Like the South of France

We are very excited to hear that when a Football World Cup camp is built it will not be like Glastonbury, it will be like the South of France.

This must a different Ashton Court from the one near Bristol. Here is it in February

A few months later, the snow went away

The only time we have seen the mud dry out was September last year.


Now, compare this to the South of France. It is sunny, the mountains look lovely.

There is faint hind of mud on the bike, but nothing to worry about.


If there is to be a world cup football campground for two weeks on Ashton Court, the only way to pull it off would be to cover the entire area in a wooden floor first.

Thali Cafe Clifton News! Clifton gets Gentrified!

Gentrification is normally associated with a run down part of down being made "nice". You know when your area is becoming gentrified when you sit in on a PACT meeting and the complaints are about party noise rather than heroin addicts loitering around where the needle swap van comes. That and skateboarding.

In Bristol, gentrification means an area gets some good pubs, decent graffiti artwork -especially on the pubs- and good food, in the form of local cafes consortium Cafe Gusto and Thali Cafe.

Clifton has had a Cafe Gusto for a while, but you don't get free croissants there, so its not as good as the Bristol University outlet. It has long lacked, sadly, a Thali Cafe. Which is where one man: Jim, from the Thali Cafe team, comes to the rescue of this neglected corner of the city.

Here he is, pointing at a building. In his hand, a piece of paper. It says "October 2"

That date is the date of Clifton's October revolution: a thali takeaway cafe, serving the same food you would have to take your 4X4 over to Montpelier, or points further east or south, places where your satnav starts beeping saying "turn round now".

We mention drive, because people won't be cycling to this shop. There is one bit of gentrification that Clifton has resisted -there are no bike stands on these buildouts.

For a moment there appeared to be some bike stands nearby

But on closer inspection: barriers to stop cars using a car park without permission.

The only place that does have parking is a line of ancient Victorian railings, up on Bristol's Secret Bike Promenade.

More on that underexploited tourist attraction another day. The key thing is that it's a secret, because Clifton doesn't want visitors by bike.

Now, when will Clifton get the graffiti that the inner city deserves?

A rural path -right in the city

We have a lovely video from GentleGreenGiant looking at a rural bike lane, right in the city.

This path is on coldharbour lane, linking down from UWE to Frenchay, where a lot of the UWE students live. On the basis that the students are all impoverished, and that UWE is in the sticks -and nowhere near the rest of Bristol- we can concede that some of these people should be allowed to cycle.

The video starts in South Gloucester, in a stretch of the road that is now 30 mph. There is an on pavement bike lane which we have noticed before, but this video looks at the downhill.

Downhill, the phrase that lights up the eye of a mountain biker. A descent, steepness, rough ground underneath, speed -danger. These are the kind of things that make DH work fun, the kind of thing that makes commuting entertaining. How then, do you give a on-road route the downhill experience?

Simple: leave the path alone so it returns to the wild. Looking at the video, you can see the county boundary. The S. Gloucs road team have tamed it -30 mph roads, lane markings, bicycles, double yellow lines. All the signage of bland suburbia.

Now look at the transition into Bristol -the city itself. At the county line the lane markings go away, the path goes from suburban to rural. Speed limit? gone. Lane markings - a memory. Surface -what was once tarmac, is now a thin layer of vegetation atop the tarmac base.

This is a downhill to cherish, especially for a bit of night work.

The summer that never was...

If you look carefully, it will be apparent why Eurotaxi coach, C1EGO, is parked up in the zebra crossing zig-zags in Redland Road...

It's there, back in summer (you do remember that day, don't you?) when it was so hot that all the ice creams melted, forcing creamy treat vendor L11ATA to head for the shade to serve a coach load of children and school-run mums.

Luckily for him, and other ice cream operatives in Bristol, even though the heavens subsequently opened, and summer was cancelled, Banksy came to the rescue.

(I could now bang on about the benefits of large trees in urban areas, but I won't).

UPDATE: Summer has apparently returned. Sorry for any confusion.

Assessing the effectiveness of bicycle parking

We are doing a survey to see how effective the new cycling city bike parking facilities are. Looking at the parking on Stokes Croft/Nine Tree Hill on a weekday morning, we see that there is room for six more bicycles; the occupancy of this facility is only 40%.

