Whiteladies Road: a weekday dataset

Our last trip down Whiteladies road shows that on a weekend, yes, pedestrian shoppers did hold up through traffic. This implied that yes, the FirstBus/Showcase bus route plans to reduce pedestrian crossing options may benefit their schedules, but we were worried about the impact on us cars getting out from side roads.

This video is different as it's a visit by our expendable cyclist on a weekday morning, down the bus lane from Oakfield Road, and through the Triangle as far as University Road, where they head off. Commentary first, analysis later.

At 0:24 FH56CVV switches lanes early, but as everyone else in the RH lane who isn't turning right also goes left, they are forced to give way to the vehicles in front of them anyway.

From 0:29 to 0:40, a bike lane that even waltham forest would be proud of. Its worn-out nature hints that it's popular with larger vehicles, while the trees keep it bumpy.

At 04:40 A9VNG is in the ASL, but we suspect that it was in there when the lights change. Why the suspicion? One car in the pedestrian area and one in front in the yellow hatched "only enter when clear to exit" area stopping cross traffic from St Pauls Road and Tyndall's Park Road getting across. Incidentally, Tyndall's Park road (on the left) here is no left turn, St Paul's (on the right, into Clifton) is no right turn, so all congestion coming up from the Triangle is Whiteladies Road traffic. Note also this junction provides no time for pedestrians to cross when the traffic isn't actually allowed to drive -if only all major junctions in the city were like this, congestion would be much improved. The BBC offices are on the left, incidentally.

Following the cyclist who is commuting without helmet, body-armour or hi-viz clothing, we eventually discover what is holding up WL-road traffic, it's the "triangle" gyratory system, which our tax-dodger hits at 1:43. The underlying problem is that Whiteladies Road traffic is forced to give way to traffic coming from the right, which initially means traffic from Clifton. Further on, at 2:17 we get held up by traffic all coming into the city from the A4 or the Hotwells's Bridges and then up Jacob's Wells road.

There are four lanes here, one for parking, one turning right at the next junction, and two straight on, but that leftmost one is lost even to vans ignoring bus-lane signs, not just by the police car at 2:41 but by the taxi-rank at 2:53.

WN59UDP is held up by these taxis forcing them to wait with all the in-town traffic, so as soon as they can they cut left in front of the bicycle, through the pedestrians and up University Road -only to find that the Biffa refuse collection lorry is in the way and ignoring the important traffic being held up. Finally passing that, they can sprint up to Woodland Road, where as you recall the Evening Post was campaigning against two paid parking spaces going away, which we felt was overreacting as nobody parks their except arts students, and their tuition fee increases will eliminate that luxury.

However, today we can see that the paid parking area is also popular for parental dropoff outside Bristol Grammar School -and it actually makes for a nice, low-chaos dropoff area. Admittedly, there isn't enough of this short-stay parking right in front of the school, forcing some parents to stop in the double yellow lined areas, but the alternative would be parking on the other side of this (one-way) street, forcing the children to cross the road. Would you want your children to cross a busy road like this? Exactly. Parking on the double yellow lines outside the school entrance is the only safe place to drop your kids off and be sure they get to school alive.

Now, returning to the Whiteladies Road issue, what does the bus plan proposal change on this stretch? The Oakfield Road crossing will be moved further away from the road, so making it less useful to pedestrians trying to walk from Cotham to Clifton or bag. Plus one point. But, this makes it harder for cars to get out or over from these roads, so minus one point.

Heading in to town, the right hand turn to Clifton will be removed for all but buses. This will turn Oakfield road into the primary rat-run option, but as we've seen, the moving of the zebra crossing makes it trickier. What they aren't doing is extending the bus lane any further south, and they are leaving that toy bike lane in there. We say toy as its so half hearted that no rational cyclist will think they are welcome -what with the faded paint and tree roots, but its very presence implies that some people in the city do welcome cyclists. No, better to remove it and put a cyclists dismount sign up.

Entering the triangle is more informative. Congestion is caused here by traffic joining the road from other places (Clifton, Jacob's Wells Road), and whatever is slowing them down on their final journey. There are no pedestrian-only lights or zebra crossings to play with, so there's little that can be done to make pedestrians feel less welcome, no tricks to make the schedule more accurate.

And that's the key problem. The goals of the showcase route are faster bus journey times and a more predictable schedule. Removing and moving zebra crossings will only help with this out of hours, on weekends and midday, because on a weekday morning the problem is more fundamental: Erlang's Laws. Congestion is a result of the ingress rate of a queue being higher than the egress rate. The reason vehicles can't leave whiteladies road isn't that there are vast numbers of people struggling to turn up Cotham Hill (more on that another day), or any of the side roads, it is because the merging of multiple queues at the triangle creates a bottleneck which having one lane dedicated to bus stops and a taxi rank doesn't do much to help.

And do we care about mid-day firstbus schedules? No -and neither should anyone else. People using the bus at weekend and mid-day weekdays are either people who can't afford a car, people with bus passes, or people who have made some ideological decision to take a bus: passengers FirstBus can take for granted. If they want to make money, they need to get the commuter traffic, and quite frankly, changes to pedestrian crossings aren't going to do it. They may help us car commuters by reducing the number of pedestrians and cyclists, but given our dataset implies that the Whiteladies Road congestion is due to problems in the city centre, those crossing changes aren't going to help buses or our cars on whiteladies road at peak hours, which is when it matters to us as well as FirstBus.

