The Evening Post discovers the Bristol Traffic Photo Portfolio

We don't do much coverage of the Evening Post these days, primarily because we've given up reading it. Eventually you get tired of its whiningly repetitive stance against resident parking and 20 mph zones, portraying them as a war on motorists, the death of the cities, a tax on Bristolians, etc. etc. The one thing we never saw was anything praising how the yellow lines have made paveparking and "optimistic corner parking" illegal —and how this was making inner Bristol a nicer place to walk.

Because the bits of the city with RPZ markings have had their pavements restored, and are now easier to walk round with a pushchair those areas still saying "RPZ isn't needed here", such as, say, St Andrews, where the contrast between that and adjacent Montpelier is now significant.

But no, no coverage of that in Evening Post articles, something we criticised it for in the past in a post looking at the history of pavements, parking and "walking opportunities" along Richmond Road, notable for nowhere to walk but the road and being an awful road to drive up or down: cars almost touching on both sides, nowhere to pass an oncoming cyclist, let alone oncoming car. With the RPZ rollout it became not only better to walk and cycle, it became driveable.

From the sole printed press news source in the city: silence.

It's interesting to discover then, that the paper has now moved on from "20 mph will kill our city" to "pavement parking is epidemic" and "is pavement parking getting worse?" The latter is quite amusing as we've been covering this issue for coming on a decade, and the main reason we cut back on coverage was that the RPZ reduced it so much that life was boring. It was not "epidemic", it is "endemic": so widespread and ongoing it barely merits a mention.

The BEP hasn't picked up on that, instead it's filled the paper with various photos of what to us look like everyday parking scenes in the bits of the city that aren't RP-Zoned. If you find it shocking, you need to go for a walk. Anyway, they had the pics up, no doubt shocking those people who don't walk further than the car they've parked on the pavement outside their home. For us, all too familiar. Very much all too familiar. In fact, one which was so familiar we recognised it as one of our own photos




This photo originally appeard in a post denouncing the car S589JDG for being parked on the specific bit of pavement where Richmond Road narrows —and in doing so, stopping cars and vans getting down the hill. That was the reason it had earned a note criticising its parking: not for paveparking, but for paveparking in a way inconsiderate of other drivers.

That photo was published in 2013, republished in an article 2015, where we used it as one of the "before/after" articles on the RPZ changes, an article which explicitly called out the BEP for its failure to cover the benefits of RPZs for pedestrians.

The photo the Evening Post printed was taken from an article criticising the Evening Post's coverage of pavement parking and RPZs.

Amusing as it is, it is still a copyright infringement.

We have a non-normative policy towards reuse of our images and videos.

The Bristolian: unlimited rights, no permission needed.

Everyone else: ask first

1. If the requester is one of: Daily Mail, Sun, Telegraph, tell them to fuck off.
2. If the requester is any other press org, we'd check with the original submitter, probably give approval with credit due us and that original submitter. (if the original author refused, that'd be passed back too)
3. Videos: Link/embed them without any restrictions (obviously), but no to use in some video remake unless its more than just some branding exercise. And again, the Daily Mail can fuck off.

Now what about publication without getting permission?

1. If it was timely news, again, no problem.
2. If it was some photo from the archives, well that's a different matter. Any failure to check there has to be be a due diligence failure or a wilful disregard of our property.

The last time this happened, we extracted a donation to the Bristol Cycling Campaign. Someone had clearly just googled for an image "car parked on zebra crossing", and copied the photo without bothering to question image licensing T&Cs.

What about now?

We see two ways forward without resorting to the legal system, DMCA copyright takedowns, etc.

Option One: a modest donation —say £250— to the Bristol Cycling Campaign. 

Easy all round, it'd make upfor publish an article denouncing cyclists for cycling over a shared use bridge designed for walking and cycling on. We'd get some good coverage of the fact that the BEP was now supporting cycling campaigners in the city.

Option two: an in depth review how the RPZ makes walking in Bristol better.

We to collaborate on an article looking at richmond road's pavement parking over time, where the van-passing incident was nearly one of the bad examples. Here we could not only provide photos from our archives, we could approach the Montpelier resident forced to walk her kids home from school down the middle of the road. She could not only cover the experience of a parent in the "before" period, but her experience now that the RPZ has been rolled out. Maybe she could even talk about the impact of the RPZ on driving round the area.

Seems a reasonable choice to us. Fund the cycling campaign after a week of denouncing cyclists for going on a bridge built for them, or get an opportunity to work on a fascinating article looking at how a inner city parental school dropoff experience has been transformed for the better by the RPZ rollout.

