It turns out there was progress in the driver's prosecution: Mohammed Ahmed, 19, of Eastville, plead guilty on Friday to :
taking a vehicle without consent
causing death by dangerous driving
failing to stop at the scene of an accident
driving without insurance
He took a car that wasn't his, ran over Troy Atkinson at Cabot Circus, then drove off. The court case is covered in the BBC and Evening Post. There's not much to add on the case except that one teenager is dead, another teenager's future not going to be what they dreamed of.
What we can do is get a quick video of what it is like to travel down Cabot Circus from one of our instrumented cyclists,. We believe this is the route that Ahmed took.
The BMW the bicycle is tracking is driving fairly sedately down the road, looking for somewhere to pull in. You can see pedestrians running across the way of this car, including at 0:19 a small child calling back to a parent on the other side of the road -if this journey had a risk of a pedestrian running out, this would have been it.
At 0:55 there's a wave of pedestrians heading out of Cabot Circus towards Quaker's Friars; they've had to wait for a bus and a car, and are now sprinting across the gap between those vehicles and the bike. There may be a build out, but there is no zebra crossing and shoppers are expected to wait patiently. Note how the pedestrians wave a little thank you to the cyclist for stopping, they are clearly grateful.
The junction which Troy was crossing when he was hit is at 1:17-1:20.
This video was taken on a weekday morning, admittedly during half-term. It's a mixture of shops, buses, pedestrians and cars, and you have to look at it and think "is this a good mix?", and "if so, why don't pedestrians have right of way at any of the crossings?" Yes, there are bits of a speed bump there, but why no zebra crossings? Why on a weekend do crowds have to queue up waiting for a moment to sprint across the gap? The only possible explanations are (a) to remind pedestrians of their place in society and (b) FirstBus resisted the idea of zebra crossings.
As well as mourning and remembering Troy, then, consider this: what if this road was made bus, bike, taxi only? And pedestrians get zebra crossings on all of the build outs?
There's two ways people use to preserve the parking in their street for the exclusive use of residents: (a) persuade the council to undertake expensive consultation and planning over months and years, or (b) get`together with fellow locals and 'just do it' 'JFDI'. Neither way is acceptable as it prevents those of us who prefer to drive in from south gloucs every day from finding a parking space.
St Werburghs residents chose the JFDI option a few years ago - banning climbers from taking up parking spaces outside the homes of tax paying residents in the roads around the Climbing Centre off Mina Rd. We raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.
Now Oldbury Court Road in Fishponds has declared itself effectively a 'residents parking only' area by putting up signs suggesting that UWE, the council and, apparently, the police have banned students from parking there. If it works, they have created the perfect RPS - no fees or permits, and no problems for visiting tradesmen, delivery vehicles and elderly aunts. How on earth did they manage it?
The sign reads: 'UWE Students - please do not park in this road. Vehicles parked illegally may be clamped or towed by the police'. The sign is apparently written by the UWE transport office, presumably under pressure from resident groups. These are residents who have cars themselves and therefore should be on our side! Traitors!
We are very worried about the precedent this sets: Car owners are turning on each other under the onslaught from anticar campaigners. Maybe they though it acceptable as students are only marginally more popular than cyclists in Bristol... however we are very worried that a precedent has been established - which can be rolled out to include football fans attending the Memorial ground, dog walkers in Victoria Park, you, and me.
How is it enforced, we wondered. There are no cameras. Do wardens check cars for drug paraphanalia and empty vodka bottles in the footwells? Or is there a posse of curtain twitchers? We suspect the latter, having been passed this photo of an alleged student entering UWE who allegedly arrived in one of the cars on the left.
The person sending it in must have hoped we would support them and call for the student to be named and shamed.. No way - he is a hero, standing up for the right to park anywhere!
Hang on though. The sign is alarming, if you are a student, and cleverly suggests that it is illegal for students to park in this road. But in fact it simply states that illegally parked vehicles may be clamped or towed.
We patrolled this road regularly for a fortnight to log all the illegally parked vehicles, and see what happened to them..but the best we could find was this one, a long way from the college and without any drug or vodka-related items left in view.
