Cummings: "the car told me to do it"

The government is scrabbling for excuses for why Cummings drove 260 miles from London to Durham in March, did a 60 mile round trip while there, and then another 260 miles south in April.

The main claim "parental instinct out of concern for a child", coupled with a revision of the lockdown guidelines, aren't proving sufficient -especially given the day trip to somewhere 30 miles away.

Now they look for more excuses: the autistic child, the dying uncle.

But there are two more they need to consider and wheel out

1. his parent's dog was dying and they needed to let their son see it one last time
2. his car told him to do it

Now, no doubt some readers will be reading excuse #2 and thinking "WTF?". If you are one of those people: know that you are one of the little people.

Cummings is important. We know that not through is arrogant and self-entitled disdain for the lockdown laws –but because he drives an Important Car. We saw it on the telly when he was doorstepped. How do we know it's important? Look at the BBC video.

• It's an SUV in a London street. Hence: he probably has money and is therefore important. However, it could of course be an old one, in which case he is unimportant. how to tell?
•  He presses a button on the tailgate of his SUV. This is a modern important car with a motor to lower it. That, along with power steering, has been essential for mass-market adoption of SUVs people -especially women- without the reach to the top of the tailgate then pull it down can now close it from their keyfob or by tapping the tailgate button.

Yes, Cummings pretends to be closing the tailgate by hand, but he has pressed the button before doing that. He's realised that to avoid being seen as one of the elite, he needs to look like he doesn't really drive an important car. But we Important People see his trick.

And what do important cars care about? Electrical power. Electrical power for that tailgate, the satnav, the hands free bluetooth phone link, the camera and computer for lane tracking, the adaptive cruise control, the power windows, the power sunroof, the 8 speaker audio system, the rain-sensing mirrors, the runflat tyre pressure monitoring, the side radar collision avoidance, the ultrasonic parking sensors, and the always-on headlights. Oh, and starting the engine -especially in an environmentally smug car which turns it of when you are stationary, waiting for the parking sensors to tell the engine control unit that the car in front has set off, and it'll be time to move two metres forward.

Even when parked up it's busy -its alarm powered up to make sure unimportant people keep out of it.

Which means, they have expensive batteries which need to be kept charged.

Based on our extended experience, an Important Car for Important People driven 250 miles/month, with 3/4 of that on motorways, is happy. But during lockdown, it has been complaining about neglect


Battery Discharged it says -Start Engine.
And on the LCD of the "things to look at when bored" feature, it expands this



Battery Charge Very Low.
Recharge by Driving or using external charger
Functions requiring power supply, such as communication, entertainment are
+some warning which continues if you scroll down on the "controls to play with when bored" dial

See that? "Start Engine". "Recharge by driving". Also, see how the warnings were all about what matters in an important car 'communication, entertainment and air condition', not things that important people don't care about or understand like 'engine won't start'.

What was he to do?
Well, he could have done what we did. bought a £50 quid charger, stuck it under the bonnet and ran a power cable over to it. That would not only have charged his Important Car for Important People, it would make passers by think he had an electric car. Because nowadays, running an extension from your front garden to your car is the new status symbol. Especially if you stick an "e" on the back of your car where it tells people what specific variant of the expensive-car category it is.


Why not do that? Maybe he realised that he was about to come down with Covid-19 and because it takes 24h to buy a battery on line and have it delivered, by the time it arrived he would be self isolating and unable to go outside and wire up his Important car for Important People.

Driving to Durham with his entire family. was the only thing he could do. Well OK, he could have got in alone gone up to the M25 and done a lap of it, but really, that's not only boring, there's roadworks between the M3 and gatwick turnoff, so it'd take longer that you'd expect. And without his family to keep him company, nothing to do but make hands-free calls to #10 telling Boris what to think. And that must get really tiring, day in, day out -especially now that Boris is @ work rather than on holiday somewhere.

Nope, Durham it had to be.

So while other people are denouncing him for being an arrogant self entitled elite wanker -which he is, admittedly, we don't support those condemnations for illegally driving across the country to bring Covid-19 to Durham just because he didn't want to have to entertain a four year old all on his own.

Nope, for us: the car is at fault .

At least he didn't come to Bristol.

Hotwell's future in a divided city

Bristol is a divided city.

It's divided between North -especially North West- Bristol where the professionals who moved into the city into the city in the 1980s and 1990s settled, and those parts of the city, where families have lived for generations.

It's divided by the future options in life which children going up North of the river have, compare to those in forgotten places like Hartcliffe.

It's divided by air quality, where people who live outside the air quality management area and drive into or through the centre, then get home expressing how glad they are they don't live in the polluted zone, while complaining that even the delayed and inadequate antipollution plans reluctantly produced by the mayor's office an unacceptable attack on their right to drive to work.

It's divided into those people who live in the city and likely to walk, cycle or take the bus, and those people who live in out-of-town dormitory villages. The latter opted for a mock-rural life with an expectation that driving to work in the city should be easy and free. Really, who moved to Portishead without noticing that the A369 is a traffic jam morning and evening because everyone else had the same idea? Who buys a little Georgian something in Chipping Sodbury and then drives to work down the M4 and A4174 without expecting the roads to be moving 30 mph in the rush hour -and why the fuck do you think the rest of us really want to hear about this fact every fucking morning?

Hotwells is one of those places where the division in transport choices are so starkly apparent.


The Plimsoll Bridge: one of the key ways people drive from South to North Bristol -and vice versa, and the way those North Somerset extra-urban commuters can bring their overweight SUVs from their two-cars-per-household mock rural semi-detached houses into what ever office car park they somehow get to park their oversized vehicles.



Alongside it, the Merchants Road Bridge: how people on foot and bike get between the two halves of the city. Visiting it on Saturday, apart from one or two cars heading to or from Spike Island -the majority of traffic was people are using their own legs to get them over.

Admittedly, the Nova Scotia, the Pump House, and The Cottage seem popular destinations for the pedestrians, so legless could well be final state of the journey -but what better places to enjoy a bevvy or four than the waterside pubs in quiet and historic part of the Harbour?


On a bike, you can carry on over the now reopened "Create Centre Bridge" and then on to points south and west (east is a topic for another post). It's here that the literal stratification of transport choices becomes so apparent. While the people in their cars, are busy wondering which lane to take, under the flyover, people are walking and cycling around without anyone cutting them up.


There is a BMX area for those with skills, and a pump trail, for children and adults alike to enjoy trying to negotiate its bumps and berms in a lovely setting. None of this is apparent to people in their cars.


