RTC on WLR

Showing we are more timely than the Evening Post with a publishing process that involves shipping paper in from outside Bristol -and so getting stuck on the M4- here are some pics of a collision between a BMW and a Toyota (Auris?) on Whiteladies Road from 08:10; twenty minutes ago.
 
The front of the Toyota looks toast, the airbags haven't deployed so it looks like a low-kinetic energy event.

The BMW bodywork has come out a lot more unscathed, though we suspect that if the driver took it to the BMW dealer in St Philips it would be the one coming out costing the most. The driver (belt and white shirt) was holding something up to the top of his head, implying he'd bashed it on the wheel or windscreen. That reg of BMW may not have airbags, and the driver may not have had a seatbelt or helmet. Yet as this is clearly a below-12mph crash, a cycling helmet would have reduce injuries.

 
The two people with rucksacks are a cyclist on the left and possibly a pedestrian on the right. It'd be tempting to blame the cyclist, but that's not the case, he pulled over after the event and was either being a witness or offering medical support.


What happened? The BMW RJ52AEM was crossing Whiteladies from Oakfield Road. At this point you need to pull across the road to get to West Park if you are heading across Bristol; this is a nice little west-east rat-run option from Clifton to Cotham that avoids the St Pauls Road/Tyndall's Park Road junction, where the traffic lights manufacture congestion.
 

You do need to pull out fairly aggressively as the gaps are quite tight. The main provider of gaps is actually the zebra crossing -whenever a pedestrian uses it the outbound traffic halts in a queue and there's an empty space on the other side of the road; once you get over that outbound lane you can go quite fast over the road, down west park and you are in Cotham Hill in a flash.
Today it went wrong. Looks like either the BMW pulled out expecting the Toyota to give way, and it didn't. Perhaps one or other weren't looking, perhaps the right-of-way negotiation process failed.

Either way, hope all is uninjured and that both are insured. Photos available to either party on request.

More Whiteladies: The Oakfield Road crossing

Continuing our Whiteladies Road coverage, here is Oakfield Road, the zebra crossing by it, then the bus/bike lane leading up to the double parking area by the BBC. Note that when the Kingsdown RPZ is rolled out, the council will steal the double parking opportunities here, which will reduce the parking capacity of the street by about a third.

We've covered this crossing before, and yes, cars do often drive through without stopping. But today, its an inbound bike that goes through the crossing ignoring that outdated bit of the highway code that says you should stop for pedestrians. We don't agree with that law ourselves, so aren't going to criticise a bicycle for doing what we'd do, if only the van parked in the bus lane wasn't stopping us getting into that lane and doing the same trick.

Learning to park proper like

We love the sight of L-plated cars parking "Bristol style". If you want to drive in this city, you need to know how to park in it, and the first rule is knowing which signs you can ignore. Yellow stripes on the ground are a good starting point.

Here. Robbies instruction car WR57FYY makes discreet use of the available space on West Park, between Whiteladies Road and Cotham Hill.

And on a different morning, an AA instructor shows someone the correct way to park on a corner of Kingsdown parade with their car GF59UXH

Neither of these number plate strings appear in Google's datacentres at the time of writing, so we welcome them to the World Wide Web.

Apologies for the camera strap in the way, some of our reporters are, well, incompetent.

Incidentally, can we ask all web sites that put videos and photos of cars up to use the full registration number without any spaces. It's what the car dealers do, and helps keep things consistent. This means that you can search for KY08XHW and not only get quotes selling this car second hand with 11,000 miles on it, you can see our page noting this car was used for teaching people how to drive round Bristol, and therefore its clutch, gearbox and suspension are toast, regardless of the mileage. Same for KS08KK0: search engines work best with consistent identifiers. This is why the dealers and the Bristol Traffic project use single-word registration numbers, and we encourage others too: its the only way to integrate properly across the web.