Student car? Unlikely. We suspect this car belongs to a visitor more used to parking in narrow streets where use of the pavement is tolerated. Sensibly, they have chosen to take no risks with their wing mirrors as scores of land cruisers thunder past this spot, on their way to disgorge cyclist-eating dogs into Vassals Park.
Last week we suggested that bicycles should be banned from the main Montpelier through route, Picton Street-York Road-Fairlawn road, instead sent down Cobourg Road.
However, we no longer support this proposal.
Our research shows that there is no room for bicycles on this road, even on the pavement. Instead bicyclists should be forced to use the one-way Lower Cheltenham Road, when heading west, and St Andrews Road, when heading east. The uphill involved in the latter option will discourage them from cycling at all, we hope.
Following on our campaign against zebra crossings, we find ourselves forced to start new campaign "Save Double Parking!". The anti-car council has come out against double parking as being dangerous and anti social. Maybe but for residents is the only way to park a car after the morning school run, and for commuters, its the only way to park a car with all the legal spaces taken up by those selfish residents who don't drive to school or work, so freeing up spaces.
Every cyclist who owns a car and goes round being smug, "I pay my road tax", is missing the point. The car they've paid the road tax for is on the road somewhere, that's the rectangle of tarmac they have rented, and by not using it they are inconveniencing not just the vehicles they hold up on their crawl round town, but those commuters who rely on the spaces they create.
Returning to the double parking problem, the BBC have an article calling it anti-social, an article that includes this road as an example: We don't normally cover double parking, and when we do we never name the roads. Those streets where you can get away with it are secrets we do not dare share, as then we will have nowhere to park. Certainly this road looked familiar.
The buildings look Cliftony, possibly university area, the road is wide and quiet with an RV on the left, opposite a smartcar. Time to send a query off to our petabyte scale datacentre to see what shows up -and yes, we know this road. It's Belgrave Road, BS8.
View Larger Map What's interesting about this road is why was it chosen? Did the council have to tip off the journalists that this road was trouble? Was in in fact staged purely to push out new CPZ/RPZ restrictions, our very own WMD-for-iraq claim?
We have a theory there. Belgrave road is right next to the BBC. The journalists just popped out for 30 seconds to get a couple of pics and then went back in, job done. Of course, that does not mean that the photo was not staged. More research is needed.
This is where our new experiment to instrument cyclists and pedestrians in the city has begun to pay off. By having them filming themselves, we can review exactly what they've done wrong, from their own position. This is a lot easier than filming them ourselves, as it is really hard to hold a camcorder steady while driving through Montpelier, especially when you are trying to text someone. We just let the bikes do the work, then later get the pics. Up until now most bike filming has been written by the cyclists, always whining about something or other, such as this Glaswegian Magnatom, who has taken up the classic sport of that city -starting fights with strangers- out of the bars, and onto the roads. We aren't like that. We will criticise the cyclists and any other tax-dodging subversives we see.
Here then, is our ride-by of this road, where we can say that yes, it looks like a good place to double park. Nobody seems to mind, and it's handy for the BBC. This is important if you are Noel Edmonds, on a visit to the competition to see if your latest idea for a Saturday evening show has got any interest. The video was taken ten days ago, in term time, so if the council staged the entire double parking scene, they kept it up outside the BBC for a long time -it probably is genuine.
Analysing this video, we see a number of events which concern us
At 0:06 a tax-dodging cyclist -correctly dressed in hi-viz and helmet- sticks her arm out to force a Mercedes to stop its manoeuvre, a turn into the bus lane. This was a premium car, and clearly belongs to someone important -possibly Noel Edmonds himself. All the cyclists should have given way, and not held up this car by being in front of them in the bus lane.
At 0:13 we see a skateboarder on the road. Again, another form of tax-dodging
At 0:31 we see a Vauxhall Zafira being forced to brake hard after overtaking the bicycle.
Throughout the sequence, we see pedestrians crossing the road -only one of them is wearing hi-viz clothing.