Which group of people do you think are behind these proposals to destroy Hotwells? Is it the families that bring a small kids down on scooters to enjoy the pump trail? Is it people crossing the Create Centre and the merchants road bridges on their e-bikes, ready to -somehow- get into the city centre unscathed? No. It's those business executives who live either in North Somerset villages, or corners of Clifton, and who only ever see the bridge for more than 30 seconds when they're stuck in traffic jam. Which is why they don't seem to have any qualms about destroying what is a key walking and cycling connection point between the two cities -North Bristol and Greater Bemmy. They won't even know it's there, except on some footnote of page 20 on a report; a report they stopped reading on page 3 once the cost of building a tunnel became apparent, the fact that repairing the existing bridge wouldn't make the money became obvious --and that there was some land adjacent to the river which nobody important seemed to be using.


Yes, the council did donate that land "to the people" in the 1960s to compensate for the bits of the park they'd used for the interchange -but they didn't have spreadsheets in that era. We do now, and they send a message to those people who look at numbers on screens in the day, and think about those numbers as they queue on the A370 en route to the newly opened traffic jam that is the new Southern Link Road.


What we're seeing here is one of those moments when we get to decide what city we want to live in. The attempts to convert the railway path into the first of the Metrobus routes was the last time we really got this. A council deciding that a bus route, was more important then anyone trying to walk or cycle into the city, that East Bristol didn't really need its parkland, not when it held up commuters from Emersons Green.

So what city do we want? We can see what city the mayor wants. We just don't understand why he has chosen to represent the car-first commuters are North Somerset and profit-first businessman of Clifton, ahead of the rest of us.

Hotwells: the Westernmost Outpost of Greater Bedminster

Hotwells -for that is the name of the undeveloped western harbour area- is part of Greater Bedminster.

Yes, much of it is north of the harbour, but it is on the flatlands, just north of the harbour.

While Clifton isn't that far away, it's a brutal climb up that Hill -and when you get there, there's only Clifton Village to show for it. Apart from the pubs, a chip shop, a very small library, and an underwhelming convenience store, there is not much there. If you live in Hotwells, and you choose to head south, you can you make your way to Asda, and buy food amongst the friendly community that always seems to be wandering those aisles. And nowadays, you have all of Southville to explore. Your parks and green spaces are also south of the Avon.

That's why the council plans for the Cumberland flyover are more than just changes in Hotwells, they are an attack on South Bristol. In particular, to propose putting a two- or four lane road alongside the Avon, through that green space which connects the Avon to Grenville park, is something straight out of 1970s Bristol road planning. Even Glasgow has backed off doing things that awful since the early 1990s (M77 and Pollok Estate, for the curious).

Our mayor is proposing destroying the unspoiled nature of the southern gorge. Proposing building a four-lane road over what today is the best view you get to the Clifton suspension bridge. Proposing making today's walking and cycling route from Hotwells to Bemmy yet another multi-lane bridge where are all walking and cycling facilities and be an afterthought. Yes, they mention "improvements to cycling", but without spelling them out -you know they'll be afterthoughts or extra lights we have to wait 15 minutes to cross the junction. And you know that as the cost of the project overruns, as the schedule overruns start to be measured in years -the "value engineering" of the project will result in the exact outcome which Avon Crescent got from their Metrobus promises: fuck all.

Why is he doing this? Because it is obvious to everyone with a spreadsheet, that large amounts of money could be made by building houses on the land which the flyover currently uses. The only way to turn flyover into profit is if you can think up another way to get people across the river. Clearly, and attempt to estimate how much a tunnel would cost to build has shown that even before you include the inevitable massive cost overruns, it's too expensive for the people hoping to profit from the land sales to fund -and nobody else is willing to. The only way you can convert that bridge into housing is if you find someone else to put the bridge. A nearby park and the side of the gorge which doesn't have traffic jams is the obvious solution -and if that doesn't work, there is always the bridge to Spike Island, which combined with knocking down some of the historical buildings of the harbour, gives you another place for the bridge. Obviously, if the council proposed building the houses on that parkland, they'd expect some resistance. Selling off the Plimsoll Bridge land space and then handwringing over how about road now need to go somewhere else lets some people make their money -too bad that South Bristol will lose a bit more of its green space and that the nice bits of Hotwells destroyed to put in the bridge which will be needed once the current bridge has been sold off for redevelopment.

So yes, we are opposed to this. Expect more coverage on this topic to follow

VU61HXM : Nissan Driver doing clifton roundabouts "french style" in the snow

We're an organisation which believes in data and experimentation. We have time for experts.


Normally we can't be arsed to send videos of near misses to A&S police on the basis that it seems an exercise in futility. Let's look at the track record of our limited number of attempts

1. Sept 2012, R242AAC. Shoots out a roundabout, nearly hits the parent. Outcome: Five penalty points. Notable that (then) Cllr Jon Rogers was pulled in early —is this the way to get a result?
2. April 2014: Double-overtaking driver of Peugeot L861CDW nearly runs over family. Outcome: A&S Police Sergeant tells off cyclist for swearing when they think their son is about to die.
3. Feb 2016, SWC scaffolds van HK15FYH. Reporting this van driving over a roundabout while texting involved cycling to Chipping Sodbury to hand over a CD with the video and file a report. When followed later that month, nobody had any record of it. Chipping Sodbury Police: "we passed it on". A&S HQ "we have no record". 

It's got worse. We've gone from Prosecute to Won't Prosecute to No Record of Incident. And that with  a trip to Yate added in.

It's 2019, three years since the last experiment. And this one merits it. A Nissan Note nearly being driven into a cyclist because the driver has chosen to drive the wrong side of the mini roundabout, in winter conditions, where the cyclist is forced to swerve into snow and ice to avoid the car driving into the side of them.

Our tax dodger (expendable) is coming into Clifton on Suspension Bridge road, heading towards the more interesting parts of the city. Because all the side roads are iced up, the main roads are the only options, and there, the central lane where enough traffic has melted the snow.

Our cyclist carefully cycles round the roundabout, making a controlled turn through the junction, avoiding snow, avoiding banking into the turn, lining up perfectly to exit in the snow and ice-free part of the road -the only place to be in these conditions.

Except, what's that engine noise coming from the right hand side? It's the Nissan Note VU61HXM, also taking the roundabout, this time on the completely opposite side of the roundel. If they have a driving license, it had better be a French one. And they have to be able to say more than "quoi? je comprende pas? Est-ce-que il-y-a une probleme?" when questioned.



In normal weather conditions, that would be an selfish and dangerous thing to do. In snow conditions, conditions where the police and met office were warning everyone to think before they travel, and take care when they do —it's tantamount to attempted murder.

