Tiley of Bristol embrace Cycle City Hartcliffe Way

Hartcliffe Way, the southern bit of the A4174 ring road. Now, with the cycle city program, with a bike path along it.

How will the people use it? Well, we don't care about pedestrians or cyclists, because, well, they aren't real people.

What we are pleased to see is Tiley Motors of Hartcliffe Way recognising that anyone walking or cycling is deficient, but there is an obvious solution: get a car.

Tiley's have parked their budget vehicles on the bike/foot path, so attracting the attention of the underpeople, while clearly making the point that for just £795 the poor unfortunates could get themselves a motor and join the grown-ups.

Now, when the cycle city money turned out to only be 4X that spent on a single slip road to the Cribbs Causeway shopping mall, yet these new paths offer shopping opportunities, then even we cannot denounce this cycling city initiative any more. Tiley of Bristol! We salute you!

Poor People! There is hope!

Couple of months back, paul@loop-pr.co.uk commented on a posting, offering a traffic-related news story. Obviously we never followed up anything which would involve effort, though we did see that the company is a media relations company which specialises in taking your brands and making them newsworthy. Obviously, we are ourselves a world famous brand, so don't need to waste money in coverage ourselves, but one of the company's customers is streetcars, the second car-by-the-hour scheme in the city. For some reason Paul didn't ever follow up with a news item, which is a pity, as we are not above receipt bribery. But still we waited.

Today, though, in a bribery-free article, we are show why you should spend the money.

Here we can see the streetcars car YK10LHD making the poor pedestrians of deprived inner-city Clifton feel even less worthy, as now they have to detour around a car in the middle of the pavement.

Same for this cyclist, who cannot ride straight up to the bike park, they must instead dismount and walk.

Here though, you can see why streetcar are parked in the middle of the road, taking up all walking space. As well as the underpeople we've seen, there are lots of students in the area, and for about £7/hour they can rent a series 1 BMW, which you can then use to park on pavements! What a fantastic idea! Students: for only £7, instead of walking, cycling, or worse -use public transport- you can have a real car, and experience being an adult.

If there is one flaw here, it's timing. Year end. That means no money. Wait until October, when the loans have just arrived, the credit cards haven't topped out. That's the time to sell the dream.

Christmas shopping in Bedminster

Look at this: the bike parking outside Asda, Bedminster, is full, with cyclists having to struggle to get their bicycles in an out of the six racks assigned to them.

This is the only bike parking on this side of the supermarket, the rest of area is dedicated to people who drive there.

It may seem a bit odd for a supermarket in a Cycling City to only have room for twelve bicycles and what appears to be thousands of cars. But consider this. Asda is owned by Walmart, the world's largest retailer. Do you seriously think that Walmart got so big by people cycling to the shops? Of course not. Their business model is built on bulk purchases, for which you need a car, ideally a proper 4x4.

Look more closely at the cyclists and compare them to the people making their way to and from the car park.

The cyclists: little bags, barely big enough to hold a snack. The car drivers: trolleys full of goods. Walmart's business model is based on high-volume low-margin sales, and cyclists bringing at most a rucksack just aren't buying enough food or other goods. These cyclists should be grateful that Asda has provided any parking, instead of turning this space over to support two more cars, especially on a busy weekend in the runup to Xmas.

Portsmouth: shopping bicycle parking

This is Gunwarf Quay, Portsmouth, their shiny new shopping centre -an equivalent to Cabot Circus, albeit one with more outlets.

What is this seen by the harbour? An area which could have been used for premium bar tables dedicated to bicycle parking?

And its used too. Something about a highly-visible place to park your tax-dodging toy vehicle encourages people to cycle there and park their bicycles.

There is even a sign telling the owners to lock their bikes up.

Given this area generates no parking revenue, and removes revenue earning space from outside bars, cafes and restaurants, you have to look carefully at it to see if it makes economic sense

• It clearly encourages people to come to the area by bicycle. If these people were going to come by car -and there was space in the car park, then it has lost income from the car park, and for the UK government in fuel.
• If these tax-dodging criminals were going to shop, they are now limited in what they can buy. This may reduce income to the shops.
• They will get in the way of premium spending car driving customers on the roads.

Against that

• It frees up space in the (small) car park, which only has 1500 spaces. If you can fill that up with shoppers and still get people to come by bike, you earn more.
• If the people come by bicycle they may be thirsty and hungry, so spend more in the bars and restaurants.
• Provided you are selling high-margin products that fit in carrier bags on handles, you can still sell goods.
• Fuel VAT and Tax loses don't show up in the balance sheet of the shopping centre, and that money may instead be spent on products within your facility.
  

There is probably a spreadsheet you can write to work out the numbers here: how much space to dedicate to bikes, which comes down to revenue earned against revenue lost. A key aspect of this spreadsheet would be one conclusion

If you have space in your car park, and people choose to cycle instead of drive, you are losing money -unless they spend the money saved in fuel and parking in your shops.

That is, it only makes sense to dedicate space to bicycles if it brings in extra customers, rather than diverts customers who would otherwise pay the hour to park. As Cabot Circus has 2500 spaces, it fills up less often, so there is less benefit in providing cycle parking.

Of course, the other factor in the equation is the revenue-per-bicycle. If bicycle parking encourages poor people to visit, then unless you get lots of them, each spending a small amount, you don't gain much. Same for pedestrians.

In Portsmouth, they've clearly concluded that the cyclists bring in enough money, that they should be welcomed. Though not if they cycle along the seafront...

Shopping without cars

One of the hardest things to cope with without cars is shopping for food, especially bulk food shopping. It's OK if you have time to walk to the local patisserie to get some pain au chocolate in the morning, but if you need a week's food you need to hit either a supermarket or one of the remaining high streets, buy your entire weekly load and head home. Without a car or a bike trailer, you are constrained by how much you can buy, so end up having to shop more often, which is pretty time consuming.

Here is some evidence of people who have embraced foot shopping.

This Sainsbury's trolley is in Cheltenham Place, Montpelier. The closes Sainsbury's supermarket is in Gloucester Road, across saint andrews, and about a mile away. Someone must have pushed it all this way, presumably full of food.


And here is another trolly, resting in the undergrowth near Lockleaze. A couple of miles from Sainbury's Filton site. So again: someone has pushed a trolley a long way, hopefully full of food. It may have just been pushed to UWE full of food -as a lot of students have been doing- and then "joyriders" took it from there, but it is still a sign of foot-out-trolly-home shopping.

The supermarkets don't like this, some people view it as unsightly. But why should supermarket trolleys be limited to the car park? That's a very car-centric world view. As part of our cycle-city, we should encourage people to walk to supermarkets and push trolleys full of food home. Why not have trolley return points at UWE and other parts of the city where students live, so as to aid them to live a car-free life?