Event #3 concerns us, the car which has to put their foot down to swing past the bicycle, then cut in , apparently to double park right in front of them. If the cyclist had not been pootling up this double-parking-friendly road at 5 mph, the driver would not have been forced to take such action. It is not environmentally friendly having to accelerate and brake like this, showing that while bicycles themselves may not be polluting, they cause the other vehicles in the city to waste more fuel, to pollute the city more.
We can see then, in 46 seconds, how a couple of bicycles can hold up the journey time of cars, be they important cars who need to use the Bus Lane, or merely someone who needs to double park outside the BBC offices. It is bad enough that these cyclists are allowed to do this, that they do not pay any tax, let alone compensate us for our lost time -now we see that the council is trying to take away our right to double park. Furthermore, the video showed how pedestrians, cyclists and even skateboarders are trying to take our roads away from us. We must resist!
Again, we send our undercover cyclist and pedestrians into the city streets. Unlike in the Panorama documentary, we aren't going to make them do some in-mirror filming where they cry about the hard time they got -that's because we don't care about their feelings. Instead we just watch with bemusement.
Here, then, is an evening crossing of Montpelier. The bike is apparently equipped with LED head lamps, though this doesn't show up well in the video. Fairfield Road, a zigzag on Richmond Road then a descent on York Road -with oncoming traffic- followed by a drop down Brook Hill and along Upper Cheltenham Place to join York Road again.
What does show up is that there isn't much through traffic, and what there is gives way to the bicycle. It's hard to say that Bristol persecutes cyclists when every one of the approaching vehicles comes to a halt. The photographer claims that this is due to the fact that "My LED helmet lights cause physical pain to drivers I look at", which is something we aren't sure about, though it is certainly possible that they may be stopping because they can't actually tell that it is an oncoming bicycle. We would have to do some A/B testing with different lighting options to reach a conclusion. For now we shall just assume that in this city everyone is gracious to bicycles, even though they are clearly inappropriate for these narrow city streets.
Note how at the end of the ride, the cyclist has the rudeness to tell off a car for driving round without lights. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander we say, and if bicycles are going to nip round our streets without lights, not stopping at traffic lights or zebra crossings, then we car drivers should have the same privileges -and that includes the option of driving without lights. Its more environmentally friendly, you know.
However, that's not what we really want to cover. What we do want to raise is that Montpelier is simply too narrow for cars to get past bicycles, and that Picton Street-York Road-Fairfield Road route is not some residential road, it is the primary rat-run of Montpelier, cutting out two sets of utterly needless traffic lights and two mini roundabouts. If you want to get from Stokes Croft to Ashley Down hill, you are in a hurry and you know the back roads, this is the secret route to take. Yet all it takes is one single bicycle and there's suddenly a tail back of traffic, and all that time advantage is lost. The cars parked on either side of the road are as far over as they can be, and now with the police sending them threatening letters, it's going to be hard for them to provide any passthrough space for bicycles.
We should ban bicycles from those roads! This is a key through route in the city for well-informed locals, not some back route for bicycles. They should be forced to use Cobourg Road and Upper Cheltenham Place or Shaftesbury Avenue, not this, the main road through Montpelier. Especially during morning and evening rush hours. Banning bikes here would make it much easier to get a car over to St Werburgh's and then onto the Mina Road. Here's our proposal -red is the red-marked car route, green for the tax dodgers:
Those drivers trying to use this route are important revenue earners for the city -pootling cyclists aren't. And independent of whether or not this area gets 20 mph zones, oncoming bicycles delay cars here, and that costs all those people money. Ban them from the main streets in Montpelier -give them the back roads- and all will be well.
Southville Parking posts us this lovely snap from this summer (Summer 2009 was a Tuesday in September, as you may recall), showing how part of the evolution of Prince Street Bridge is going on
A year ago: two lanes for cars, bikes and buses, narrow pavements on both sides. Then, change: the western side/northern direction was blocked off to be bike+pedestrian, while the other direction became alternating all-vehicles. This makes for some interesting options for tax-dodgers who insist on cycling.
Together with Forest Pines, Chris "known subversive" Hutt has shown that the long term plan is driven by Bus Rapid Transit; the eastern lane will have the pavement removed and the route made bus/bike only, despite the inconvenience this will be to the forthcoming 8000 Ashton Vale commuters and people who will discover that Tesco Sainsburys Southville is going to be the best supermarket the city has seen.