The cyclist was: positioned on the snow free part of the road, carefully using their (hydraulic disc) brakes, riding with tyres (2.4" Conti Mountain King ) suited to bad weather, and taking corners really, really carefully, both hands gripping the wide bars for maximum control. Oh, and avoiding the side roads which don't get swept or gritted.

The driver "Oh, this cyclist is taking too long, I'll just dive across the road. Oh, they are shouting and waving. I shall carry on without slowing down or changing my line —they shouldn't have come up the inside of me"

When you see a car aiming straight for the side of you, there's no point trying to argue rights of way, it's time to make an emergency turn into the snow -avoiding braking at the saame time as that's guaranteed to lead to a fall. Then, once to side, controlled deceleration.


If there had been any ice underneath, this would have caused a fall, and, with a car twenty centimetres away, guaranteed injury. We wonder what the driver would have said then —aassuming they stopped at all.

Certainly driving off seemed to be their sole reaction to the near-collision



It's interesting to look back. They only come up behind the bike within the last ten seconds of the approach to the junction —the time the cyclist is gently slowing down. And, irony of irony, because the tax-dodging cyclist stopped to let the family cross the zebra crossing. If instead they'd gone straight over the crossing (the kids hadn't stepped out, so it'd have been legal, albeit antisocial), then VU61HXM wouldn't have had a chance to run over the cyclist.

At the junction itself the driver didn't even make any attempt to drive legally. Look at the angle of the front wheel. They were lined up right from the outset to cut across the roundabout and the cyclist.  Not a moment of hesitation, not even to safely assess whether there were any drivers approaching from the right. The decision to drive on the wrong side of the mini roundabout had been made before they started to pull out.


And it's not like they "just" went onto the painted roundel. They barely grazed it with the passenger side wheels.


The rear view also shows how close they come knocking the cyclist off. With the wide angle lens, that is probably within 15 cm.


The only way to put a safe gap in was to put both hands on those MTB bars bars and steer into the snow, while taking care to stay upright.



This is one of the worse bits of driving experienced for a while. In the worst road conditions Bristol has experienced for almost a year.  In terms of actions, it makes the cut for the CPS guidelines for prosecuting dangerous driving.

• failing to have a proper and safe regard for vulnerable road users such as cyclists
• overtaking which could not have been carried out safely;
• disregard of traffic lights and other road signs, which, on an objective analysis, would appear to be deliberate;

And particularly:

• a brief but obvious danger arising from a seriously dangerous manoeuvre. 

Let's see what happens. Filing planned for Saturday, with the full "dull" long video and a detailed statement; will do a followup in the week to make sure the NIP is in the post, then we'll see whether this makes the cut as something worthy of the CPS's time. Oh and this time: ruthlessness from our side. Missing report: escalate. Failure to prosecute: escalate and publicise.

If A&S police don't do better than they have done in the 2014 and 2016 experiments, they may as well cancel their safe passing program and give out Nissan Notes instead.

December 5th: today is the day to object to the BRI's multi-storey car park

Today is December 5th. If you have any concerns about the BRI's proposed 820+ space car park adjacent to the Dove Street Flats and the hospital itself, then go to the council planning portal and make a comment

Here is our objection: Bristol Traffic's Objection to Planning Proposal 

Key points

• The idea that adding a vast car park will not increase traffic is bollocks. It assumes transport choices of staff and visitors are inelastic, and also that freeing up capacity in the streets and car parks nearby will not encourage others to drive into the city.
• Even based on the naive assumption that Induced Demand doesn't apply to the BRI, the air quality assessment included in the proposal admits that air quality will get worse in and near the hospital
• It completely ignores, in both planning, discussion and air quality assessments the Dove Street Flats and play area directly above where the car park is planned. Unlike the hospital itself, the families living don't have filtered air conditioned houses: they will have windows open on the hot high pollution summer days, their kids will be spending evenings and weekends playing in the playground which will be directly overshadowed by the car park.

The best bit: it's going to to make air quality in the hospital worse too, to the detriment of staff and patients.

In our research, we came across some slides from October by Dr Estafandiar Burman of UCL, who provides real measurements of the air quality inside the new heart and lung clinic, or as we call it "the BRI Scottish Hospital"

This new part of the hospital has air conditioning, sealed wards and filters on the aircon to reduce air pollution.

The filters are great at reducing PMx pollution compared to that experienced by the Dove St Flat families



But, NOx air pollution levels are dangerously high all the time, especially given the patients, by the very nature of their conditions, will have reduced capacity to breathe oxygen and pass it round their bloodstream

Given that even with the utterly indefensible traffic model, the plan acknowledges that external air quality directly level with these wards is going to worsen, we can conclude that air quality within the wards is going to worsen —so endangering the health of the patients.

If this was proposed by someone on the medical staff of the hospital, it would go against the GMC's ethical code of conduct, "do not harm your patient"

Have a look at the BRI proposal, add your comments. If you want a copy-and-pasteable version of our objection, here it is.

To close then, here is the conclusion of our objection.

Conclusion

We could go on more detail —such as dissecting the traffic analysis and covering all its flaws. But that is moot. Even based on the assumption of the analysts: "demand for parking is inelastic", the air quality assessment shows that the car park endangers the health of the patients, the staff, its neighbours and the broader citizens of the city.

We will note that The Bristol Traffic Project is a decade-long project to document the city, to build up a defensible dataset on how people get around Bristol. We also like our satire,

Yet for all our attempts at ironic humour, even we could not imagine Bristol's showcase hospital proposing adding an 800+ car parking spaces within the Bristol Air Quality "red zone". We look forward your application for a licensed fried chicken takeaway with outdoor smoking in the Heart and Lung clinic, along with a trampoline in the children's A&E waiting area.

fraternal greetings between arrogant and self-entitled road users

We've observed before that there's no real difference between cyclists and the owners of fast german cars: Arrogant and Self-entitled wankers: the only variable being how much kinetic energy they bring to a collision.

You can see that some of the individuals are in fact self-aware of this little detail. And rather than treat "the opposing team" as unworthy, instead welcome their presence and greet each other as they pass.

Here we can see exactly this at work, with our tax dodging adult and teenage child heading towards the Clifton "dead zone" from the more exciting parts of the city, on a weekend afternoon where almost nobody is around. This St Pauls Road, incidentally, because its the way from Clifton to those more exciting parts of the city. It continues as "Tyndall's Park Road", because the Bearpit roundabout wasn't considered in the victorian era destination, so "Bearpit Avenue" is eternally denied our city.