If you look at the car parking, not only is every parking space on the road taken up, but there is a large van WN09PCZ on the pavement, and a car in front of it, a space only useful when trying to get a bike to the parking. With only ten visible pavement spaces, we see 12 cars, therefore the occupancy of the car parking spaces is over 120% -three times that of the bike parking

The conclusion, therefore, is that car parking is more efficiently used than bicycle parking. By removing these new bike stands, there is rom for at least one more van on the pavement -and as that space will be used, we can be sure that the space will be valued more.

Bristol your Bristol

A reader, one of those tax dodging cyclists, emails us:

"As I write, highly civilised people are pulling their buses into the lanes occupied my bicycle, trying to kill me

They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in running me over with a bus, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving FirstBus, which has the power to absolve him from evil."

Well, that's right. He is trying to kill you. He is engaging, as Chris Hutt puts it, in "anti-terrorist activities". It is everyone's duty to fight the war on bicycles. It's for your own good. Now put the bike down and start saving up for a car.

When George Orwell wrote the essay that has been misquoted above, he was trying to define what Englishness was: cups of tea, "old maids hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning ", etc. No mention of bicycles. They are a foreign invention. Possibly even Scottish. No, what Orwell celebrated included "the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road", windy country roads, and the motor car. Admittedly he wrote it at a time petrol was being rationed, and if you did have any it would be for an Austin Morris vehicle whose quality control issues were a warning sign of the break down of the British factory system, a precursor to the economic problems this country has today. You could go out on your vehicle for a spin round the lanes, but you wouldn't know if you would get back.

Times have changed.


In the 1940s, a trip by car would have been an unusual event, the breakdown an adventure. Nowadays, its how you pick the kids up, the breakdown a crisis if it happens at 15:00 on the first day of school. You need help, you need an organisation that cares about you. Hence, the AA, here seen double parked on Whiteladies road as part of such a support call.

According to Wikipedia, the AA was founded in 1905 by a collection of motorists who wished to build a list of where speed traps were. This shows that the nanny state has been interfering with our rights for over a century -and that the AA has been standing up for them.

This week, the AA are pushing out a report, warning that the recession is threatening what it means to be be British.

Increased costs of motoring means that drivers are looking at ways of making motoring more efficient., This means we are more likely to question if we need to go to that meeting, can we avoid rush hour by going to work earlier or staying late, can the kids walk to school?

 The AA's president Edmund King said

"The motor vehicle is an integral part of British culture we rely on - whether getting to work, taking the kids to school or delivering goods. So when times are hard it is with reluctance we look at ways of cutting down on car journeys."

The report brought the shocking news that not only are some people walking and cycling to work, the increased cost of driving is encouraging people to work from home, or even to postpone their journey times to avoid peak hours. Some people have discovered that the unfair tax regime in the country now means that it is cheaper to walk your children to school.

The AA were quick to condemn this, and understand that people look at these options with reluctance. Being stuck in a traffic jam on the M32 is what defines us, and it brings in money for the government and the phone companies. If we did not spend an hour a day stuck on the M32 flyover, we wouldn't be funding the government. Or the AA.

Working from home, walking the kids to school, the AA are right to demand the government acts to stop these. Orwell's dream of a maid walking to communion has been replaced by the Honda CR-V sounding their horn at the bike in the way while the kids in the back argue over which DVD to watch. This is the dream of Britain that Cycling City is losing touch with. We must all support the AA in their campaign to focus on the real problems of the country: roads that aren't wide enough, and not get distracted by other issues, like the fact that we have got the next decade's governments forced to introduce scathing cuts to all government services through a year's worth of printing money and nationalising banks with a bigger exposure than our entire annual Gross Domestic Product.

If we do not fight the bicycles, we lose what it is to be British. We will be Dutch, or worse, Scandinavian.

Two Wheeled Terrorists: official

There is a new paper out which argues, according to the Daily Telegraph, that Cyclists killed more people than the 7/7 bombers, on account of people switching from the tube/bus to bicycle. We were a bit doubtful about this, the null hypothesis being that the Telegraph reporter had made everything up, but no, it turns out that the alternate hypothesis, "the researcher made everything up" is in fact the correct one. As the paper author says to Moving Target, "cycling has been a greater hazard than terrorism and is responsible for far more deaths."

Reading the paper, it is clear that the author has confused correlated with causated (i.e. there may be other causes of any increase in cycling deaths/injuries than an increase in numbers; Olympic construction springs to mind), and relies on the same weak measurement of cycling traffic as everyone else does -some samplings of a few main roads that nobody rational cycles down. And as it doesn't take any health benefits into account, overestimates the damage of cycling. That is, technically, it's bollocks. But from the researcher's perspectivel it does achieve one wonderful goal: it gets read, it gets cited, they get more funding.

