When He Comes, He Shall Wear Hi Viz

Some of the Easter preparations of the city can be seen by this man walking down Tyndall Avenue with a cruicifix.



You can just make out at the base of the cross a wheel, so that when this man walks around the city, it isn't so much hard work.

What kind of penance and suffering is that if you are going to pull a wheeled cross round the city?

At least this believer has recognised that as soon as you start to travel round the city with any form of human powered wheeled device, you are at risk of being run over by people who have paid for the right to be there. This is why he is wearing a bright hi-viz top to walk around our city's streets

Bike Parking Rollout

The long awaited bike parking on buildout rollout is taking place.

King Street East

This is in addition to the existing King Street area, next to the traffic warden writing a ticket.

Just off Park Street in Park Street Avenue

And on Tyndall's Road.

We await the Evening Post to discover these and complain, again.

However, we take a more relaxed view.

1. These are all paid parking spaces that are being taken away, and who pays to park? Only losers who don't know the secret places.
2. By not building the bike racks on the pavements, they are keeping them clear for our vans.

We're a bit miffed that the racks keep on reinforcing the myth that bicycles are welcome, despite the best efforts of our local press and conservative councillors to remind them that they are nothing, and despite the premier approaches to the city: M32, A4, A370 all going out their way to say "you'd be insane to cycle here". The fact that some do, all the way to the university, is why some students get so frustrated. There's not much we can do there though, except get together with the EP commenters and together pay for some banners to put up on the bicycle approaches to the city to say "with the money you have saved -now buy a car"

Safe Protesting during the winter months

Given the fact that the students and the schoolkids are now out protesting -often after dark- we need to think how to deal with more pedestrians on the road.

Here we see some of the students outside the Senate House, Tyndall's Avenue, which they have occupied part of.

Not one of them is wearing a hi-viz top!

Across the road, there is a minor police presence: one horse.

The police know how dangerous the city streets are -which is why both they and the horse are wearing hi-viz, though we are saddened to see that the rider isn't wearing a helmet.Do they not realise how dangerous horse-riding is? It is from the fort at the end of the path that Prince Rupert of the Rhine surrendered Bristol to the Parlimentarians -the people- and then rode off to wales for safety.

Fortunately, we are aware of such safety issues, and in conjuction with the local councils and the Evening Post, we are pleased to announce a new Christmas Gift: discounted high viz tops. These are available at discount rates, and different sizes. Imagine how your children's eyes will light up when they get their first hi-viz top! As for the students, well, if they are to get in the way of cars driven by important people, they need all the hi-viz they can afford!

Evening Post! This is not the war on motorists!

The EP is upset that the council wants to turn 12 paid parking spaces into 72 on-road bicycle parking spaces. The title of their article "IF drivers think it's hard to find a parking space in the city centre at the moment, it's about to get worse.".

We love this. Some people are probably expecting Bristol Traffic to be up in arms on the same topic, but we are too busy laughing at the naivety of the E.P. to bother. Here is why we aren't complaining.

1. We have had a copy of the plans for about a year. If the E.P. is surprised, it means they are out-loop.

---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: "Nick Pates"

To: "Alex Woodman" , "Mark Wright"

Date: Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:25:43 +0100

Subject: Pay and Display cycle parking proposals - Cabot

Dear Councillors,

As part of the Cycling City project we are proposing to remove

10metres of pay and display parking at seven locations to replace with

cycle parking. I have attached a plan of all the proposed locations

as well as a draft letter that I intend to consult with.

I would appreciate any comments you may have.

Yours sincerely

Nick Pates

Cycling and Walking

Bristol City Council

Twelve months ago these plans came out. Where have the E.P. reporting team been? Probably hanging around with Bristol City people getting wined and dined to believe that after England win the 2010 World Cup then its a cert for England hosting the cup in 2018, for which we need a giant supermarket in Southville. Got some bad news there, folks.

