Save Double Parking!

Following on our campaign against zebra crossings, we find ourselves forced to start new campaign "Save Double Parking!". The anti-car council has come out against double parking as being dangerous and anti social. Maybe but for residents is the only way to park a car after the morning school run, and for commuters, its the only way to park a car with all the legal spaces taken up by those selfish residents who don't drive to school or work, so freeing up spaces.

Every cyclist who owns a car and goes round being smug, "I pay my road tax", is missing the point. The car they've paid the road tax for is on the road somewhere, that's the rectangle of tarmac they have rented, and by not using it they are inconveniencing not just the vehicles they hold up on their crawl round town, but those commuters who rely on the spaces they create.

Returning to the double parking problem, the BBC have an article calling it anti-social, an article that includes this road as an example:

We don't normally cover double parking, and when we do we never name the roads. Those streets where you can get away with it are secrets we do not dare share, as then we will have nowhere to park. Certainly this road looked familiar.

The buildings look Cliftony, possibly university area, the road is wide and quiet with an RV on the left, opposite a smartcar. Time to send a query off to our petabyte scale datacentre to see what shows up -and yes, we know this road. It's Belgrave Road, BS8.

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What's interesting about this road is why was it chosen? Did the council have to tip off the journalists that this road was trouble? Was in in fact staged purely to push out new CPZ/RPZ restrictions, our very own WMD-for-iraq claim?

We have a theory there. Belgrave road is right next to the BBC. The journalists just popped out for 30 seconds to get a couple of pics and then went back in, job done. Of course, that does not mean that the photo was not staged. More research is needed.

This is where our new experiment to instrument cyclists and pedestrians in the city has begun to pay off. By having them filming themselves, we can review exactly what they've done wrong, from their own position. This is a lot easier than filming them ourselves, as it is really hard to hold a camcorder steady while driving through Montpelier, especially when you are trying to text someone. We just let the bikes do the work, then later get the pics. Up until now most bike filming has been written by the cyclists, always whining about something or other, such as this Glaswegian Magnatom, who has taken up the classic sport of that city -starting fights with strangers- out of the bars, and onto the roads. We aren't like that. We will criticise the cyclists and any other tax-dodging subversives we see.

Here then, is our ride-by of this road, where we can say that yes, it looks like a good place to double park. Nobody seems to mind, and it's handy for the BBC. This is important if you are Noel Edmonds, on a visit to the competition to see if your latest idea for a Saturday evening show has got any interest. The video was taken ten days ago, in term time, so if the council staged the entire double parking scene, they kept it up outside the BBC for a long time -it probably is genuine.



Analysing this video, we see a number of events which concern us

1. At 0:06 a tax-dodging cyclist -correctly dressed in hi-viz and helmet- sticks her arm out to force a Mercedes to stop its manoeuvre, a turn into the bus lane. This was a premium car, and clearly belongs to someone important -possibly Noel Edmonds himself. All the cyclists should have given way, and not held up this car by being in front of them in the bus lane.
2. At 0:13 we see a skateboarder on the road. Again, another form of tax-dodging
3. At 0:31 we see a Vauxhall Zafira being forced to brake hard after overtaking the bicycle.
4. Throughout the sequence, we see pedestrians crossing the road -only one of them is wearing hi-viz clothing.

Event #3 concerns us, the car which has to put their foot down to swing past the bicycle, then cut in , apparently to double park right in front of them. If the cyclist had not been pootling up this double-parking-friendly road at 5 mph, the driver would not have been forced to take such action. It is not environmentally friendly having to accelerate and brake like this, showing that while bicycles themselves may not be polluting, they cause the other vehicles in the city to waste more fuel, to pollute the city more.

We can see then, in 46 seconds, how a couple of bicycles can hold up the journey time of cars, be they important cars who need to use the Bus Lane, or merely someone who needs to double park outside the BBC offices. It is bad enough that these cyclists are allowed to do this, that they do not pay any tax, let alone compensate us for our lost time -now we see that the council is trying to take away our right to double park. Furthermore, the video showed how pedestrians, cyclists and even skateboarders are trying to take our roads away from us. We must resist!

When will this anti-car oppression end!

You are Noel Edmonds and I claim my prize!

The quantum physicist and Manhattan Project veteran, Richard Feynman, in his seminal 1959 talk "there's plenty of room at the bottom", the talk that gave birth to the concept of Nanotechnology, offered two prizes. The one for an electric motor less than 1/64 of an inch was won within a year, but the other -"take the information on the page of a book and put it on an area 1/25,000 smaller in linear scale" wasn't achieved until the mid 1980s, when some PhD student took time off their thesis to use the Scanning Tunneling Electron Microscope to lay down a bit of Dickens in very few atoms. There are some interesting lessons there.