Discounting the "cyclists cause more deaths than terrorists" hypothesis as being invalid, we do note something that the author missed, namely that cyclists hold up tax payers, and if there were more cyclists on the road after 7/7, more of us tax payers got held up by bicycles. That is, the cyclists will have cost the country far more in car commuter hours than the 7/7 TfL shutdown ever did.

And that is where we think, unarguably, you can say that bicycles are a greater threat to Britain than the 7/7 bombers. Really. Yes, some insane idiots blew up a bus and some tube trains. But it was a bus, not a decent car, like a Mercedes. And it was in London. Whereas bicycles, they irritate everyone across every city in Britain. They are out there, every day, getting in the way, slowing us down, creating congestion where before there was none.

When will one party stand up and recognise these people for threatening our very way of life; our dream of a quiet commute in from the suburbs to our jobs in the financial services back offices, day in day out. Not just slowing us down, but stressing us out, getting us angry, shortening our very lives!

In this city, the council has sold us out. Only the conservative party is fighting the bicycle terrorists, and they aren't doing a good job of it.

There are three groups of people out there doing their best: the bus companies (FirstBus and Turner Bus), the taxi and minicabs, and the Clifton Downs committee. The bus and taxi people have to do it discretely, punishing each bike they see by cutting them up, by going past really close, by blocking the ASL -so that eventually the cyclists will see what we are trying to tell them -that cycling is dangerous and that they should stop it.

The Clifton Downs committee, they ban bicycles, especially kids bikes, to stop them getting addicted to this class-A drug and then going on to the roads when they get bigger.

But look, here we have one of these subversives standing on the grass, right next to a no-cycling sign -there it is, on the path, between the Mercedes WR08CPY and the double yellow lines.  And he's ignoring it. He's laughing at the sign as if it is some kind of joke.

It is not - the Clifton Downs committee are standing up to bicycles, the greatest threat our country faces.  Now we have the peer-reviewed literature to back up our claims.

Tax Dodgers have stolen the A4 Portway!

Look at this! This is what the view from the suspension bridge was like at lunchtime!

The A4 Portway is again closed to road-tax payers!

This time, its runners, out there, blocking the Portway as they run along. If they can afford iPods and high-end trainers, they can afford to pay an annual runner tax. And a bridge fee.

This is because the Cumberland Basin bridge is closed to tax-payers, who are being forced to divert over the suspension bridge, and pay for the privilege of being late.

The runners should pay to cross the Cumberland Basin bridge, and that money should be given as rebates to cars crossing the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Better yet, open up the bridge for free crossing -just as tax dodging walkers, runners and bicycles get.

The worst part? A lot of todays runners aren't even running. They are walking. Why close the Portway for walkers?

We should write a letter to evening post about this, but as we suspect our fellow-traveller, local ABD representative Bob Bull will have printed off his set letter on the topic, there is no need.

Traffic Calming the Railway Path

The greenbank development has surfaced again, with the developers asking for more input on their plans to build houses straight on to the path. The previous proposal was rejected by the community as having 20 paths opening on to the path was felt to be dangerous.

This time the community has the option of the same number of paths, or half as many, with the option of traffic calming. Oddly enough, there is no option to reject the proposal, which is clearly a bug in the web page design. It's tricky, getting those <select> buttons right.

Evening on Muller Road

Muller Road, evening. A line of cars, not moving, heading back towards Horfield. Where are they coming from? A mystery.

Where are they going? That's clearer. The M32, and then onwards: M4, M5. Out. It is everyone's right to live a long way from their place of work, and the duty of the governments to take whatever measures it deems necessary to ensure that the petrol keeps flowing at a price the voters deem acceptable. It is also required to provide the roads needed to keep the cars moving, and here they fail.

This road has pavement on two sides, yet almost nobody walks on this, the purdown hill side. It would be trivial to remove the pavement, take a bit away from the hill, and what do we have? Another lane for cars. That is, provided it is kept for cars. If they turn it into a bus-lane, or worse, a bike lane, that would be a waste.

On that topic, we were pleased to hear the AA on the radio earlier in the week, complaining that it now costs an extra 2p/Litre. Yet they said something we disagree with. Their so-called spokesman actually advocated funding public transport from our road and petrol taxes. This must have been a slip of the tongue, as that is one step from advocating funding bicycles.