 2. We were consulted on the plans. We are Bristol's premier web site collecting data and reporting on traffic issues in the city. Unlike the rest of the motor lobby -the RAC, the ABD, the AA, we are rational. We don't just deny bad news or the entire process of science just because we don't like the answers. We collect data, and reach conclusions.

3. We support it! Really! This does not mean we have changed sides!

Why do we support it? Because they are taking away pay-to-park spaces, and nobody uses them as you have to pay. We much prefer zebra crossings, double yellow lines, traffic islands to a slot that demands money and which offers time limits on the parking.

3. The only people that park in most of the areas are students. Not tax payers. Students. We can see that by doing a drive by last week, out of term time.

Tyndall's Avenue: empty parking spaces. The university staff either have access to the car parks, they get the bus in, or they park+walk. 

Round the corner, Woodland Road. Utterly empty. We, the tax payers, have paid road tax already, so we refuse to pay extra to park. We'd rather drive around for half an hour to find an empty corner in Cotham then walk in.

The only people who use this are not only students, they are the students with enough money to pay for parking, which is a small subset of students: the ones with lots of money. We feel no guilt about having their parking options removed, so they can't drive over the downs for one lecture, half an hour in the gym and then home again.

The argument here is therefore not "bike parking vs car parking", it is: how do you want students to get to university?

1. By car. Only parking in the paid bits if they can't get a free space nearby -our spaces.
2. By bus. Not ideal, but you can get a lot more students to one bus than 40 cars, and they don't take away our parking spaces, as we have been known to park in bus stops too.
3. Walking. FirstBus hates this at the zebra crossings, we don't like it on Cotham Hill, but you can usually swerve round them while making a phone call, though you have to shout out the window rather than use your hand on the horn.
4. By bicycle. Yes, we despise them, but if they are going to cycle in, they won't try parking on our secret places like Highbury Villas. They may even decide its not worth walking or cycling down to the uni for half an hour in the gym, so not even get in our way on a bicycle.

The best bit: if there is no option to drive in, some of these tax-dodging students may not bring their cars at all, which will free up more street space in Clifton and Redland.

Now, can the E.P. stop being 12 months behind what's being planned and help join the coalition to fight US proposals to stop you doing things like downloading porn onto your laptop while driving.This is the real war, not some argument about how twelve students a day will get to the cafe for lunch.

University Discrimination!

Seen on Tyndall Avenue, the university heartland.

The

 Cycle

  Surgery

    Free

Apparently at the  "Hawthorns", which is the restaurant building at the far end of this road, they are doing free bike maintenance sessions from 13:00 to 16:00 on the second and fourth Wednesday of every month.

This discriminates against those students, who, through no fault of their own, have to drive in. It's bad enough they have to pay tax and insurance, fuel and short-stay parking -now the university is helping to keep cyclists on the road, yet not providing a similar service to students who have to drive. This is unfair!

To add insult to injury, these sessions are being held in the car park. See that? "car park". As in "place for cars to park". Not bicycles, cars!

Students: they think they own the road

One interesting aspect of our secret-instrumentation of unsuspecting cyclists is that we see how differently people behave in situations we would not normally encounter. Normally, when heading up Cotham Hill as a last minute Redland-Mum sprint we'd sound the horn and expect people to get out the way. But here, as the cyclist crawls up, you can see the students out and about uninterrupted.

And very interesting it is too.

You can see that they are quite happy to step out without looking round, without turning their head to see if there is any risk. Yet Cotham Hill is your first option to sprint on the school run after the crawl down Whiteladies Road; your first chance to put your foot down. These pedestrians think that shared-space means they get some of our taxpayer space, when really it means we get to park on the pavement we pay for.

As for the other roads -plenty of room for double parking. Yet not with all these students just wandering around. There should be a law against them.

Drive round here, run one of them over -you get the blame. They should not be allowed to walk round without passing some "walking in the city" test and getting third-party insurance. And as winter comes in, they need to get with the hi-viz clothing.

Students have stolen our parking!

