Clifton: last days of Christchurch School paveparking

Royal Park is yet to get its markings, so we can view the invaluable space the council will be taking away, ruining with ugly yellow lines

Here, by Christchurch School, the lines already exist -but as they can be ignored, they have a beauty of their own

Round the corner, there's more pavement space. Its inevitable the council will put down double yellow lines here —just so schoolchildren can get to school safely

Yet look at our archives: we've evidence back from 2008 that there's enough space for cars and children!



Given that small children on scooters can already squeeze past parked cars, there is no justification in adding more ugly yellow lines —or even enforcing the ones that are already there

Colston School declares more war on parents

No sooner had we issued a call for more low-quality pictures than one reaches our inbox from "M", showing how Colston's Primary School is persecuting parents.

It's bad enough they have bicycle parking in the playground, now they have a large sign in front of the keep clear zone.

Welcome to Colston's Primary School

Around our school please drive safely

DROP THE 'DROP OFF' HABIT

The yellow lines protect our children. Stay off them!

Irresponsible parking endangers our

children's lives and is reported to the police.

Ignoring the fact that when you push your child out the door while keeping the engine on in neutral and not even bothering to put the handbrake on isn't technically parking -just unloading -it is needless persecution.

We look back fondly on how it used to be, when small children could get views of motor cars that they could aspire to own in later years.

It was only back in 2008 that we started documenting our city, and today we must mourn the many parking spaces removed for build-outs and bike parking -and now, even School Keep Clear zones are taken from us.

Camera Enforcement Vehicle: Bristol declares war on school parents

"Camera Enforcement Vehicle". An odd term. It has a hint of Mad Max's "Interceptor", back in the days when Mel Gibson did half-decent films. In Mad Max, the interceptor existed to catch criminals threatening the streets and the safety of citizens.

We are sure that the council thinks their Enforcement Vehicle is there for the same goal, but we know what it has done: it has declared war on hardworking school parents who have nowhere to park their 4x4 for child dropoff except in the School Keep Clear lanes.

Today: when you see the traffic officers outside the school you know to drive pass, take the five minute hit on child dropoff to avoid the ticket. Once they've been and gone, that's it for the term. Safe. But not now.

Look at this car  R009OVT. It's got a camera on top, a GPS unit lurking inside. Now all it has to do is drive past a school and it can take a photograph of all the parents parked in the parent-parking-zone, then send them tickets later. Because it can do drive-by ticketing, it can cover multiple schools in a day -increasing the risk of getting caught. And you don't get any warning, you won't know to detour on the dropoff that day. After the dropoff: uncertainty. Did they pick on you today?

Worse yet the ANPR school parking car is not just targeting school zigzags, but also anyone stopping in a bus stop. Is it really so bad for people to have to get off the bus in the middle of the road? If people are worried about safety then the bus driver could simply drive on to the next stop (as they are apparently officially expected to do)!

They are enforcing loading restrictions, so stopping legitimate traders like Tesco from stopping their vans outside shops during rush hour. What sort of priority does Bristol put on the economy?

Even worse: the Evening Post isn't on our side here. They have joined the War against Motorists, in the same week the evil anti-car EU bumped up fuel prices by declaring an oil embargo against Iran. This is just victimisation

There's only one way to defeat this: stand firm.

Make sure nobody from your kids school calls Parking Services on 0117 922 2198 giving them the school location and exact time morning and evening when they would catch the most parents on a drive by.

Similarly, make sure they don't email parking.services at bristol.gov.uk giving them the same details, or telling them of your favourite secret bus-stop short-stay parking areas.

If nobody tells them of the places and times they should be enforcing parking at schools or in bus stops -we will continue to be able to exercise our right to do so!

Hotwells Primary: the parking problem

While down at Hotwell's Primary, we thought we'd have a look round to see where else parking restrictions could be relaxed.

Well, there's a bit by the school marked "school keep clear" that looks like a good opportunity.

Round the corner there a build out with bollards and four bike parks, stopping even important parents from using it.

There's even a sign "stopping on zig zags is dangerous and selfish". But as that's not live evening and weekends, that's a problem for commuters rather than residents.

Round the corner -on a weekend- no parking problems at all, with a pavement where you can park close enough to the fence to ensure that neither side of your vehicle gets scratched.

This is why we think the proposal to take away one short-stay dropoff point on Hope Chapel Hill to add at most two parking spaces is misguided. There's lots of pavements to park on outside of the weekday, and if you add two more spaces, well, that just adds room for two more commuters -people who aren't in the Clifton wards, so aren't going to vote for Barbara or Terry in a fit of gratitude. It's the school-run parents who will be most inconvenienced, and they who are the biggest threat.

Christchurch school, Clifton -no yellow lines here, yet!

While looking for places where yellow lines can be removed from Clifton "for traffic calming", we say, with a knowing smirk, we are pleased to see that the roads by Christchurch School, Clifton, as seen here at 08:30 on a schoolday, have no such problem

Residents are free to park on the pavement without fear of harassment.