You can see, as they head down St Pauls Road, a Porsche turning in from Whiteladies Road, cutting the corner as it revs up to the 20 mph speed limit Marvin Rees is yet to publicly abrogate —though his state of the nation "we can't punish driving" hints that it will come soon.

It comes up behind the two cyclists; the father riding alongside the child to stop both of them getting close-passed.

Rather than get upset, the Porsche driver pauses for a moment, assesses the situation, and recognises a fellow arrogant and self-entitled wanker. They pass, but close enough they can see each other clearly, and sound a friendly on their horn as they pass.

Our cyclist, also recognises a fellow arrogant and self-entitled wanker waves a friendly hello back. After all —why else would someone beep their horn in a quiet Bristol road except to say hello?

20 mph sabotage at Leigh Woods

Our mid-august coverage of the 20 mph "firstbus" review, was illustrated with a photograph of a 20 mph sign nonchalantly keeling over.


That photo was taken on Bridge Road, the approach to the Clifton Suspension Bridge from North Somerset. If you are driving from Portishead down the 40 mph-limited A369, or sprinted down Beggar Bush Lane from Failand (60 mph), this is the first sign you are entering the Big City where you have to temper your expectations of speed with the need to share the road with people on foot and bike and keep your speed at around 20 mph.

Here's the sign today.

More specifically: it's where the sign was. Rather than repair the sign, someone in the "hypothesised" North Somerset Highways Maintenance Department has decided that rather than repair the sign, they'll just take it down and fill in the hole.

Which means, for anyone approaching Clifton on this road, there is no large roundel here warning of the speed change. There's one on the other side of the road, but it can be hidden by parked vehicles.
As a result: no major cues that you are in a 20 zone.

Does it change people's behaviour? Hard to tell.

Here's a rear-view clip from earlier in the week of one of tax-dodgers (expendable) approaching the bridge and going past where the sign used to be. They're doing 20-25 mph in the 30 mph zone.

If you look at the speed of the car WR07YFL coming up behind, it's probably doing 35-40. And, as they both cross where the sign used to be, the driver decides she doesn't want to slow down for a bike only doing 25 mph, and instead swing past. Which, given our tax dodger is positioned in the middle of the lane, and there's a lane separator fast approaching, isn't going to work. She eventually slows down and tucks in behind, only getting an option to go forwards when the cyclist pulls over on the "they don't have to pay any-more!" cyclist bypass of the toll gate. And then, the same cyclist pulls out in front and speeds up to 20 mph again, enough to stop the car from overtaking. We've documented dangerous passing on this bridge before; at least here the driver was sensible enough to not attempt it —but we wonder, if it had been an oncoming bike, not a car, would she have done any differently?

In town, she drives less aggressively; the cyclist is now "only" doing 20 mph, but so are the cars in front. Seemingly having the reason for the speed constraint being a car, not a bike winds up the driver less. Again though, we have to ask: if it hadn't been for that, would she have made another attempt?

Who knows? And one recorded incident doth not a defensible dataset make.

For now: if caught driving above the 20 mph limit, anywhere in the inner zone, just say "I came in over the Suspension Bridge and didn't see any signs!" Which, if it works, shows that all it takes is some laziness from an adjacent council for the whole 20 mph project to slowly fail.

BRI parking: still waiting for a response from the PR team

After the BRI notified us residents of the Bearpit that we were to be graced with a new 8 storey car park above the only children's playground in the Stokes Croft area, we dropped their PR team a note On Aug 7 saying, essentially, how can you defend this?

We followed this up on Aug 21, saying "hoping for a response here", and got something back saying "we will be answering this".

It's now September, and as they say, "silence is usually a sign of inability to come up with a good excuse".

So again, out with another email. For the curious, here is the view of the staff housing they plan to demolish to make way for 800 parking spaces —the view as seen from the Dove Street flats' kids playground. That's a three storey tenement: imagine that with 5 more storeys above, brought almost up to the railings, and full of cars driving around all day. That's what the BRI wants to do.



One little thing we've come across in our research is the UBHT 2020 Green vision document, which sets out their vision of a sustainable future, especially in light of the NHS to step up to its duty of reducing national CO2 emissions by 80%. Being the largest single employer in the UK, and seeing millions of patients every day, the NHS is a critical part of meeting that goal -so it's good to see Bristol's hospitals leading the way.


The existing document is worth a read though, especially page 8, which estimates 1 vehicle in 20 (where?) is on NHS business -which implies they are a significant factor in our pollution and congestion issues.

Travel by staff and patients is another area we currently do not account for in our carbon footprint.
However, we recognise the significant environmental impact that our staff and patient travel has. It is estimated that one in twenty vehicles on our streets are on NHS business as staff patients or visitors. As such we have developed a green travel plan to reduce the impacts of travel.

There's a followup point on P13,

 supporting a shift away from car travel to more sustainable and healthy transport alternatives.

Sadly, the author of that paper, "Deborah Lee, Chief Operating Officer and Executive Green Champion", appears to have moved up to gloucestershire; we'll have to do some research on who is their replacement at that level, and whether the 2020 green vision has been superceded by one which discusses driving to work as a core aspect of the future.

For now, though, another email to the press team, this time highlighting the fact we know that they're also the PR team for MetroBus, so are actually part of a story of their own: does the PR team for MetroBus believe that MetroBus is going to transform Bristol's transport or not?

From: Bristol Traffic <bristol.traffic@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, 1 Sep 2018 at 13:59
Subject: Re: hospital parking feedback
To: <James.Hinchcliffe@jbp.co.uk>

Still waiting

It comes across that as the communications partner for the UBHT multistorey car park, you just weren't prepared for any form of detailed analysis. Its was predictable that someone was going to say "how much will be staff?", "don't you have 800+ spaces already when you count up all the parking across the UBHT campus?", and "how can you say it is set back on the hill when there's a childrens playground behind?"

Yet these are exactly the kind of questions you should expect after sending out a letter to those local residents whose children play in the car park, who live in the central bristol "red" pollution zone,

Here's a new question then: how does the UBHT reconcile this with their 2020 green vision, which also covers the NHS's requirement to participate in CO2 reductions, and explicitly says  on page 8 "It is estimated that one in twenty vehicles on our streets are on NHS business as staff patients or visitors. As such we have developed a green travel plan to reduce the impacts of travel."

We are struggling to find any way to make the proposed parking defensible other than an outright admission "FirstBus/Metrobus is a failure and we've given up trying to reduce staff driving numbers". Which, given your position as the communications partner for FirstBus, puts in a somewhat sticky situation.

Please can you at least supply an approximate deadline for your responses.