Personally, we'd like the article —it would be a good follow up to the previous ones, and we don't want the author of those articles to feel chastised for writing the first articles we've ever seen to criticise paveparking. We'd even help with the content.

Over to you, Team Evening Post

Censorship

There's an article up on the independent about the war on motorists.

Our fellow travellers, the Association of British Drivers added a comment:

Whilst we are pleased that the penny is beginning to drop with regard to taxation, it is sad that the author refers to driving as a "bad habit", when it is in fact merely a means of going about one's business.

We agree! Accordingly, we replied stating this fact:

We in the bristol traffic project agree. Some people view us driving our van around a narrow city, while texting one hand and sounding the horn at pedestrians and cyclists in our way as "antisocial", our activities, as the ABD says, "a bad habit". Yet as they say, this is the only way to get on with your business. When you are held up by pedestrians on a zebra crossing, of course you have to sound your horn. When you are held up behind a cyclist, of course you have to text ahead to your destination to warn them you'll be late. Yet still this anti-motorist country, with its zebra crossings, its traffic lights and its double yellow lines persecutes us.

And what's happened? Our comment has been "flagged for review" and it is no longer on the site. It has been censored by an online press that cannot accept the truth!

update: we posted asking why praising the ABD for being the voice of van driver is being suppressed and the ABD replied

the Independent is just trying to ensure comments are reasonable and well balanced. Whilst comments like those you made may have been acceptable during the last decade, the country has moved on to more reasoned debate.

That's good. We thought somebody had felt we were taking the piss. That happens all the time.

Men: bicycles are not the answer to your mid-life crises

We like seeing Bristol on TV, and right now the TV show that has coverage is the BBC's Mistresses, one that shows pretty women driving round the city having extra-marital relationships with men who are also driving round Bristol. Got that? There's a link there: cars=sex. 

This fact is important as there a lot of press right now saying that the new mid-life crisis toy is not a sports car, a motorbike or a woman half your age -it's a racing bicycle. These articles are appearing both in proper papers and socialist rags.

This is wrong.

Men: whatever issues you have in later years -  a bicycle will not solve them.

You may have seen the Tour de France, seen Andy Schleck go to-to-toe with Contador in the Pyrenees, and thought "I could do that", but sadly, you can't. You just penalise the rest of us.

Oh yes, it sounds nice, and makes for some articles showing shiny bicycles against mountain backdrops, such as here, Crater Lake, Oregon. Oh yes, you can dream of such things while stuck in the traffic jams on the A370, or the M32.

But look at those mid-life crisis cyclists. Has it really solved their problems? No, they just fill their lycra clothing too much for everyone else to enjoy, and have strange looking legs. The one on the left: drinks too much beer for that top. The one on the right, scrawny, and apparently has not only continued with his bicycle obsession, gone on to come in at #5 in the veterans category of US Cyclocross rankings, and dragged his daughter in that same obsession.

Well, it's their choice, their money you may think. But as well as damaging the family, we, the motorists suffer. You don't see it in those news articles showing the fat men gasping up the mountains, but we know. We get stuck behind them on our trips to cribbs causeway when we get held up by packs of these middle-aged lycra-louts on their Saturday training rides up the A38. We get stuck behind them on our weekday commutes when their training regime mandates mid-week rides. We get stuck behind them when they spend so much money on bikes and bits that they can't afford to drive and have to cycle to work -on our roads.

We even get stuck behind them in the mountains.


The photo above may look nice, but this is the Going to the Sun Road,  the road from the opening scene of the Shining, the only road through Montana's Glacier National Park, a road that last month the Guardian listed as one of the "must visit" roads in the US.

Yet it is somewhere a single mid-life-crisis roadie could hold up line of Recreational Vehicles, each of which could be towing an SUV carrying a quad bike and a jetski. There to enjoy nature, to bring revenue to the area, not faff around pretending they were six again. At least in the US, they recognise this and ban bicycles in summer, but that just means these people ride up illegally. Whoever took this photograph was not only a tax dodging cyclist, they must have illegally ridden up this mountain pass which is rightfully kept free for important people. Us.

Yet still they come, naively believing that spending money on a bicycle, some silly clothing and then pedalling round the mountains is a noble thing to do.  Then there are these "sportives", which is where hundreds of them come out and block through traffic, such as here, on the RAMROD "Ride around Mount Ranier in One Day" event.

As the cyclists block our roads -here there are even signs up to warn us of the inconvenience- the rest of society pays the price of your inability to settle into middle age with a few beers in front of the TV.

For all those men who have been spending too much time loitering around at Fred Baker's, Mud Dock or that fancy shop at the bottom of Park Street, print out this article and read the points below before you fritter away your money.