What's not been covered is how the rollout will be -will it be one big day when cars are banned from the bridge, and bikes are forced into the road, rather than the pavement? This picture answers the question.
The careful placement of an ice-cream van not only brings in revenue for those ice-cream vans who failed to win the Banksy franchise, it discourages bicycles from using the bike/pedestrian side, and so gets them used to it being taken away. As an added bonus, northbound cars awaiting the green light can buy some ice cream too.
A lot of people come to our sight looking for free Cabot Circus parking, but we haven't mentioned Primark yet, which is apparently so popular that people are selfishly parking at Cabot Circus and walking to Primark. This is wrong. Do these people not know that the Cabot Circus consortium invested a lot of money in that parking area, putting in high clearance parking for bigger vehicles, yet now it turns out that people are shopping elsewhere? Even though the parking spaces are now let out at weekends at discounted rates?
We think that people who wish to shop at Primark should park elsewhere, and so are pleased to receive this photo from Cap'n Bikebeard showing a secret parking space?
Where is it? Castle Park. And how exactly does this car get there? That's the secret.
update: Cllr Jon Rogers has forwarded us a note that went round bits of the council last week:
Claire Adams 22/10/2009 12:37
Hi all,
Just a quick note to say that the area in front of the Vaulted Chambers should not be being used for parking by anyone, including family members, friends etc. Please can you pass this on to anyone who may be parking here. In future any cars found parking here will be towed away.
Thanks very much,
Claire
Claire Adams
Area Park Manager Central (Acting)
Neighbourhoods
Bristol Parks
A lot of people complain that all we ever do is take photos of cars parked badly and make fun of them. Well, we don't actually make fun of them -we are praising their innovative solutions of the problem of how to park in the city, now that the council has taken anti-car actions such as adding a new 5000 car car park in the centre purely for shoppers.
But we need to branch out, we need to raise the bar. And last week's coverage of Southmead shocked us. There were children: outside the house. Some of them on bicycles. None of them with helmets. Do they not know how dangerous this is?
The BBC coverage has shown us that we need to do more, so we have secretly stuck some cameras on pedestrians and cyclists round the city, and are seeing what it is like from their eyes. This does not mean that we support walking or cycling around the city, only that we want to see what it is the troublemakers are whining about. We will interpret the videos as we see fit, not what our undercover camera crew thinks.
Here is video #1, a pedestrian crossing whiteladies road at a zebra crossing.
As you can see, the red car CH51RLY decides that it is too important to stop for the pedestrian and instead decides to drive straight over the crossing, 5cm away from the pedestrian.
Is this wrong? Not at all! The driver clearly has to get to work, is probably tired and on the phone. Anyone would do the same thing.
It's not as if they are running red light or anything! We don't understand why these pedestrian rights groups are whining about cars endangering their right to cross roads safely. They have no such right!
And zebra crossings, just like traffic lights, create congestion. Imagine if the driver had had to stop here? an extra 15 seconds on their journey, right? Now scale that up to the number of zebra crossing and pelican crossing you might see on a commute in to work. At least ten more. That's three minutes of your commute time being spent waiting for pedestrians to toddle over. Of course the driver runs the lights -its the only way to keep the city moving.
For this reason, Bristol Traffic is pleased to announce our new Campaign against Zebra Crossings. Every zebra crossing in the city creates congestion. Every zebra crossing says to pedestrians "It's OK, you should walk round Bristol", leading them to walk round the city, eventually having to cross roads that don't have zebra crossings -getting into accidents, and blaming us, the car driver!
Join the Bristol Campaign Against Zebra Crossings today! We will print a manifesto in the week and ask all the parties and leading celebrities for their support! Sign up your support below!
Here in St Andrews, we can see that WR56WHV clearly has a selfless owner.
Not only have they parked their shiny car across the exit from the footpath between Effingham Road and Belmont Road but they have also taken the trouble to mount the pavement.
Their careful positioning should prevent children, wheelchairs and buggies coming out too fast onto Belmont Road; in fact he should prevent buggies coming out at all.