On Tue, 21 Aug 2018 at 08:51, James Hinchcliffe <James.Hinchcliffe@jbp.co.uk> wrote:
Dear Bristol Traffic.

We’re very sorry for the delay in coming back to you and still intend to answer your original query, but suggest we also wrap that response up with the issue you raise below.

We’ll be in touch as soon as possible with a substantive reply.

Many thanks

On behalf of:

Tel: 0800 130 3270
Email: UHBT@jbp.co.uk
Website: www.uhbristol.nhs.uk/transporthub

20 mph: it's OK to support it if you have a fast car

There are a few days left to tell BCC you support 20 mph and don't want the zones to be crippled for the benefit of firstbus and few angry drivers from the suburbs. It'll be interesting to see the outcome. If Marvin Rees does roll it back, he will have to justify spending the money to do so, and the potential cost in lives.

We've sent in our feedback "happy with 20 mph", which raises a question with some of our acquaintances, the question being "but you have a fast car"

For the record: in the Important Car for Important People, it is no harder to drive at 20 mph than 30. Petrol consumption is the same at ~20 mpg; as the engine switches off when idle the stationary bits are free.

We've repeatedly claimed that we are important, yet people have accused us of being arrogant self-entitled car hating-wanker cyclists. Not so: the Important Car for Important People is not fictional, it's a BMW 3-series estate with a 2L twin-turbo engine hooked up to the rear wheels via an 8 speed automatic gearbox.



That said, the difference between the two is quite subtle:

	Cyclist	BMW Driver
Arrogant	Y	Y
self-entitled	Y	Y
Wanker	Y	Y
Think they own the roads	Y	Y
Park where they want	Y	Y
Ignore Highway code	Y	Y

The Important Car for Important People is actually speed limited to 250 km/h; 156 mph. That's a mostly abstract value, visible only in the cost of manufacturer approved W-rated homogulated run-flat tyres you need to buy on the off-chance you take a wrong turn from Cribbs Causeway, get on the M5, and, after a few missed turns, end up on the A8 autobahn between München and Stuttgart. But it is there: the speed you could drive at if you weren't held back by speed limits and slow-moving cars.

Look at the difference between that theoretical maximum speed and those of Bristol urban roads

Max Speed	Limit	Difference
156 mph	30	126
156 mph	20	136

See that? Noise.

It may matter to Ford Fiesta drivers who get upset being stuck behind someone cycling 20 mph in the 20 mph zone, but from the perspective of a BMW owner, you are crawling along at either speed. And so: you may as well embrace that crawling along, in order to have a city better to live, walk and cycle in.

Having fiesta drivers tailgate you flashing their lights for you driving at 20 mph is then quaintly amusing, given that it's Fiesta drivers who can't go above 85 mph which hold you back on the M4. For that is where trying to stay close to the limit is hard. Not enough cues around you, you need to keep an eye on the speedo, tell the car itself to beep above 85, waze to chime at 80, and, with attention, you can drive vaguely close to the limit when heading up and down the motorways.

In town: much, much easier

1. Get in car
2. Turn Waze on to beep at speed + 5.
3. Set off, gently tapping the accelerator.
4. Look at speed of car, compare with speedo, get to 20 mph, or, if too high, coast down.
5. Carry on at this speed so you get familiar with how it feels.
6. Keep driving round town, do whatever you intended to do.
7. If waze beeps, it means you are going too fast, or you think you are driving in a 30 zone where it is really 20. Most useful when coming off a faster road (M32) into town.

You don't need to look at the speedo all the time as it doesn't take long to calibrate your driving at the start of the journey. With the whole inner city at 20 mph, it is easy to get used to it, and straightforward to know what the limit on every road is.

Make the bus routes 30 mph, and all that calibration goes away. You'll end up driving at 35 in a 20 zone, and that's how you earn speeding points. And let's be honest: there's nothing impressive about those kind of speeding tickets. Try showing off to other BMW drivers about getting a ticket at 33 mph —you'll only get laughed at.

Twenty mph works great in Bristol, because it is everywhere. You can calibrate driving at that speed with ease, and you don't have to worry about whether you are on a 20 road while doing 30.

Save your speeding for the M4! Get your response in today!

UBHT: our next email to the BRI PR team

Two weeks, and silence from the PR company tasked with selling an eight storey car park in the central bristol "red zone" as a benefit, here is our followup to our initial email.

Hello.

Sadly, we don't seem to have had a reply to our previous email..

Never mind —a polite response would have been nice.

We have a few of questions for our ongoing coverage. While you can opt out of answering them, it will save time compared to filing FOI requests, and give you an opportunity for you to present your arguments.

Terminology

1. What is a transport hub and how is it different from a normal car park?
2. If it is because it has secure staff cycle parking, do the existing BRI and St Michael's hill staff car parks qualify for the title "transport hub"?
3. If not: why not?

Current/Planned capacity

1. Across the entire UBHT Kingsdown Campus of BRI and St Michael's Hill hospitals, what is the total number of parking spaces?
2. What is their breakdown into: facilities, staff, disabled and visitor
3. How was the number of new spaces to build chosen? Was it demand driven, or simply "number of floors times spaces per floor?"
4. With the proposed multistorey-transport-hub, what will be the new breakdown of facilities, staff, disabled and visitor?
5. Why was this specific balance chosen?

Demand Modelling

1. Which tool did you use for modelling demand?
2. Did you model the pollution impact, and if so on the "we trust the manufacturers" EURO5/6 numbers, or the real world datasets?
3. Did your model consider that Metrobus promises a step change in Bristol transport? If so, what impact will it be considered to have? If not, why not?
4. Did any model you explored actually reduce pollution within the central bristol "Red Zone"?
5. Did you explore different mixes of staff/visitor allocation —and what impact did it have?
6. Did you explore different sizes of car park —and what impact did it have?

Finally, can we have the model you've built up? We can sort out the software.


Thanks,

The Bristol Traffic Team (data and traffic analysis department)

20mph: get your opinions in or lose to FirstBus

Bristol Council has a ongoing consultation on 20 mph limits.


We are happy supporters for the 20 mph limit in Bristol, for various reasons including:

• We live in the city and want one which is good to live in.
• Our children walk and cycle round the city, and we like them to come home alive.
• A defensible study on the 20mph zone concludes that it directly saves lives.
• If you live in the Red Zone, you want the council to do things to get people using cleaner transport options than driving, and this and RPZs, along with more aggressive actions, are needed here.
• In the Important Car for Important People, driving at 20mph is no harder than driving at 30 mph; fuel consumption (in a vehicle which turns off its engine at lights and in traffic jams), the same. 