Sorry FirstBus, but whatever datasets you have on congestion problems on Whiteladies Road, they were clearly collected by FirstBus or Council staff during their working hours, rather than during am or pm rush hours. This is the only explanation why your proposals don't just do nothing for us drivers while making pedestrians and cyclists suffer, they don't appear to help buses either.

That's the irony there. This proposal has already got the cycling campaign saying "oppose this it's anti-pedestrian and anti-cyclist", it's also anti-car, but we think it manages to be bus-neutral at the same time. That takes skill, that does.

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.

Banksy Parking Logistics

Lots of new visitors coming to our site are not using the usual keywords "high viz fetish", but now "banksy parking". Lots of other people are either concerned that this criminal is stealing our parking spaces (now no parking allowed there, 24-hours a day), or looking for somewhere to park. We welcome the new visitors, even the one who denounced our concerns about the loss of parking spaces as petty selfishness. Selfish, maybe, but petty, no!

zulu1001 says:

"Oh please!"

"It's something that is really popular that does no-one any harm. Let celebrate this rather than complaining about a perceived traffic inconvenience."

Well, zulu1001, it is not just the loss of a few parking spaces that matters, it is the fact that all these visitors to the city are taking up our commuter parking spaces in/near Woodland Road and Tyndall's Park avenue, the last free parking area nearby, just when the students had all left for the summer. Because you need to be in that queue before 08:30 to be sure that you will get in the first 450, and not have to wait at least an hour for the first group to finish, so called "art lovers" who have driven over will be there grabbing the spaces before we regular commuters can get them.

For all those people coming to this site looking for the best place to park for the exhibition, can we therefore point you all at Montpelier? Come off the M32 before you reach the end of the road, go into Montpelier and park on an empty bit of pavement. It will get easier throughout the day.

Then walk all the way to the show via Stoke's Croft, Jamaica Street, Dighton Street and Park Row, past all the other free graffiti the city has to offer.

Having been inside the show, can we note that it is not very authentic. This "landscape near Hartcliffe" painting, for example, does not recognise the off-road skills of the locals, who can get a stolen car way further up a muddy track before having to torch it. That painting is more a Clifton-down class of off-road parking, which may give a new clue as to the graffiti-criminal's origin.

Finally, can we close by reminding the locals not to mention the fact that Boston Tea Party at the top of Park Street does the best coffee, cakes and meals of all the cafes in this area, because if word does get out its lovely garden at the back will fill up. Point the turists at Cafe Nero and Starbucks, it is all they expect and deserve.

Sustrans route 4 open again

Woodland road, full of walkers and bicycles

Because the roadworks are gone, the cyclists dismount signs gone, the path open. Now students can walk or cycle all the way to the university, which is on the other side of Tyndall's Park Avenue

Some people -and we know who you are- will bemoan the lack of safe crossing facilities on a busy road leading to Clifton. Given the traffic lights at the junction of Tyndall's Park Avenue and Whiteladies road, 200 metres to the right of these pictures, lack a pedestrian crossing period -and that for a route used by taxpayers as well as students- there is no reason to add any safety facilities to this crossing.


Students are young, fit and fast. On the person with luggage is going to be at risk.

Over in London, Boris wants to shave six seconds off every green man crossing. This is to reduce congestion and increase traffic flow, possibly handling the consequences of his rollback of the western congestion zone and the big-car premium tax. The official walking speed is now 1.2 metres/second. Anyone going slower that is either a tourist or someone elderly or unfit.

Over in New York, campaigners are pushing for longer crossing times, to help the elderly, advocating a speed of 0.75 metres/second.


But that is the US, with privatised health care. In Britain, with the NHS, the old, the frail and the unfit are often a net cost to society -they cost in health and pensions, and bring in little tax. Having a crossing policy that penalises the slow with death reduces the long term costs to the state, and so saves money.

University Approach

Starting to collect some data on the university. A key finding is that walking is the primary way students get to university, something they do despite the effort the city goes to run them over. This is the Tyndall's Park Road/Woodland road junction.

Up until about 1992 this was open to cars, making Woodland road a high speed alternative to Whiteladies Road. It certainly made cycling down T-Park-Road trickier as cars were prone to pulling out in front of you while you came down at speed. Then the junction got closed of for a year or so while a storm drain was constructed underneath the city -car access never came back. Instead we got a road that is intermittently available to pedestrians and bikes. Currently the roadworks are being anti-bicycle. Cyclists dismount, the sign says. These signs are a stock requirement of all roadwork sites in Bristol, as the alternative would be thought and effort. If they could have a sign "pedestrians go away" they would use them too.

With the roadworks and the scaffolding truck, its a kind of edgy junction. You can get half way out and with no visibility, have to assume that when a car goes uphil (to the right in this picture), its safe to pull out. We are fortunate all students are fit as you need to be able to sprint across.

We are also grateful that most cars in Bristol don't deliberately set out to run over pedestrians and bicycles in their way. Here a car graciously slows down to avoid hitting a bicycle head on.

Where are the students going? To their 9am lectures. Where are they coming from? The halls of residence, other side of the Downs. This junction is not only part of Sustrans national network route 4, it is the primary by-foot commute for a few thousand students. Clearly it is not felt necessary to provide safe road crossings here. Further up the hill, there is a zebra crossing, but that will be replaced at considerable expense by a light controlled crossing so that buses can regain priority over pedestrians.