The whole zig-zag parking area is trouble in our city. In theory: anyone parking there is wilfully endangering pedestrian lives. In practise, as even the nearby double yellow lined areas are full of short-stay shoppers, zebra crossings are the only place to stop. How to do this without endangering pedestrians.
This photo, from Southville Parking, shows an experimental delivery zone in Victoria Street.
The zig-zag area has been moved leftwards, with some bicycles painted down to force bicycles out the way of through traffic. This newly opened up area does not have double yellow lines, so delivery vehicles -here BX06MDU from the Post Office- have a convenient place to stop without endangering pedestrians by parking over zig-zags.
We were really worried when the House of Commons Public Accounts Committe report on road safety came out -once we'd read the report.
Key findings
Focus on child safety in deprived areas.
Speed amplifies injuries so 20 mph zones are great
Monitor road safety schemes to see if they actually work
Nobody is monitoring injury rates, so all statistics on road safety have to be viewed as doubtful. Reducing the death rate is not enough if the injury rate is increasing.
We were worried. We we worried that they might pick up on our right to use a build-out by zig-zags for parking, such as demonstrated on Whiteladies Road by YA55VDY at 08:22 on October 7 2009.
Similarly, we were worried they might express concern that driving and parking on pavements at popular junctions during the school run might be viewed as endangering kids, such as again demonstratedby YA55VDY at 08:13 on October 17, 2009.
What to do? We had an emergency phone conference with our fellow travellers, the Daily Mail, and a couple of MPs who were courting the Daily Mail vote. And we had an idea. One of the points said "look at the perceived cyclist/pedestrian conflict", as apparently those people who write lots of letters in green ink to their MPs care about this a lot. That's it, the problem we in Bristol Traffic think is the route cause of risk in our streets: bicycles on pavements.
That's it! we said, focus on this, pretend it is the key finding, not that cars speeding through the less well off parts our cities are killing the children, not that there isn't room on the pavements for bicycles or pedestrians on account of all the cars.
We were a bit concerned that the statistics didn't hold up, that nobody in our city has been killed by a bike on a pavement, but we have had people killed this year crossing the road, we have had schoolkids killed on the pavement by cars, we have had cyclists killed on the road. What to do? Get some quotes from the docile MPs who will do anything to get their names in the paper. And we did.
We wanted to appear on question time, but apparently the BBC had already booked their speaker, so it had to be a bit of journalism instead. Which had us worried. Journalism. That means research, insight and writing. How would the BBC report this?
Would they read the report and come down hard against our right to drive round the city at speed, to finish our commute by parking our cars on the buildout by the double yellow lines, here outside the physiotherapy department of the BRI?
Would the BBC pick on the speed issue, embrace the Bristol Council proposals to reduce the speed limit in the deprived parts of the city? Would they look at the discussion on injury rates, enquire of hospitals what the trends are, and perhaps find some unpleasant facts about that Britain is becoming a more dangerous place to walk around, on account of -dare we say it- the cars.
Fortunately, they went for the MP's quotes rather than even looking at the report's summary This produced some lovely "Target pavement cyclists" headlines and with a consistent "Parliament blames the bicycles" story, even the on-line bicycle press didn't bother to download the report and realise that we, Bristol Traffic, had made the headlines and all the quotes up.
I mean really, how could a respectable news outlet fall for quotes that are straight out of Monty Python? Like this one from Geraldine Smith (Labour), "A police superintendent was at this forum with me and he said that it was legal to cycle on pavements." That is so wrong; the police not enforcing things that aren't actually illegal. Or this one, from Tory MP David Curry, some cyclists were "irresponsible and arrogant road users"? Yes, that is what we want: the next parliament to make being "irresponsible and arrogant on a bicycle" a crime. It will be the first step to banning the two-wheeled terrorists from our streets entirely.
Victory! Success! We, Bristol Traffic, in collaboration with the Daily Mail, are not only writing articles for our own news outlets, we are setting the agenda for the country. Now that the Daily Mail can't be racist, can't blame rape victims and can't be homophobicwithout 25,000 press complaints, attacking the cyclists is the oneluxury the press has left, and we will exploit it to the utmost.