Now, regarding the consultation, there's a large list of roads where raising the limit is being considered. 

This proposal is fundamentally wrong.

1. The roads they propose are the roads people cycle on. 
2. They are the roads children walk to school on.
3. They are the roads which anyone walking round the city has to walk on and/or cross.
4. Some of them actually have schools on.
5. Many of them are shopping streets, where encouraging people to visit and walk to shops, even across the road, is much more important than a nominal peak speed of 30 mph.

Everyone who lives in that inner city, and wants their streets to be more than rat-runs for the suburban visitors, should get their opinion in, support the proposals as is *and argue against changing the limit on any road in the zone.

Changing the limits will massively increase the costs, as now every 20mph-30mph turnoff/junction will need speed-limit-changed signs (go to portsmouth to see this). And at peak hours it will do nothing for journey times.

Why then the proposal? And why the choice of roads? Presumably Marvin Rees & team are trying to keep some groups of people happy. But whom? Well, one little reference is to "stakeholders". And what do the majority of those listed roads appear to have in common? FirstBus buses run on them.

Has FirstBus just given the mayor a list of roads in the 20mph zone where their buses go round and said to him "if you make these 30 mph all our scheduling problems will go away, FirstBus will be wonderful and Metrobus a success?" Because if they did, it's a lie

Looking at that list of roads, comparing it to a bus map, and its hard to conclude that the names aren't from firstbus, and are driven more by their belief it will help scheduling than any concerns about the safety and wellbeing of the inhabitants of Bristol's 20 mph zones.

If you don't want FirstBus to be setting speed limits in Bristol, make your opinions known ASAP.

Photo: the 30mph/20mph boundary on Bridge Road approaching the suspension bridge from As, someone clearly didn't see the speed limit sign and decided to go straight into it. That road isn't on the review list, while nearby roads (Pembroke Road, Clifton Down) are. But then, FirstBus buses aren't allowed over the bridge, are they?

As the outreach on an eight-storey car park over staff parking, adjacent to the sole child's playground near Stokes Croft takes place while everyone is out of town, we send a note to the PR team doing their utmost to make this consultation achieve the outcome the hospital wants: support, or at least acquiescence.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: bristol.traffic@gmail.com
Date: 7 August 2018 at 10:53
Subject: Re: hospital parking feedback
To: uhbt@jbp.co.uk

The Bristol Traffic Project

The Bearpit, Bristol BS2

Hello,

Thank you for your letter to residents proposing replacing the multi-storey car park comprising primarily of staff parking with a new, larger car park composing primarily of staff parking.

There appear to be a few other omissions from your letter

1. The claim "it will be a transport hub" fails to consider the existing multi-storey staff car park has staff bicycle parking, as does the Southwell Street facility. If adding secure bike parking to a car park makes it a "Transport Hub", then the existing car park must also qualify for this term.
2. The fact that existing Eugene Street car park is primarily staff parking. We estimate of your quoted 192 spaces, 165 are exclusively for staff.
3. The fact that total parking capacity across the BRI and St Michael's hill area comes to 1.9 miles —and that's without including the three floors of staff-only parking in the existing car park
4. The fact that air quality in inner Bristol is a significant health hazard, and that if that 800 space car park were used for higher turnover visitor parking, there would be many more than the baseline 1600 journeys/day one would expect. This will generate significant congestion in the area, along with the pollution.
5. The "it is set back in the hill" claim misses to note that it will in fact tower over the Dove St children's park behind it —the sole childrens play area within a part of the city whose demographics markers indicate "somewhat deprived".

We like to consider ourselves the purveyors of an ironic perspective of Bristol's many traffic issues, so are tempted to cherish the delicious irony of your proposal, "increase hospital staff and visitor parking at the expense of the health of staff, visitors and residents", along with "improve staff parking by removing staff housing".

However, we've decided instead to stare in disbelief at the disingenuous hypocrisy of claiming to be doing this for the health of patients where it appears to be more of a reaction to the residents parking zone changes, combined with an excel spreadsheet showing the revenue opportunities of high-turnover visitor parking.

We shall cover this topic over the summer. Expect forthcoming FoI requests to explore both the number and purpose of parking spaces across the entire Kingsdown Estate, your modelling of the congestion and health impact of adding six hundred more spaces, any artists impressions you have made of the "View from the Dove Street playground", as well as on your business model —including who is funding the project and whether you've included in your business plans the risk that a labour government will mandate that England follow Scotland and Wales in offering free hospital parking.

Current and future coverage will be appear under the URL http://bristolcars.blogspot.com/search/label/BRI

Thanks.

The Bristol Traffic Team

"Weakly-defensible data-driven traffic analysis since 2008"

bristol.traffic@gmail.com   @bristoltraffic

How much parking does the BRI have? 1.9 miles

One aspect of the greenwash letter on the new BRI multi-storey car park was its claim that the current multi-storey transport hub only had 200 spaces. That was a surprise, as if you ever spend any time in that part of the city you will know that UBHT property can be recognised by the way all garden areas have been converted into some form of parking.

Have the PR consultants forgotten to mention that detail? Hope that locals wouldn't pick up on that any more than they'd be expected to notice that you can't set an 8 floor car park into a hill when there's a child's play area right behind it? Whatever the reason, that failure to list all the parking spaces seems designed to make you feel sorrier for those who can't park -and again, by emphasising patients over staff, going for the maximum sympathy

Sadly, we are a data driven organisation, so set out to count up the spaces ourselves. Attempt 1 was on a Sunday afternoon, it took about an hour to get round and is too boring to share. What's surprising is how many little blocks and crannies they've managed to fit a car into. We estimate that in the combin f BRI and St Michaels hill hospital "campus", there are 400+ spaces, outside the existing multi-storey transport hub. That's not obvious to patients for the following reason: a lot of these spaces are dedicated to staff. As for the disabled? You get into double digits, but really -the majority of dedicated disabled parking is the double-yellow line areas on the council roads.

Here is our second attempt at a tour of the parking areas, starting in Dove St at the children's playground the BRI pretends doesn't exist, finishing off directly above it in Marlborough Hill place. This complete loop of the many transport hubs belonging to UBHT here takes 15 minutes, and covers 1.9 miles. That is not a typo. If you cycle round each bay in the car parks, one by one, the total amount of space comes in at just under two miles. There's a small amount of public road to connect all this together, but there's parking there -free form disabled, paid for visitors. How can the hospital PR team say with a straight face that it doesn't have enough parking when it has 1.9 miles worth?


