The Arley Hill Contraflow

In our coverage of Cotham Brow yesterday, one Colin Hounslow, ‏@crusherdrive, who appears to be an HGV driver

@bristoltraffic noticed the foul language and the cyclist riding the wrong way up a one way street #urbanterrorists

We did note the foul language, and did complain that it was needless of abuse of a car that left at least ten centimetres of gap between the cyclist and their car as they squeezed through the pinch point.

The thing we do want to pick up on is the claim that the #urbanterrorists were cycling the wrong way up the hill.

Arley Hill is a contraflow to bicycles. And we have a dataset going back years documenting this.

The entrance is behind the AA van blocking the hatched junction

it goes under where the Bristol Council traffic survey car WV09NYO is blocking it
.
 It goes under where Brittania Movers international WA58BVD are parked -,because coning off some of the parking bays with the dustbins that are on the street would have required forward planning


You can actually see the bicycle logo pointing up hill just before the Ford Ka Y873LCY blocks it.

And proceeds up the hill to where the the Peugeot P817OVV is blocking it.

The cyclists aren't, therefore, illegally contraflowing.

Where there is a contraflow opportunity, it is that the Nugent Hill to Arley Hill cut through is bicycles only, yet it provides such an invaluable rat run that it is popular with people who don't want to get stuck in the Arley Hill traffic jam, such as WN08EZX


And R968NKX

Yet again, we see abusive cyclists giving cars a hard time, such as here where one stops in the middle of the road and so block a car from using this secret route.



As proof that Bristol council is anti-car, they eventually added a traffic island to prevent a right turn here by cars

this now forcing drivers to swerve left -uphill, then swing round, such as the one in R214RVN.


this car was following the transit van YR51XJX, which must have an even harder time executing the contraflow.



Colin, we could carry on, but instead would point  you at our complete datasets on Nugent Hill and Arley Hil.

While you do that, consider that Bristol Traffic -while mistaken for some kind of subversive satire, is -as discussed in the context of Arley Hill itself, a collaborative project with our strategic partners google, facebook, and apparently the NSA, to build a crowd-sourced mass surveillance state for the City of Bristol.

Which brings us to the main reply to your tweet.

You can say what you want about #urbanterrorists, but as soon as you make a claim about a cyclist going the wrong way up a one-way street, provide the data to back up your claim -or shut the fuck up.

Bristol Traffic. Datamining you for your own good since 2008.

Traffic lights on roundabouts, cyclists and tinted windows

Bristol Traffic does have a twitter account, which rarely gets used for the following reason "to spend time on twitter is to waste an important life". Yet we do get notifications on messages sent to @BristolTraffic, as it is a way for little people to contact us. We obviously care more for little people to call up our Stokes Croft "adult content" fulfilment centre, get redirected to our Luxembourg sales office for Bristol Traffic s.a.R.L, buy entertainment products from the tax-efficient locality and then have us deliver them to anywhere within the former Avon county.

Today, we get a tweet from one Andrew Fawkes:

@bristoltraffic Would you like to R/T this? Even turning them off at peak times would help congestion! Thank you.

Pet hate: traffic lights on roundabouts. RBs were designed to keep traffic flowing. Please r/t if you agree and let's keep traffic flowing!

@AndrewWFawkes is proud to be a "Marketing consultant, career coach, classic car activist, MotoGP fan, guitarist & singer in a band and lots of other spare time activities!", based in Somerset UK".

Somerset is of course the elf-kingdom, which is where important people live, despite the fact that Bristol council is trying to push bike lanes into the kingdom -against the elf-folk's wishes. Everyone who commutes in up the A370 gets stuck somewhere in the way by anti-car policies of the inner city.

The traffic lights on roundabouts are merely a detail -and not one we care much for ourselves.

We are actually against them for a number of reasons.

1. By making it safer for cyclists to cross, they make it easier to cycle round the city, so encouraging cycling.
2. The James Barton Roundabout has a special light for buses coming from the M32 direction, so encouraging bus use.
3. Sometimes we have to wait at them for up to 30s
4. Sometimes when we pull out just as it goes red, our van blocks other traffic who then get upset.
5. The lights on the James Barton and St Pauls roundabouts are still on at 4am, where the only traffic is our van on an emergency delivery of inflatable sex aids to some of our St Andrews customers.

What we aren't sure about is the idea that turning them off at peak times would help congestion.

Having to put traffic lights on a roundabout is an indication that the roundabout has entered a failed state; that without them you woudn't get fair access to the roundabout.

Because a feature of a roundabout is that you can pull out, which can only be done if one of two conditions are met

1. There's nobody on the roundabout.
2. The roundabout is very busy, but traffic is exiting onto your road, so you can pull out as they turn off.

At peak hours, the "nobody on the roundabout" condition is not met, so we depend on the "traffic exiting" condition.

If people don't turn off onto your junction, you don't get out -leading to what is known in queue/scheduling theory as starvation.

For anyone trying to cycle over a roundabout when someone pulls out, this is why we do it. It's not just because we hate the cyclists for being there and not paying -it's because the only way to pull out in a busy roundabout 

Here, for example, is the car AE59JGU pulling out in front of a bicycle on the St Michaels roundabout. It's not that they didn't see the bicycle -it is that it was a weekday morning, and the only way to get out was to cut up the cyclist. There was no reason for the cyclist to catch up with them and say "please don't cut me up like that -it makes you look bad in the video". That was just selfish behaviour by a cyclist that shouldn't have been there.

While covering this incident, notice that the car had tinted windows. This is a great feature from a game-theory perspective, as it introduces more uncertainty into the negotiations. There is no way the tax -dodger could make eye contact with the driver, to see them and for them to see you. Instead, the dark windows depersonalise the car " there is nobody in there that cares -this is only a machine", as well as stopping the cyclist from even imagining that they've been seen.

Given that uncertainty, slowing down is the only thing the tax-dodger could do -creating the opportunity for the audi to pull out. Such an incident discourages the city-folk from cycling, so making easier for commuters from the Elf-Kingdom to come in to the city and so create wealth.

To summarise then:

• Traffic lights do hold up traffic, but not always at peak hours, as they make the scheduling of junction ingress fairer.
• If the council does remove them, we have to correct for this scheduling by pulling out when you don't have the right of way
• Cyclists are much safer to pull out in front of than buses
• Tinted windows are great for reducing the confidence of cyclists, so making it easier to pull out in front of them.

Andrew -thank you for your opinions! We have summarised our views on the matter!

The Danger of Twitter

Twitter alert!!!

Now, here at Bristol Traffic, none of us do Twitter.

It's not our thing, so we leave that to others like @ipayroadtax to point out how cyclists continuously get in our way, without contributing to the costs of our roads.

More importantly, we don't do twitter because we know how it can be used to persecute us.

Take this example: here's an innocent tweet from a motorist (@andythomas365), sitting waiting for the lights to change just north of Stokes Croft:

Nothing wrong with this, you might think, except some clever clog spotted it and has now alerted the Police to the use of a mobile device to take photos whilst driving...

See that? 

The Police are straight on to it, even pointing out where to go to find out how many points you may get for using a phone while waiting at the lights.

Our advice: stay away from Twitter!