All those bike people that view us as some kind of satire will have a different look on their face now, now that they realise that we are setting the battle lines for the next election. It won't be about financial competence, how to handle the fact that Britain is £270 Trillion in debt and rising, it won't be that the mass employment industries are toast and with North Sea oil declining year on year, we won't have the cash flow that kept us going through the 1980s. The issue that neither party who stands a chance of getting a majority appears to know what to do isn't going to be raised. No, the next election will be about what really matters: bicycles on pavements.
Fear Bristol Traffic! We are in charge, and you, the little people, don't even realise it!
Just moments after recording the appalling Jay Walking incident in Bristol's famous Gloucester Road, our roaming reporter managed to snap this incredible photo of a new mode of transport.
Our team of investigative journalists tell us this vehicle was developed in secret by the CIA in collaboration with Firstbus, and that this is the new hybrid "Manvan" (tm). We're not so sure.
However, this radical new vehicle (part human, part cabriolet, part something else) could be the solution to all our urban traffic problems and the ultimate transport salvation of inner city Bristol.
Half Man, Half Car. Genius.
Early adopters 'Trade Link Retail Services" are seen here testing the concept on an ASL on Gloucester Road, probably because the vehicle is, at this early stage of development, apparently only pedal-powered (for legal reasons).
But... a wider roll-out is expected next year following further testing of the prototypes.
If the extensive trials currently taking place on Bristol's red tarmac prove successful a motorised version of this van, and even cars, buses and lorries, may then become upgrade options.
SPOF: Single Point of Failure. The failure modes of GPS are pretty fascinating, which is why you cannot trust it to get you home alive, not unless you are in the US army and have access to the military GPS channels. Even then, you can't trust them past the opening salvo of a war that involves non-conventional armaments.
The Bristol Traffic Project is not anti-car, but we are anti unscientific approaches to the traffic issues of our city. Therefore it was with some sadness that one member of the team was forced to issue a complaint about a recent advert. For anyone else who fears that SatNav is not something that should be relied on, consider complaining to the Advertising Standards Authority. There is no need to
go to such detail, a more succint summary would be "If GPS is so reliable, how come come someone
nearly drove their BMW off a cliff last summer? (Apologies for the citation style, but it was needed for the ASA complaint form). Plain text only.
FirstBus would like to make clear that this footage of a bus failing to observe rights of way rules is not one of theirs.
All their buses respect zebra crossings as well as Advanced Stop Lanes for bicycles.Furthermore, anyone who states otherwise will receive an injunction from some well-known libel lawyers to prevent them spreading such lies.
In our Friday Brain Teaser, some people commented on the no-entry signs at the entrance.
These people need to get a newly-updated "Bristol Highway Code" document, which will bring them up to date with recent changes in the meaning of signs. For the particular Red Circle with White Minus, it's severity has been downgraded.
Old: Do not enter this road New: Slow down when entering this road
The vehicle heading down Marlborough Hill, WR09FRJ is adhering to the new signage, as the brake lights show that they are slowing down on entering the one-way system from the low-priority entrance.
Bristol Traffic welcomes contributions showing this sign's new meaning being followed, as well as other recent changes in the meaning of other signs.
It's nice to see that the Shared Use area is being used effectively on Cotham Road, now that term time is started.
It can be used by parents dropping their kids off at the Steiner School. We have seen them argue with Parking Services whenever an attempt is made to discourage this, and clearly this term BPS are avoiding the area, so helping harmony develop.
First, the parents use the "buses only" parking area -respected by residents and commuters- for their short stay work
What happens when buses come, cynical viewers may ask? That's simple, they just double park in front of the commuters, just above the build-out indented to help pedestrians to cross.
Doesn't that make it harder for walking schoolkids to cross? not really. There is now parking for those parents who wish to drive to school. More subtly, they make what is otherwise a fast and dangerous road to cross one-way-alternating-traffic. Parents who wish to endanger their children and slow down tax-paying road traffic by walking them to school can now actually cross this wide and fast road more easily
This shows how a mixed use: school-run-parent and bus parking area can actually enhance all school transportation options.
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