What they should be doing is looking at the allocation of it: how much to staff parking, does facilities have theirs in the right places, how many people with disabled parking needs come a day -and are they satisfied. Instead, we get a grand plan to poison central Bristol, one which simply puts off addressing the big issue: why does everyone seem to expect unlimited staff and visitor parking at a hospital in the centre of a city?

Anyway, here's the video showing exactly how much parking there is for the UBHT to choose how to allocate. It's taken about 5pm on the first day any light drizzle had fallen from the sky, making the roads a bit skittery; you can hear the back wheel slide out at one point.


(Literal) High point: our (expendable) reporter discovers the base of the St Michael's Chimney. It just comes up out the ground, behind the asbestos waste skip and near the toddlers house. Maybe in future it will get the recognition it deserves as central Bristol's highest structure. We'll need a Banksy or two on it first though.

For those who hate our cyclists (expendable), skip to the end of the video and you can see them getting a "snakebite" puncture just trying to ride down one of the many potholed roads in the city. This is Bristol cycling. You can't even complete a two mile loop of the BRI car parks without getting a puncture on the small amount of council road covered on the ride. Interesting question though: given this is clearly filmed as happening on a council road, are the council billable for the replacement inner tube?

Finally, purists may fault us for not actually covering three of the for floors of the existing multi-storey transport hub. Can't get in there see: staff only. The secret that UBHT press releases dare not mention.

BRI: Staff parking matters more than the health of the children in its shadow

A letter reaches in the Bearpit, which is not just the HQ of the Bristol Traffic, it is one of the few Bristol Parks and services managed greenery-spots in the city centre.

It comes from the BRI, and tells us residents of the hardships the hospital is facing regarding transport.


Specifically

1. 32% of the visitors drive for medical necessity.
2. Visitors complain when they drive here and they are forced to drive round "as they search for a small number of hospital car park spaces", or, even worse "park on-street".

The good news, the hospital has come upe with a great idea to fix it: A giant multistorey car park

1. This will add 800 spaces over the 200 which exist today.
2. It will the same height as the existing BRI main building.
3. You won't notice it as it will be set back into the hill.
4. They will have to knock down a terrace of staff housing.
5. And there's a small public road through the middle which they are ignoring.

Sounds good right?

Well, there's one little aspect of which the letter omits. It might not be obvious to people outside the area, but you can't "set a heliport-height car park into the hill", as the BRI doesn't own the entire hill. The area they are talking about is at the bottom of Kingsdown hill. And what is behind it? The Dove Street estate; social housing close to the city centre. A couple of tower blocks with a fair few families. One thing it actually does quite well is although it doesn't have much greenery, it makes the most of it for those families. There's a central area where small kids can play, separate from a dog-walk area, and on the western site of the estate, a larger play area for ~primary school age kids.
This play area, one of the two shared gardens of the estate, is exactly above where the BRI want's its 800 place multi-storey car park.

This means that "set into the hill" is actually true. Saying "Set into the Hill" creates an image of a car park somehow dug into the hill, a small thing you'd hardly notice, the Bag of Hobbiton, the underground house of Bilbo Baggins.

This utter fucking bollocks, to use a technical term.

It will be an eight storey car park set directly in front of the childrens play area of the Dove Hill estate. This will create a valley in the area, where the children, be it in the playground or in their houses, will get to breath in the car pollution of the thousands of car journeys which this will create. And of course, the principle of Demand Creation means that more people will drive there confident there will now be somewhere to park: it won't even address any parking problem.

800 spaces is more than 50% of the capacity of the 1700-space Cabot Circus multi-storey car park, the one which has created so much traffic that the M32 inbound on a weekend now has a traffic jam as people queue to get in to find a space.

800 spaces is 150% of the proposed 500 bay multi-storey car park in the Broadmead development, the one which was shrunk to 380 spaces, as the council felt 500 spaces were too many.

It's going to be the same height as the BRI heliport. This is one we showed a helicopter taking off from last month, ironically, filmed from that Dove Street play area. If you want to get a preview of how the car park will look to primary school age children playing in what is effectively their garden, imagine that same building, pulled up right in front of the play area, fill it with cars. That's what their life will be like

If this was some private developer that was proposing this —as with the Broadmead plans— there'd be outcry against this. Yet so far, we've heard nothing. Why? This is coming from the hospital, so of course it must be good.

Except: what's this in the news today? Another study showing how traffic pollution causes Asthma —and there's been a rise in 25% of cases in the last decade.

If the BRI actually cared about the welfare of children living in their literal, as well as figurative shadow, they'd be pushing the council to do more about an inner city ULEZ, collaborating on making that road in front of the hospital somewhere pleasant to cycle, rather than somewhere so scary adults try to avoid it, let alone families.

But no: they are proposing an 800 space multi-storey car park.

Even they must realise what utterly amoral this is. So rather than call it that, their letter talks about how it will have a secure employee cycle park, and so call it a "Transport Hub".

That sounds really good, but for a small detail. Their existing multi-storey car park already has a secure employee cycle park, but nobody bothers to call it that. Instead they call it "The BRI Staff car park".

For that is what it is.

Of that existing car park, of the 192 places which the BRI letter implies exists, only 20 are for visitors. The remaining 165 -the entire top three floors of the four floors, are staff parking.

For some reason, we get tales of woe of visitors with burns and neurological industries, but no mention of the fact that of that existing park, three quarters are for staff.

And similarly, we don't get any coverage whatsoever of how much of the new multi-storey car park (we can't call it a Transport Hub with a straight face), is going to be to staff parking —but we are confident of one thing: it'll be a fuck of a lot more than 165 places.

More to follow, showing how everything the BRI say in that letter is lie.

Friday Quiz: turning or parking?

Is this car GK06AUN, pictured one morning in Clifton

(1) turning on the wrong side of the road

(2) parked?

The correct answer is: it makes no difference. Oncoming traffic has to assume they are are turning vehicle, so slow down for a junction in a way that the painted give-way signs would never achieve.

This shows how Bristol's drivers do think of the safety of others, not just when driving, but when parking.

(this was published in 2009; updating the tags has had it relabelled as new. There's probably some yellow lines here now, forever deriving somebody important from parking on the closest corner to their home)

fuckwit RLJ at race speed

People ask us: why no coverage of RLJ-ing cyclists? Well, we generally leave that to grumpy Havana Coffe Hamid, on account of his soundtrack choices and spelling skills. But when the opportunity arises, well, we do

Today then, this fuckwit


This is filmed from St Pauls Road, leading from the dull part of town, Clifton, to the more interesting bits, albeit after a final bit of climbing and a university area inevitably full of texting students.