Datamining Banksy Traffic

Bristol Blogger complains that Banksy brought no new traffic to their site

For the curious, here are the top fifty search terms that brought visitors to Bristol Traffic during July and August. Banksy comes in at #26, "banksy bristol parking", way below "parking on clifton downs" and "cabot circus parking". But what's at #27? "banksy parking". If you add the (secret) numbers together, then banksy brought traffic to our site between #16 high kingsdown playground, and #17 northumbria drive henleaze.

Suprisingly, Bristol Traffic only comes in on page 2 of google's search of "high kingsdown playground", but on Yahoo! we come it in fourth place. The fact that Yahoo build their indices using Hadoop, the official Bristol Traffic datamining platform, is not a coincidence. What is even stranger is why High Kingsdown Playground or Northumbria Drive Henleaze is so interesting to some people. Two people, we suspect.

1.  bristol traffic 
2.  bristol traffic blog
3.  bristol parking blog
4.  parking on clifton downs
5.  bristol cycling chic
6.  bristol traffic news
7.  turner buses bristol
8.  cabot circus parking
9.  bristol bike blog
10. fixie bristol
11. uwe lockleaze path
12. bristol cars
13. henleaze parking
14. traffic bristol
15. cpz bristol
16. high kingsdown playground
17. northumbria drive henleaze
18. traffic news bristol
19. traffic news
20. bristol blog
21. bristol cycling blog
22. bike blog bristol
23. ofsted bristol traffic
24. mod abbey wood
25. st phillips causeway flyover
26. banksy bristol parking
27. banksy parking
28. bristol bike project
29. oregon bike tax
30. bristoltraffic
31. mod abbey wood bristol
32. bicycle tax
33. cabot circus bike parking
34. for immediate release
35. thali cafe clifton
36. bristol cars blogspot
37. bristol cpz areas map
38. pete taylor
39. thali cafe
40. free parking in bristol
41. nugent hill civil war bristol
42. portsmouth seafront
43. safe parking
44. sustrans route 4
45. troy atkinson
46. "pete taylor" bristol
47. balloon fiesta traffic
48. banksy bristol
49. banksy vs bristol
50. bristol cycle blog

It is pleasing to see that searches for Turner Bus Bristol and Turner Buses Bristol coming at #7 -our page describing a Turner Bus driver's attempt to reduce the number of children they have to pick up by one. If you endanger people, the fact becomes known. Similarly, Thali Cafe is popular -on account of its excellent food.

What is sad is to see visitors asking about Troy Atkinson -killed in April while crossing a road, and Pete Taylor. These people are being remembered, but it's sad to see that people are still looking for answers -especially to Troy's death.

Summary: not much Banksy traffic; we get many more visitors by way of Bristol Blogger's site. But that is now sliding down the rankings -google images is bringing in more traffic. There's a reason for that. Between us and Bristol Graffiti, we provide the photographs of Montpelier, Stokes Croft and regions nearby, such as nine tree hill. This is not an accident, this is part of our strategic plans.

More motorbike shortcuts

Here's a couple of shots, courtesy of Google Earth & photoshop to let our motorcycling readers know of a fantastic new short cut that will save you microseconds in your journey. Are you stuck at point A waiting for the lights to change?. But you want to get to point B?. Well, no problem - simply make a sharp left turn and take one of the two routes highlighted in red and pink. Although it's probably illegal (and bad riding), nobody will notice, except maybe those pesky bloggers from Bristol traffic. Just be aware of the annoying pedestrians and cyclists who swarm all over this bit of the short cut as it might add a few nanoseconds onto your journey. It has been rumoured that the council might try and thwart your time-saving by increasing the size of the island at point X, but you can always cut around this by using the two lanes indicated by the dashed lines on the road. Again, beware of the humans wandering around in these lanes, getting in your way. But you're in a hurry, so who cares?.

Dissent in the cycling community

Being an underground documentary project, we in Bristol Traffic are secretly infiltrating the cycling and walking groups, to identify the troublemakers, and stir up dissent. Here we are pleased to see John Grimshaw of Sustrans publicly apologising to Chris Hutt of Green Bristol Blog (out of picture to the right).

Chris had stated that a road crossing of the A4174 was part of the Cycling City plans, John corrected him, then Chris corrected John. We like to see such disagreement, as it stops them co-ordinating their efforts against our plans.