Days after the banksy-takes-our-parking debacle, now woodland road is closed to cars

There are pedestrians, but few are walking round in hi-viz

And the banksy ice cream van has moved

What is up? Students have arrived. The university is giving them a false sense of security by closing the roads. Better to give them each a hi-viz top and show them how to cross the city.

University: bike parking options

Bristol University, flagship college for a Cycling city, is threatening to clamp bikes parked where they should not be, while leaving cars alone on their property, and allowing their own vehicles to park on the pavements elsewhere in the area. What bike parking do they provide?

There is actually some secure parking in the sports centre -you need a membership card to access it and we have not yet seen inside. We can take a look at the covered area outside the physics building. Since the bike and motorbike parking behind the physics building was removed (it's now building works), this is all there is on this side of the road.

It's covered, and running at about 80% capacity at 10:00 on a Wednesday morning. But wait -what is that sign on on the wall? It's another notice.

It is from the university security and says "your bike will be stolen" - 41 bikes were taken in Autumn Term 2008, average bike value 300 quid. That's not much for a good mountain bike, hence the obvious lack of hydraulics in the brake levers. But it is a lot if you are a student who doesn't have a trust fund set up by your parents. Your bike gets nicked, there goes your transport.

There we have it then. University security parked on one side of the pavement, warning signs of bike clamping if you park on the (not that secure) fencing, and clear evidence that wherever you park here, if it isn't the secure park, its going be gone when you get back.

Taking a look at the other side of the road from the Bristol Traffic Helicopter, we can get another view of the key parking issues of the area.

In the foreground, five cars in the pay and display short stay parking. The people I all saw arriving were students -ones with money, obviously. But if mum and dad get you a car for your 18th birthday before you go to Bristol University, money for parking for one lecture a day is probably manageable.

Behind the cars, on the left, a de-facto motorbike site. They've lost their parking with the building works. nine to ten bikes, taking up less area than the five cars in the foreground.

Behind the cars, on the right, more bike parking. possibly twelve sheffield racks, twenty to twenty-four bikes.

Notice something unusual here? There is more area allocated for short stay parking for five cars than ten motorbikes or twenty bicycles. The sheer possibility of short-stay parking means that those students who have the money have the option of driving to lectures, forcing them to park over corners on Highbury Villas when that fails. If someone were to turn those short stay parking areas into bike parking, there would be room for another 40+ bicycles and, by removing the option of driving to lectures, supress road traffic.

Now, one could hope for cycling city funding for this, but there's another option, isn't there? For the university cyclists to take over the short-stay parking area as a protest against the university removing all their parking spaces. It might also make a fun place for a critical mass ride, though there is the small detail of the hill climb from the centre to deal with.

University: New Bike Parking facilities

Last week: Free Monty. This week, the Unionists push back.

There's some new signs up outside the Physics Building -the one that looks a bit like a castle and is visible for miles round the city, a symbol of a city -the symbol of A cycle city.

The signs say :No Cycle Parking.

More precisely

No Cycle Parking.
Bikes left here will be
clamped and a 10 pound release
fee charged, or may
be removed at the
owners expense.

Alternative cycle parking is
provided alongside the
sports centre and to the
front of NSQi

Thank you.

They don't say who is doing the thanking, or why you are being thanked. The key thing is that you are not to park your bicycles to the railings outside the physics building, or on street signs outside.


There is some covered parking nearby, behind the car AK55AEA that appears to be blocking the entrance to the bike park - a car that our database searches show was recently sold for 5500 quid in Eastbourne.

One question: will the rules against bicycles be enforced? After all, parking of workmen's vans YK54JZT and BP06NCU in the two disabled parking spots doesn't seem to be crime worth punishing, but maybe bicycles are deserving of special treatment. After all, they belong to the troublemakers.

University Operations Vehicles

Keeping an eye on the various ops teams of the university. Here's WV54MYB picking up bread from Parson's Bakery, nicely obscuring visibility for anyone who dares to cross St Michael's Hill anywhere but the zebra crossing.