So can parents who were forced to drive here early due to the congestion problems caused by a city that failed to provide a city-wide motorway scheme like Glasgow. This family is stuck waiting 15 minutes for the playground to open, so have no choice but to park here. It would be dangerous to let the kids out to play on the pavement.

Now: the bad news. The council is proposing putting some parking restrictions in. No worry though -as our coverage of other schools in the area will show, it's completely unenforced, so provides a lovely parental drop-off zone -provided there aren't any pedestrians in the way. The careful parking of residents and parents alike here ensure that there are no schoolkids on the pavement. That said, the school has just won a Sustrans Award. That was for the kids, not the parents or residents, obviously.

the luxury school run

We are sent an email by "Mike" showing the proper way to get the kids to school, here with a stretch limo outside Colstons Primary School on, what, Cotham Grove

The submitter of this photograph seems a bit, well, unhappy about the incident, and we can see why: a vehicle like this can take up the entire school keep clear area, so stopping other parents doing their dropoffs.

However, people need to recognise the hard truth: taking the kids to school in the family 4x4 is, well, common. Twenty-five years ago, yes, most kids walked to school and those that got driven were taken there in the mini metro, but times have moved on. From the metro, to the VW polo, then the VW Golf becomes car #2, now it's one of the little Audi or BMWs, while family car #1 has grown up from an estate to something with more status. Nothing has more status than a stretch limo -which CN55PZS clearly is.

Jealousy, that's what the other parents are suffering from.

Stretch Limo school runs: you saw it here first!

St Pauls School Run problems.

By way of the Legacy Printed Press, we see this video of a car being forced to push a Ford Ka out onto the road by the school entrance to Cabot Primary School.



The comments on the E.P. Article are pretty polarised.

On the one hand, this is someone exerting their right to get their car out of the garage despite the selfish actions by lazy parents who themselves park on the keep clear zones just to drop the kids off faster. On the other, this is someone potentially endangering children who if not walking to school, are being dropped off by their parents outside it and expected to walk across a road. It's hard to say who is most wronged here.

Schoolkid build-outs for Colston Primary School

This area round Colston Primary school has a double role. It's commuter parking par-excellence, and its somewhere for parents to drive their kids to school, either here or Cotham School slightly up the hill. Anyone doing the school-run there knows that Cotham Park North is the turnoff to take.

Yet now, we see buildouts going in, buildouts with bollards planned. This is the price of having the city's Councillor for Walking the locally elected representative.

There was a perfectly good "switch off your engines while waiting" sign up by the school-keep-clear dropoff zone, and now what? More lines, more signs, more bollards

For the parents, the one redeeming feature is that the final draft resident parking zones are up, and this road is in it. If there is only one resident parked here on a Saturday, we can assume that if commuters cannot park here on a weekday, there will be plenty of space for short-stay dropoffs.

Indeed, we suspect the anti-schoolrun developments at Colston's are primarily to push all those parents in favour of resident parking, to split the drivers up into residents, commuters and school-runners, so stop us unifying against an anti car council.

Resisting Oppression

There are some new signs up on Aberdeen Road, outside St Peter and Paul RC Primary School. They say no parking on the school-keep-clear area on weekdays 08:00 to 17:00.

This is more of the city's simply insane anti-car activities, something everyone should resist. We have discovered a loophole.

By banning parking on weekdays, there is nothing to stop any local parking entirely on the pavement on a weekend.

This will protect wing mirrors, and with the bollard, ensure the body-coloured bumper of OY05LNW won't suffer any damage from other vehicles reversing into it while parking.

It will even benefit the schoolchildren, as more snow is scheduled for the evening -this car will ensure the area will be snow- and later ice- free. With such selfless drivers, it doesn't matter than the council appears scared to grit paths.

France: school parking

And why the airport travel? Because the West of England Partnership have recognised that the contributors to this blog are doing more to improve travel in the area than their previous set of consultants, so are funding our trips to different parts of the world. This week, a look at how the south of france deals with their traffic problems.

Look at this. Its a school, with the same car-on-pavement problems as all of Bristol's schools, but fixed.

A set of bollards away from the kerb effectively stop any parents, even if they own 4X4s and are really important, from using the pavement parking area. And you can't park in front of the bollards as that would block the road entirely, which is generally considered bad form.


This is clearly wrong, as it denies these important people the right to park their cars next to the school, so forcing them to park further away and walk, costing the parents 10 minutes, twice a day. With 110 schools in the city (i.e. ignoring nursery and private schools), and room for four cars in front of each, that's 410 cars/day parking in directly front of Bristol schools, a total of 8200 minutes. Which, under the revised NATA road costing rules, means that allowing parents with cars to park directly in front of the school, saves Bristol's drivers lots of money.

No, Bristol should not use such low-cost techniques to stop parking in front of schools, when we can show that such parking saves the city's parents so much money.