Approaching the lights, they're red, time to hang around for a while waiting for green. And then slowly off, in case the BMW driver is in an hurry. No problems there, except carving out from the left is someone on a road bike, looking like they are near that 20 mph limit, blowing straight through the red light to make a high speed turn into St Pauls Road.



On the shout of "fuckwit" you can see some surprise and a bit of a wobble, though delayed. Leaning into the corner like that, he was fully committed to the bend: the only two options were: carry on or come off sliding sideways exploring the concept "road rash" more fully. It'd have been interesting to see if a scream of "no brakes" would make him choose the latter,

What were the risks this fuckwit exposed themselves to?

• If the car he had cut up on the inside had gone through the light themselves: crash
• If the BMW turning right from Tyndall's Park Road had been in a hurry: crash
• If a vehicle coming out of St Pauls road had been in a hurry, he'd have cycled into it.

And of course, if our tax-dodging reporter hadn't been so slow setting off: they'd have been in the crash too. Which is why we think this fuckwit deserves coverage.

BRI Helicopter Takeoff

This happens fairly regularly these days: a helicopter landing and then taking off from the BRI helipad. This is just the first time we've got a video of it from nearby Dove Street



It's never a good sign, but apparently it doesn't always mean that its a critical emergency: apparently the helicopter works well as a way of getting patients from places like Plymouth or Taunton to the BRI without having to worry about an ambulance getting stuck on the M5.


This though, April 21 2018, the Great Wiltshire Air Ambulance bringing someone in from Pewsey, Wilts, "Medical emergency, helicopter conveyed to hospital". Hope they are well and enjoying the quality rice pudding which the BRI serves up.

The next day the team was involved in "Diving incident, helicopter conveyed to Decompression Chamber", taking someone from Chepstow to Plymouth. Busy weekend.

It's good to be in a country which has free, functional health care and a helicopter to take people which need that care to a hospital which doesn't ask for money. And, hopefully, doesn't ask for your immigration status to see if you are on Theresa May's "approved list".

The Uber Dev Team just Killed Someone

A software development team at Uber just killed someone.

The Uber AV killing is going to go down in software development as one of the "things you must never do" examples up there with Therac-25 and various Flight Control System failures. The datasets and traces of the collision, will, along with all analysis, be reviewed, torn apart and rebuilt into some fairly brutal dissection of the entire software development process by the Association of Computing Machinery Risks Group, which is basically a documentation of fuckups of one form or another.


Without waiting for any analysis, police and others are already saying "it wasn't uber's fault". That's the wrong way to view it.

Better to try and categorise it

1. Uber's system made a mistake —one that can be fixed and so never repeated. Other AV manufacturers can also use the data from the collision to avoid it in their systems too. 
2. The collision was unavoidable given the action of the user and the general category of LIDAR-enabled Autonomous Vehicle.

Option 2 means we would now have make a choice. Do we consider the death-rate of AVs "Acceptable", or push for more to separate vulnerable road users from AVs. That could be banning AVs from cities "it's just too hard right now", or trying to do something banning pedestrians from walking around, requiring cyclists to have some beacon implanted in the bike and charged up on a regular basis to announce its presence, etc. That's the category of "admitting your tech can't do what was originally promised"

It is a lot better politically if it does turn out to be the uber team at fault. Or a least blame the driver for inadequate supervision.

How society and industry reacts to this, the first fully self-driving car killing will reflect on the decisions and priorities which society makes. It should be the duty of the software developers to be honest about the incident and open about whether it and similar events can be prevented in future.

Unlike all "human at the wheel" collisions, the actions of the uber car can be fully replicated: with the recorded sensor data from the car and the same version of the software, exactly the same set of actions can be expected. Therefore we can see where it failed.

Here is the list of places

1. Sensing: failure to detect the victim with the sensors available.
2. Interpretation: failure to recognise the victim
3. Anticipation: failure to anticipate their movements (and/or the vehicle's) and/or failure to conclude from the anticipated trajectories of pedestrian & vehicle that a collision is likely
4. Planning: failure to come up with a plan to avoid a collision
5. Execution: failure to execute a valid plan.

What do we think?

Sensing: Uber, like the Google/Waymo vehicle has LIDAR: light-frequency radar Works perfectly well at night, wider angle of view than a set of headlamps. Range? Unknown. These are the state-of-the-art in sensing, very expensive, and why Tesla are claiming "you can get by without them". LIDAR is what engineers believe is needed. Yet here it has failed. Does it have known failure conditions? Rain, snow, hail, probably fog and smoke too. Doesn't recognise glass. Presumably doesn't work into low-sun either. "It was dark and they had dark clothes on" is not an excuse. 

Intepretation: First realistic way things could have failed. 

Anticipation: Not a fast moving vehicle, a person crossing the road. No obvious unexpected movements. This should not have been hard. If it is: give up AVs now.

Planning: Fun one. After concluding that a collision is likely, the car has to come up with a set of actions (brake, swerve, brake+swerve, accelerate, sound horn, ...). None of these actions seem to have been attempted.

Execution: Car skids on rain/snow/oil; swerving to avoid one crash triggers a second, etc. No actions appear to have been executed, so unless the car computer couldn't communicate with the steering/engine/brakes. not a failure point.

We suspect then: interpretation and anticipation. Or the sensors got an echo but discarded it amongst all the other inputs it had to deal with in a limited time. That is "prioritisation". 

We humans make exactly the same mistakes all the time. mostly you get away with it. When you don't, well, it could be skid and a dent, or you can be sliding down the crash barrier in a motorway, passenger and driver both trying to keep that steering wheel straight, everyone in the car screaming thinking  they are all going to die. Such events happen with all too much regularity across the country. and generally, unless fatal, nobody gives a fuck. Now its done by software, it gets a lot of press. We shall have to see what the outcome is.

If it was a software/system error, then it can be fixed. Uber can add a new scenario to test their software on, even before running it in a real car, and the limited set of AV manufacturers (Waymo, GM, Ford, ...) can use the same data in qualifying their software. Everyone can learn from it and repeats can be avoided. 

That's if we want that, and it is avoidable. The alternative is blame the victim, exonerate the software, carry on promising a safe utopia, now qualified with "some people may still die". 

That's a major change, as it is accepting that death is inevitable in driving the way we don't accept it for trains and planes. We do make that distinction in cars today, but that's because we all believe that "we" don't make mistakes, or that personal freedom "right to drive across town" is better than safety for all.

This death is going to have to make us spell out our priorities.

For now though, let's add Elaine Herzberg to the list of people killed by cars. She is one of the few to get a mention beyond the local press. That doesn't make her death any better.