But who do we see in the foreground? Laughing? Cllr Jon Rogers, that's who. We shall have to find some more embarrassing photos of him, to stop him interfering with our plans to make Bristol a Car Friendly City.

Shaldon Road Advanced Suicide Lane

This is Shaldon Road. Behind the camera is a path leading to the Farm Pub Path -Shaldon Road is the main route from that path to Lockleaze and hence UWE. As and when the "new" North Fringe route gets rolled out there will be one less steep, but it will still suffer from the problem of getting over Muller Road, of which this is one of the junctions.

What is that bus in? That's right, an Advanced Stop Lane.

Now, some people, and Crap Cycling & Walking in Waltham Forest spring to mind, would fault this bus for endangering cyclists. We do not. Not just because we view cyclists as tax-dodging troublemakers, but we don't think bicycles should be using this ASL on safety grounds. Remember, the primary route on this road for a bike is straight on, towards Ashley Down, Horfield, St Andrews and St Werburghs. No cyclist planning of surviving their commute back from UWE should use the bike stop lane. They should hang back.

Here is a video showing why, taken from the other direction.

Note how buses turning left swing round to completely scrape clear the ASL of bicycles? And while someone could try sticking to the far right of it, vehicles turning from Muller Road into Shaldon Road will get them there.

Once upon a time, this ASL was actually wider, yet its right hand side was removed to eliminate the illusion that this was a safe place to loiter. It would seem to us that painting out the rest of the ASL would benefit everyone.

Kingsdown without cars

A strange event occurred a few weeks back -there was a stretch of Kingsdown without cars one Saturday.

It gives a hint, just a vague hint, of what the city must have looked like 150-200 years ago. Except back in those days there would have been horses belonging to us tax payers, and it would have been the poor pedestrians holding us up. The Association of British Horseriders would have been the pressure group that represented the needs of important road users.

It's just a fluke that there are no cars here, but it is interesting to see.

More horse trouble

Continuing our campaign to have tax-dodging horses removed from our streets, we are appalled to see that there is now a police horse, here on Picton Street.

It is waiting on the double yellows, yet the rider is not waving their hands up and down in a hand-signal version of flashing yellow lights. With the police on their side, they will soon demand their own lanes and parking in the city.

Ban these horse people now!

Bank holiday bumper (to bumper) quiz.

Stuck in a 4x4 deadlock down a country lane in Cornwall and lacking the reversing skills to escape? Waiting at a train station for a train that has vanished from the timetable without a trace? Sitting in a lay-by with a derailleur that has decided to collapse into your rear spokes miles from shelter in the glorious English summer?

Why not pass the time with the Bristol Traffic bank holiday quiz. Answers on a postcard to the usual address.

1. When is a school not a school?
2. When is a car not a car? ( Clue: BMW SN9BMX is giving you a hint in the photos below. )

2. How many traffic lights and pedestrian crossings can you have the luxury of waiting at if you are arriving at Bristol's new shopping centre Cabot Circus on foot? (Extra points if you know how many pedestrian footbridges there used to be before the new layout.)

3. How many glass covered bridges to guide you swiftly from the new car park if you arrive at Cabot Circus by car?

4. True or False. All you need for safe cyling is separate cycle paths. Cycle paths that are separated from motor traffic by a barrier are guaranteed to keep cyclists 100% safe from cars.
5. While you're at it see if you can identify what this symbol is for in the picture puzzle below
Bonus question - Spot the irony in the logo pictured below, seen on the recent e-flyer promoting the "Cycling City Freewheel", Sunday 30th August 2009, Ladies Mile, The Downs, Bristol. Clue


Quiz brought to you by Newlyn Junior and Infants School, Penzance and St Phillip's Causeway, Bristol.

Resisting change at Colston School

This is Cotham Park Grove from the South, some cars making it a bit tight to enter and exit the junction.

Here is the road during term time, some cars are quite clearly parked right over the corner. While this makes it tricky for parents with push chairs to pull out, it does at least ensure that on the road itself there are never two lanes of traffic at a time, a vehicle is either exiting or entering the system. The school-keep-clear zone provides a pull-over point, while the zebra zig zags are good for coaches.

So what? People ask. Ahh, this is where the power struggle between those in the council traffic planning department, where those few engineers who are still fighting against the anti-car elected councillors, are managing to represent the interests of us car drivers against those parents who dare to walk to school.