One: any technology which can be defeated by a skilled person with access to electron microscopes or similar technology only needs an investment of slightly more than the hourly income of a PhD student with access to the aforesaid technology. If the person with the 4am shift on "The Beam" or "The Facility" earns $10/hour, you only need to pay $20/hour for them and the machine time. Make the problem more interesting than a thesis and they may do it for free.

Two: really interesting awards take a while to be earned.

We are reminded of this by a comment by Old Holborn on our this site is not a spoof posting, a comment that provided hard proof that Noel Edmonds is still alive, and driving round the bus lanes in a car that is not an official Bristol taxi.

Having got over the shock of Noel E's continued existence, we think this is good. It ensures that all of us tax payers -including payers of TV license fees- are not held up by Noel Edmond in the taxpaying lanes of our streets. It also ensures that Noel has a future career, with the main capital investment -the motor- out of the way.

But it does worry us that we have another Tier-2 TV personality on our streets to deal with, and it reminds us of our challenge to readers from the spring: to find a photo of Carol Voerderman taking full advantage of our city's parking opportunities. The thought that our regional champion of unrestricted parking is now joined by a Noel Edmonds' one-man stand against bus-lanes chills us. How long before the entire daytime-TV-presenter portfolio of the South-West ends up on our streets, in our bus-lanes, parking on our zebra-crossings with the hazard lights on?

Someone needs to monitor this, and as the data-driven, evidence-based, metrics-centric traffic monitoring site of Bristol, the job falls to us and our many correspondents.

We have already been looking for a photo of Carol V., now we are creating the Official Bristol-Traffic-TV-hasbeen-Award. We will buy a pint of beer from the Cornubia pub (maximum price £3) to whoever sends to bristol.traffic at gmail dot com new photos of Carol or Noel pootling round the city. For Noel, we will double this to two pints of beer (maximum total price £6) if they bring his fake taxi's wing-mirror (which must have been detached from the vehicle on the road, not while parked). We will issue an award of equivalent value if you can get a video of Noel getting really frustrated at the bike in front of his fake taxi pootling along at 10 mph in the bus lane. If he goes over into road-rage, we will not award anything, as we do not endorse violence. However, if Noel Edmonds does end up being put away for a number of years from a road-rage we will at least celebrate his absence from the second-tier sky and freeview channels.

There is no hard deadline for the submissions; the award will be issued once the criteria has been met. However, the ceremony will be timed to be on the same date as a scheduled Bristol Cycling Campaign meeting (first Thursday of the month, apparently), so as to guarantee an audience.

So let's keep an eye out there for Noel E in a taxi cab -it's worth beer!

This site is not a spoof

Some of the cyclist groups have discovered us - CTC Forum , citycycling, and YACF, whoever they are, and have been viewing our site, apparently concluding that it is some kind of spoof, that the text is somehow satirical.

Not so. We document the transport options in an anti-car city. While some of it may appear satirical to tax-dodging cyclists, that is merely because their model of the world suffers from an invalid assumption: "bicycles are a rational form of transport for adults". This taints their entire view of the site -and of society as a whole.

If Bristol Traffic is a spoof, then, by inference, TopGear, Jeremy Clarkson, and indeed, the entire Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail newspapers, would have to be viewed as some kind of spoof journalism put together by an anti-car news media.

While we do consider the BBC to be anti-car, we do not consider the Daily Mail or Jeremy Clarkson to be fictional. Until such a time as their fictional nature can be proven, we wish to be referred to as Bristol's Pro-Car press. Of course, we are competing with the Bristol Evening Post for the honour of being the best traffic news outlet. Today we are at a disadvantage as they have discovered that Noel Edmonds drives a taxi down our bus lanes. We are very excited by this news and look forward to any photographs of Mr Edmonds learning a new career now that his TV career has collapsed.

However, the fact that we are not a spoof makes it hard to link to other sites. The Association of British Drivers, for example. We agree with their anti-bike, anti-bus lane, anti-pedestrian stance, but the entire layout of the site, including colour scheme and use of Comic Sans MS font, spells out "spoof". We are doing more research there before coming down one way or the other.

Another recent situation was a comment on our popular Fixed and Singlespeed in Bristol article, where some idiot asked for us to link to their site, despite the warning in our comments that anyone who attempts this will be ridiculed.