1. The main mid-life crises toys for men are sports cars, motorbikes, and a women closer to the age of your offspring than your own year of birth.
2. Motor vehicles -especially the open topped car, help you get that woman on the side.
3. Motor vehicles reward those with money: the more you spend, the faster it goes.
4. It doesn't matter how much you spend on a road bike, you will still be overtaken by the 22 year old riding a fixie one-handed while texting a friend and smoking a cigarette
5. That student girl you were after will find that 22 year old fixie-rider cuter than you.

Think about it. Open topped fast cars have a purpose, road bikes don't. 

More on this topic another day. In the mean time, we are watching you. Act your age -get a sports car.

Unter den Linden: the Telegraph goes soft

Every time someone accuses us of being some kind of spoof, we point to the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail and say "if we are a spoof, then these two papers must also be". They aren't -we view them as fellow-travellers.

That's why we are pretty shocked to see that the Daily Telegraph has published an article praising cycling.

Their points

1. It's cheaper than driving or public transport
2. It's the only way to avoid the repressive "film all the cars" state we are still in, despite the coalition taking over from NuLabour.
3. Berlin managed to transform their city to make it nice to cycle round

Obviously, we object to all of these. As, fortunately, did enough people in the article's comments, that perhaps now the Telegraph will know their place better. If we wanted to read articles praising cycling, we'd read the Guardian or other socialist rags.

1. Cycling is only cheaper as they don't pay their dues, because the cost of congestion caused by bicycles, the danger they pose to children walking from the 4x4 to the school gate isn't taken into account.

2. Yes, Cycling may avoid the repressive state we read about in the Telegraph and the Mail, but we want that corrected by having every cyclist, every pedestrian registered, number plated, third-party insured and billed. And the speed cameras removed. Because we drivers are not the criminals, the cyclists are. Look at this man: threatening pedestrians on Karl Marx Allee, Berlin.

And Berlin? Well, whoever wrote that article missed their history. The liberation of Berlin in May 1945 left vast quantities of open space due to the actions of allied forces, and even today the population of the city is way below that which it was designed for.

Then the partition of E and W, on the photographer's side of the Brandenburg Tor, took away the German's rights to drive their cars through this, the centre piece of Deutschland. When the wall came down they kept it closed to traffic, and now, with the US and UK embassies behind, it, it's going to stay that way. This is wrong.

We should be able to drive our cars through the Brandenburg Tor then park them here, on Unter den Linden, the most famous street in Berlin. This is the road where the Nazi government cut down the trees for their marches and rallys. And what did the communists put back: the trees.

The fact that central Berlin is a nice place to walk and cycle is not due to to planning or well-meaning government, it is due to WWII and the repressive, communist, socialist state that followed, and a failure of the FDR to push through the changes this city needs to be a modern European city. After the war, we rebuilt our centre, to give us Broadmead, Lewin's Mead and the Queen's Square dual carriageway. What did Berlin do? Let the pedestrians and cyclists go back to the 19th century on their pre-motor toys.

This may be Europe, but it is not Britain, and any attempt to encourage walking or cycling in our streets must be opposed by the coalition as the EU trying to control our lives.

Someone is stealing our photographs!

This web site exists to document the way that Bristol oppresses us, the tax paying motorist. That is why we were so pleased to read in both the papers last week, the Mail and the Telegraph, that "the war on the motorist is over": that the new government will push back on anti-car activities like speed cameras and parking tickets.

We particularly like this comment on the Daily Mail page:

When cyclists, horse riders and pedestrians actually pay to use the road they might be considered equals, until then car drivers who do pay to use it and who drive the whole economy, mean the car IS king
Matt Munro, Bristol, UK, 13/5/2010 19:50

That's our kind of Bristolian: one who recognises that pedestrians and horse riders have no more right to OUR ROADS than any of those cyclist scum, and that it is we, THE DRIVERS, who keep this mess of a country afloat.

We are sad to see, therefore, that someone has been using our photographs, our documentation of the one pro-car part of Bristol, the North Fringe, and used them in their response to the cycling city route 10 proposals.

The main point of this tax dodger's commentary appears to be that the continued widening of roundabouts, ring roads, new roads from the A38 to Cribb's Causeway and the like are the real transport plans for South Gloucester, and all proposed cycle routes are simply window dressing on the main plans. To which we have to say "and your point is?" The purpose of the proposed routes 7 and 10 is to keep the students out of our way. Once everyone recognises this the plans make some kind of sense. For one of these transport activists to go back through our North Fringe coverage and rather than celebrate the one council that is holding out against this cycling city movement, the one Avon council where the sustainable transport councillor drives to his meetings with the cyclists, is wrong. We put those photographs up praise that part of the city, not to criticise it.