Those parents have been complaining that the council should act on this, and they are doing so, but managing to do this in a way that still retains benefits for parents coming in by car

• The school will have their school-keep-clear zone made enforcable
• There will be some disabled parking across from this
• The corners will be double yellow lined to mean "no parking"
• A bit of redland grove will have double yellow lines to mean "drop your kids off here"

Those last two points are the most interesting. A stretch of redland grove will be double yellow lined to say "no commuters, just parents". Which is handy, though of course if the railway line was less expensive to take an adult and a child up from Monty to Redland, perhaps less needed. But the corners will also be double-yellowed, to discourage commuters and parents from using it.

Here, from an attempt to provide a safe route to school, the plan fails. We have evidence from Clifton and Cotham that says "all double yellow lines do by schools is provide a guaranteed place for parents to park", while it doesn't encourage driving to school, it certainly doesn't discourage it. Any parent that turns up hoping to use the two car lengths of allocated space on Redland Grove is going to have a problem when they turn up and discover two other parents there. What are they going to do? That's right, they will use the other allocated spaces -the corners. These will have the same markings "yellow lines" on them, and so will be equally legitimate. Until those once-a-term days when Bristol Parking Services turn up, and you have to argue your case.

If, by some miracle of consideration these corners aren't occupied by parents, and are in fact kept free, the parents who walk are left with a problem. whereas historically the road was narrowed by parked cars, making it one lane wide, is entrance will be two vehicles wide, making it harder to cross safely. This will discourage them from walking, so stop them getting in the way of tax-paying parents.

We dropped a note to Cllr Neil Harrison, who is one of those safe-walk-to-school subversives we are keeping an eye on, to make sure he wasn't planning to surprise us.

Did the engineers look at having some build-outs on the corner instead, with enough bollards to keep cars off them? This would keep the road one vehicle wide at the junction, yet offer good visibillity to parents trying to get across.

With yellow lines, except on the two days a term when they are
enforced, they are going to be a parents-only parking area.

His reply was informative

We did talk about this, but his view was that it would create dangerous traffic tailbacks around the corner. 

You see that? The traffic engineer is doing his best for us, the car drivers. If they had added any form of build out, the effect would have been exactly the same as if there were parked cars on the corner, which is what you see every single weekday. Buildouts would not create any more tailbacks than normal, yet they would take away two or more parking spaces away from us commuters and parents.

We thank this anonymous engineer, and close the posting with a photo to show that we know he was making things up when he said that build-outs would create tailbacks, but that the councillors don't. 

Can we close by saying that given the parents are off school, we do have an opportunity to keep the plans as they are. Email alan.berridge at bristol.gov.uk on the subject of the consultation 09TM013/ACB/WH, to make your views known (cc: Neil.Harrison at bristol.gov.uk ). Remember, you have until September 8th, and some walking parents may discover the plans before then, so its important to push for parking spaces over build outs.

Update 15:30 august 28, Neil H now says

Consultation done now at request of parents Travel Action Group, all of whom are walkers and cyclists. They want to try to get works done by start of year. They devised the planned works thenselves. Build outs now planned too. Some reason why single yellows not suitable - can't remember.

Learning to Park

Here on Stokes Croft one weekday morning, we see the L-plated car from "Drive" showing everyone how to park to get into the post office. Veer across the road -so avoiding a dangerous road crossing yourself, and then use the double yellow lines under the bike lane.

We hope a student is picking up these valuable lessons, and it is not just the driver in WM09FJE doing some errands.

Elsewhere, on Kingsley Road -parallel to Gloucester Road, behind the arches- we see a P-plated car showing it has understood the lessons

Yes, they have parked so as to not interfere with passing vehicles on this one-way road.

Yet poor R852UWO has somehow got a ticket? Why? Who is persecuting innocent drivers merely for choosing safe and convenient parking? When will this anti-car program of an anti-car council ever stop?

Polite Note

A car in Upper Cheltenham Place, Montpelier, has a note on its windscreen.

What does it say?

When you park here please pull right
up to the telegraph pole. In order that I
can get in and out my home with my
bike, buggies or Kayak.

Its probably honest, pragmatic, and may produce enough guilt for the driver to consider following the request. But what it does not produce is fear, not for the driver of P583HAN. Kayaks? Bicycles? Baby Buggies? Nothing to fear from those.

No, better to say something like "It is very hard to get my chainsaws and hunting rifles in and out of the house without damaging your car. This upsets my son, who, being on remand for attempted murder, does not need to get upset. Please park in a way which does not cause more problems ofr my household?