I found your site from a Google alert for "travel accessories". As myblog has content related to this term and some of your content, I was wondering if you'd be interested in a blogroll link exchange (I link toyour site and you link to mine).

Their web site is about cupholders. Now, how to view this?

1. It's a spoof as who in their right minds would run a web site advocating better cup holders for commuters? They have mistaken our site as some kind of spoof and want to join in.
   
2. They really are leading-edge advocates of superior in-vehicle cup-holding technology, and are trying to move up from being a bottom-tier player in google searches for cup holder by trying to get links from the planet's premier transport journalism sites -of which we are clearly one.

If situation (1) holds -they are a spoof-, we must turn them down because we are in fact serious journalists. Also, their site isn't very funny.

If situation (2) holds, they are serious, we have to turn them down for a separate reason, namely their site is shite and we understand how PageRank works.

Google does not give web pages high placement in search queries based on the number of web pages that link to you -quantity-, but based on the ranking of those pages themselves -quality. Only links from other premier web sites -such as the Bristol Blogger- matter; links from web sites that come in on page 17 for searches for cup holder do not, and by linking to them without the nofollow tag, would only devalue our own ranking, for no tangible benefit.

For people who want to know more about the problem of applying graph algorithms to internet-scale datasets can we recommend Graph Twiddling in a MapReduce World, by Jonathan Cohen, of the US National Security Agency. We are only prepared to discuss PageRank and hence web site linking with people who have read and understood this paper, as anything else would be a waste of our time.

Thank your for your co-operation. Your civil rights will be restored once The Emergency is deemed over.

Rebel with a cause

Being a celebrity gives you power. Your statements get press, your picture gets recognised worldwide. This is why so many celebrities take up the global pressing campaigns once they become known. Bono: poverty. Sharon Stone: middle east peace. Richard Gere: war.

What about Bristol. Well, we have one problem (ignoring the collapse of the financial system, the running out of north sea oil and other national issues). That problem is traffic: the congestion, the impact of the life of the locals, the impact it has on life in and near the city. Which is why we are so greatful that Carol Vorderman, Bristol's local celebrity, has come out against resident parking.

It must have been a tough choice. There are so many issues in the world. A skilled mathematical celebrity could have gone on air to explain how quantitive easing helped Japan recover from the lost decade, how that the conventional armaments of central government to trigger economic activity -lowering interest rates and cutting taxes- had failed, and that desperate measures were needed. Or she could have explained how uncontrolled population growth was the root cause behind so many problems, from peak oil to deforestation, and that unless we did something there there was bad news ahead. But no, Carol stayed true to the city, looked at what matters here, and came out against resident parking.

Because the right to park your car badly wherever you can get it close to a clifton coffee shop is one of the great freedoms of the city. More than, that -it is what makes Britain so British. The government may be tracking all car movements, wanting to tap into every entry you make in facebook, or detain people it doesn't like without any need for a trial. As long as the core freedoms of the island are retained -and parking wherever you like is one of them- Britain will stay free.

That doesn't mean that people can ignore rules willy-nilly. Below, is a picture of a small child cycling along a path in the downs that bans cycling. That is not British. There are no cycling signs that have been there for many decades, and they should be respected. We are talking about parking, which is a right.

Ever since the Romans built the country's first real roads, important people in big vehicles have been parking where they like -and the little people on the roadside have complaining about the experience. They didn't respect their Roman masters then -they don't respect their tier-2 celebrities today, and how much such people benefits the city. Without people like Carol Vorderman to speak up for us on ITV2 daytime TV talk shows, nobody would know anything of our city other than it is near where the M5 clogs up on your drive to the South West.

We in Bristol Traffic welcome Carol's involvement in this issue and are glad that she has correctly recognised what the true issues are. In order to recognise her contribution, we would welcome any photographs of Carol parking n Bristol. We are also considering the possibility of campaigning for a directly elected mayor for this city, with Carol Vorderman being the official Bristol Traffic candidate for the post. She has the vision this city needs!

Parking or turning?

Lovely bit of traffic calming here. As you approach, you cannot tell if it is a car pulling in aggressively or someone just parked. This forces caution, more than the dashed-give-way hints ever do.

It is only once you get close you see that WV070PW is parked, and therefore not a risk

Weekday mornings, Clifton. This is the part of the city where Carol Voerdeman is complaining that some essential freedom would be lost were it ever to embrace residents parking. Yes! the right to park with one wheel just about near a corner in a german car is an essential part of Britishness. We must stand up and fight the oppressive state now, lest this right becomes something whose loss we can only mourn!