Our lawyers shall be in touch.

BBC gets on message: bicycles are the problem

We were really worried when the House of Commons Public Accounts Committe report on road safety came out -once we'd read the report.

Key findings

• Focus on child safety in deprived areas.
• Speed amplifies injuries so 20 mph zones are great
• Monitor road safety schemes to see if they actually work
• Nobody is monitoring injury rates, so all statistics on road safety have to be viewed as doubtful. Reducing the death rate is not enough if the injury rate is increasing.

We were worried. We we worried that they might pick up on our right to use a build-out by zig-zags for parking, such as demonstrated on Whiteladies Road by YA55VDY at 08:22 on October 7 2009.

Similarly, we were worried they might express concern that driving and parking on pavements at popular junctions during the school run might be viewed as endangering kids, such as again demonstratedby YA55VDY at 08:13 on October 17, 2009.

What to do? We had an emergency phone conference with our fellow travellers, the Daily Mail, and a couple of MPs who were courting the Daily Mail vote. And we had an idea. One of the points said "look at the perceived cyclist/pedestrian conflict", as apparently those people who write lots of letters in green ink to their MPs care about this a lot. That's it, the problem we in Bristol Traffic think is the route cause of risk in our streets: bicycles on pavements.

That's it! we said, focus on this, pretend it is the key finding, not that cars speeding through the less well off parts our cities are killing the children, not that there isn't room on the pavements for bicycles or pedestrians on account of all the cars.

We were a bit concerned that the statistics didn't hold up, that nobody in our city has been killed by a bike on a pavement, but we have had people killed this year crossing the road, we have had schoolkids killed on the pavement by cars, we have had cyclists killed on the road. What to do? Get some quotes from the docile MPs who will do anything to get their names in the paper. And we did.

We got the article out the Daily Mail, that was to be expected -MPs call for laws against bicycles, but since the Jan Moir article on Stephen Gately exposed the paper as being a relic of the 1930s, and something to ridicule, we needed a more mainstream channel.

We wanted to appear on question time, but apparently the BBC had already booked their speaker, so it had to be a bit of journalism instead. Which had us worried. Journalism. That means research, insight and writing. How would the BBC report this?

Would they read the report and come down hard against our right to drive round the city at speed, to finish our commute by parking our cars on the buildout by the double yellow lines, here outside the physiotherapy department of the BRI?

Would the BBC pick on the speed issue, embrace the Bristol Council proposals to reduce the speed limit in the deprived parts of the city? Would they look at the discussion on injury rates, enquire of hospitals what the trends are, and perhaps find some unpleasant facts about that Britain is becoming a more dangerous place to walk around, on account of -dare we say it- the cars.

Fortunately, they went for the MP's quotes rather than even looking at the report's summary This produced some lovely "Target pavement cyclists" headlines and with a consistent "Parliament blames the bicycles" story, even the on-line bicycle press didn't bother to download the report and realise that we, Bristol Traffic, had made the headlines and all the quotes up.

I mean really, how could a respectable news outlet fall for quotes that are straight out of Monty Python? Like this one from Geraldine Smith (Labour), "A police superintendent was at this forum with me and he said that it was legal to cycle on pavements." That is so wrong; the police not enforcing things that aren't actually illegal. Or this one, from Tory MP David Curry, some cyclists were "irresponsible and arrogant road users"? Yes, that is what we want: the next parliament to make being "irresponsible and arrogant on a bicycle" a crime. It will be the first step to banning the two-wheeled terrorists from our streets entirely.

Victory! Success! We, Bristol Traffic, in collaboration with the Daily Mail, are not only writing articles for our own news outlets, we are setting the agenda for the country. Now that the Daily Mail can't be racist, can't blame rape victims and can't be homophobicwithout 25,000 press complaints, attacking the cyclists is the oneluxury the press has left, and we will exploit it to the utmost.

All those bike people that view us as some kind of satire will have a different look on their face now, now that they realise that we are setting the battle lines for the next election. It won't be about financial competence, how to handle the fact that Britain is £270 Trillion in debt and rising, it won't be that the mass employment industries are toast and with North Sea oil declining year on year, we won't have the cash flow that kept us going through the 1980s. The issue that neither party who stands a chance of getting a majority appears to know what to do isn't going to be raised. No, the next election will be about what really matters: bicycles on pavements.

Fear Bristol Traffic! We are in charge, and you, the little people, don't even realise it!