And here's the pavement on Tyndall's Avenue, where the security vehicle WU56JPO is resident.

This may be legal; depends on whether this part of the pavement is uni property -the pavement is lowered here. What it does, legal or not, is give the impression that the university approves of pavement parking. Which it clearly does seem to do.

Why the attention to the university? Because of recent changes in their bike parking policy.

Building Work Priorities

This is where Woodland Road meets Tyndall's Park avenue. Due to the fact that a very large water drain tunnel goes underground here, there have been ongoing roadworks for some years, right across Sustrans NCN route 4, and a popular walking/cycling route. We've discussed crossing this road before.

Cyclists dismount, the red sign on the left says, which is a request, while the sign on the right says Cycleway Closed Ahead. This is technically untrue, unless you have a very loose definition of "ahead", because the cycleway is actually closed in front of the sign -not behind it. And what, play tell, lies behind the sign?

This is where it gets interesting There is some crane, some building work. But also, a large stretch of pavement fenced off. Why? So that the people who are working on the site have somewhere to work. They know that if the pavement wasn't fenced off there would be nowhere to park, and hence alternate transport options to and from work would have to be considered. Like, foot, bicycle or even bus. All of these options would be unacceptable.

Therefore, a large stretch of pavement has been fenced off for car parking. What we have here, then, is a longstanding roadwork that takes away the primary walking/cycling route to the university, is covered in no-bicycle signs, yet quite happily takes away a stretch of pavement so the people who work on it can park their cars. Why? Because it is more important that these three people get to drive to work than have the thousands of students who cross this junction on foot or bike get across safely.

Priorities, see. The priorities you set provide an implicit message on who is important, and who is not -and students come near the bottom. The only hard question is who comes out lower: students walking to college, or students cycling there?

Student travel options

There is now a U-bus running up and down Whiteladies road; this could offer a functional bus service to Bristol University. What other options are there? Let's see what we can see from a tour during student hours.

First off, this stair case is interesting. Students heading up and down the hill are strictly segregated into two lanes. Two overcrowded lanes, with people running down the hill either side of the path. One might think that opening up the central bit of the stairs to pedestrians, rather than fencing them over with highly reflective paint for safety would improve traffic flow. One might think that. But everyone knows: wider roads leads to more more traffic -presumably the same rule applies to pavements. It is necessary to close off half the steps to discourage people from walking.

There is a bike shed, but it is only temporary and not big enough. In the week since this picture was taken the stand was taken out of action, leaving only the railings and disabled access areas opposite. Again: providing bike parking would only encourage more bicycles.

What does that leave?

It leaves this, the pay and display section of Woodland Road. Here is a bit where any student can drive to work, provided they are prepared to pay for the right. At 10am on a monday, nobody is. But later on, it is seems popular, with groups of students getting out their shared cars. If you are only going in for one or two lectures, and sharing a car, short term pay and display parking will probably be cheaper than the bus.

Bike and Motorbike Parking at Bristol University

Now that the term has started, we can see what facilities have been put back in for wheeled vehicles after the summer's building works on Tyndall Avenue. First up the bikes, that have a fairly pretty looking covered bike park. It's not clear how easy it is to secure your bike to the stands, but if the bike isn't stolen, it will be dry.

The motorbikes get this stretch of pavement outside the shops and are left to fend for their own security.

Why is this? Is that they are just lazy?

Or is that after removing the bike/motorbike parking area behind the road, adjacent to the physics building, no parking has been put back.

Nope, parking has been put back. But apparently for cars.

Again, its because the cars are more important. To merit a Car-Parks-A sticker at the university one must be in a position of power and prestige; lower status people get the parking by Clifton Down railway station and such like. A-sticker people are important enough to be allowed to park close to where they work, so they deserve parking areas while bikes get some temporary covered parking and motorbikes get to push the pedestrians out the way.

So now we know whose being lazy, and it isn't the motorbikes.