, bus lane light or other feature to interfere with the sprint from Clifton to the Downs, apart from two Zebra crossings at the bottom. The woman driving RV10OBG -the first 2010 car in our database-, just had a different interpretation of the rules from the cyclist.


Yes, a car is required to give way to a pedestrian waiting to cross or on a zebra crossing -but what if there is an island? Once a traffic island appears, you can ignore the other lane, so they aren't on your bit of the zebra crossing. And as they aren't waiting to cross the zebra crossing -they are on it- that rule doesn't apply either.

Finally, at about 14:30, you can see why we really hate these people, when RO57WFG gets abuse from the parent purely because it turns straight over them while turning from Clifton Park to Clifton Down Road.



The parent and child were probably turning left, so there was no need to slow down or indicate -and this VW Touran was clearly in a hurry -because the man driving didn't indicate at the miniroundabout either. But he achieved his goal: got to the bridge first, where unlike the tax dodging family, the driver paid for the upkeep and the illumination of the bridge.

This shows that one single cyclist can, in the space of fifteen minutes, nearly cause three collisions. You can also hear a small child in the background asking questions about why the deranged parent is shouting registration numbers at the car. What kind of example is that? He will grow up to be one of those people who get banned from supermarkets for shouting at people.

Dropped Kerb Parking Persecution

Since March 1, the council has been promising it will make life harder for us, the city's tax payers, by ticketing our cars on dropped kerbs. And its true, they really are!

Here by Hampton Road and Cotham Vale, HD53UHB has received two tickets.

It's crime? Being parked across the knobbly bit of the pavement -that's all.
 

That's despite the fact there is clearly enough room for a student to walk up the hill and out onto the road -while talking on their phone- we note. Why don't mobile phones detect when someone is using them at walking pace and stop working? Because the telcos make so much money from students strolling around, chatting to their mates, that they don't want any ban on walking+mobile phones.

Over in Beaufort Road, Clifton. Another corner. another car, A3FXX, ticketed.

A week later we can see how the locals have learned and adapted. WP52EFH shows the trick.

If you park far enough away from the dropped kerb, you are no longer blocking pedestrian access. That's OK then.

20mph zone: an affront to car drivers

It was bad enough when some of our road tax was diverted to bicycles, but at least bike lanes are meant to keep bicycles out of our way. Then some troublemaker came up with the idea of 20mph roads, so every road would be a bike lane. Excuse us? "road", "street". Not bike lane.

Portsmouth was a challenge but after a bit of behind-the-scenes work with the council we got all the main roads, all the through roads, all the important ones kept at 30. That offered a number of benefits:

• We could still sound our horn at bikes in the way, so discouraging bicycles. People in a hurry can sprint through the town on the main roads
• We get more reward for spending so much money on big-engined 4x4s. Well, you need to if you want something that big to accelerate well.
• Its easier to get out of speeding tickets if the town is all broken up into 20 and 30 mph zones, as you can claim confusion.
  
• The extra cost of signage reduces the size of the area that gets rolled out,
  

We were pretty chuffed when the Portsmouth review came out, pointing out that adding 20mph signs to back roads had had no tangible benefit. That was the whole point! That was why we put them there!

Unfortunately, some people in the council -and that Jon Rogers has to get a lot of the blame here- read it completely differently, concluding that for 20 mph zones to work, it has to cover the entire area. Yes, he is correct, but that assumes that you want 20 mph zones to work.

We, the important people, don't live in inner Bristol because its dirty, noisy and full of traffic and poor people walking and cycling around. We live in nice parts of S. Gloucestershire or North Somerset and drive in precisely because we can do that instead. Of course the people who live in the inner city want these 20 mph zones, but that's their fault for living there. Our little 21st century suburban enclave has a 20 mph limit too, so that people can drive into their garages carefully. If the people in Southville, Easton and St Andrews want to live in streets like that, they can come out and join us!

Instead in Bristol, this main thoroughfare, Ashley Road will be given a 20 mph limit. That will increase the transit time from Stokes Croft to the M32; it will add an extra two minutes on the commute time to and from the North Fringe from residents of Clifton, Cotham and Redland.

This is not a residential road, it is a direct link between the M32 and other parts of the city. It is so that we important people who don't live in the city can drive to our important jobs, so that delivery vans essential to the UK economy can do their routes.

Here's Ashley Hill. No houses alongside here, a nice road to put your foot down when you get past those ridiculous traffic lights at the bottom. But not now, oh no. Now we will have to pootle.

The worse part is that it knifes the Portsmouth scheme in the back. The amount of under-the-table funding we in the motor industry had to pass on to the relevant people of power was justified given it set a precedent for the rest of Britain - a scheme that let us talk about road safety but without doing anything to force us to slow down.

Now this. A precedent for the rest of the city. How can main roads like Gloucester and Whiteladies stay at 30 mph now? How can useful school/commute rat-runs like Pembroke and Cotham Roads not get their 20 mph limits. Which, if enforced to 30mph, is still 10 mph lower than today.

Worse than the city though: the country. Instead of traffic engineers going to Portsmouth to see what to do, they will come here, and take the same approach home with them. This is a chilling precedent.

We are shocked.

We are equally shocked that not one so-called mainstream media outlet has asked us for our opinion on the matter. Why do campaigns like Speed Safe, run as a hobby by one person and a web site that has barely mastered the <blink> tag get all the quotes in the national papers? Why does Bob Bull from the local Association of British Drivers get his letters in the Evening Post despite the fact their web site looks like something badly designed in 1996 and they only have eight members in the city? The press should be coming to us as the mouthpiece of the motorist, instead of these amateur organisations that cannot be taken seriously. The fact that they have not offends us almost as much as the 20 mph zones themselves.

Build-outs are for Builders

Readers might be surprised to discover that this site is in favour of build outs. Don't they reduce the amount of parking? they may ask. No, they don't. They just stop the little people from using it.

Build-outs tend to be for the exclusive use of residents, delivery vehicles and people working in the houses. This means that they provide a small amount of resident parking spaces without any of the overhead of creating resident parking areas. No need to sticker up cars, paint over roads, enforce pavement or road parking rules. Just leave the build-outs for vans such as Refresh Painting and Decorating and their van KM53RVY. Problem solved!

(This is on the junction of Hanbury and Pembroke Road, outside the (proposed) Cliftonwood CPZ. With build-outs like these, there is no need to expand the proposed zones.)

Environmental Footprints

New Showroom off Pembroke Road, Clifton, pushing environmental housing

They even have a smaller van than most building firms -one that is slim enough that they can leave it on the pavement. This being a Sunday afternoon, WX08SXB has probably been sitting there for 24+ hours, which will incur no environmental costs.