The M32 shutdown: a preview of the Zombie Apocalypse

Most films and TV series about some zombie or apocalypse or similar generally have some common visual motifs

• A city partially destroyed.
• Wild animals reclaiming the land. (example: 12 monkeys)
• One or two survivors pushing shopping trollies. (Denzel Washington: The book of Eli)
• Wide empty roads where the main protagonist can drive round fast.( Will Smith: I am Legend; the Walking Dead,...)

It's the latter that interests us. After the fall of civilisation, you will never be stuck behind a bus or or a Renault Clio veering from lane-to-lane as their satnav gives last minute directions. There's obvious question: why did everyone die in a way which left a fast route through the ruined city? For that to happen, everyone in the last 30s of their life would have to get off the M32, pull to the side of Stapleton Road, then die. In doing so, they leave a nice through route for drivers, albeit for those few survivors trying to push a shopping trolley down the pavement.

But an empty M32? It's almost worth starting a zombie plague just for that experience they promised us: centre of town to M4 in under seven minutes.

Last weekend the M32 was shut down to put in a bridge —that is, local government funding for P+R commuters from the wealthy suburbs of S Gloucs, for students at UWE (more diverse than Bristol Uni), and the affluent staff of the North Fringe —the latter with a bias towards men in the engineering/tech career path.

A whole section of the city —less affluent, more diverse and more interesting than Clifton— breathed a sigh of relief and a lungful of air that didn't taste of second hand turbo diesel. A weekend off. Something they haven't known for decades.

For us, we got to experience something similar: being the only car on the M32.

Driving down the M32 late Sunday evening, there are signs warning of the M32 closed at the Stapleton/Muller Road junction, or, to the affluent of the city, "the IKEA roundabout", that being the sole reason they'd ever get off here.



As we prepare come off, bringing up the phone to tell us how to get to Clifton without having to make eye contact with anyone, we see the flyover "40 mph limit due to faulty barriers" section. Some of the cars come off before it, a few stay on.



The first sign of an unusual situation is that the outbound lanes are empty: there is not a single vehicle leaving the city.

The sole car in front pulls off at St Pauls, leaving an empty road ahead.



This is then: the first time that we have ever seen the M32 without traffic. Those vehicles opposite? Parked. When the Zombie Apocalypse comes, people will be required to pull over to the hard shoulder and put their hazard lights on —either as their last step of being human, or their first step as a zombie, before running up the exit and trying to eat anyone sitting in Mina Road park.

For all those people who missed it: going down an empty M32 is not so much a discovery of what those builders of "the M32 parkway" imagined the experience to be, it's actually very unnerving.

All motorways in the country are full of traffic, weekends as well as weekdays. That traffic actually provides cues. If the brake lights come on in the distance, something is up, time to start coasting down. If everything is going along at different speeds in each lane; all is probably well. And if all lanes drop to about the same speed, it's busy. Pick the lane with the best stopping distance in front and be calm.

Most importantly, the other vehicles provide speed information. Because if there is one place where you do need to keep checking your speed on the dial, it's not the 20 mph zone. It's the motorways. Once you are going at 75, the vehicle noise going up to 85 is generally the same, and from there, 85-90, 90-95, easy to pick up if you get into the fast lane to pass things, then, while speeded up, start going along with the other vehicles in there. Motorways are where you do need to keep an eye on your speed. Which is what the other cars help do.

Ignoring rain/fog/snow, when you should be making decisions based on stopping distance alone, you can generally benchmark your speed relative to other vehicles. If there are trucks going past you: either you own an original British Leyland Mini 850cc —or you should speed up. In the middle lane, going along with the Astras, the Golfs and the Zafiras: you are in the 70-80 zone, where generally most people sit. If you are in the outside lane going past those vehicles, maybe you should think about pulling in once you get past them. And if you are in the outside lane and there isn't an Audi Q7 driving so close to the back that you can see the nasal hair of the driver, you are going at less than 90 mph.

In the absence of those vehicles, you have no idea what speed you are going. Instead you are too busy looking round, going "ooh, there isn't anyone in front; where is the car right behind me, the one in the slow lane about to swing past the HGV? And why isn't there someone sitting in my driver-side blind spot?". It's fundamentally unnatural —like nothing you have ever trained for. We ended up spinning up the motor to 40 mph and trying to cherish this odd event for as long as we can.

Like Halley's Comet: We shall never see it again in our lifetime.

FirstBus: don't make it a class thing: the M32 commuters would never forgive you

A PR group funded by FirstBus and other bus companies have just published a "Dodgy Dossier" on why their buses suck.

The Bristol "dead" post went for it, but chose to blame 20 MPH and RPZ zones, that is "max speed between queues" and "limit on number of vehicles that can park for free in the inner city".


In doing so they made a couple of mistakes

One: In their claim "bristol is the slowest" they forgot to say "except Reading, which the graph clearly shows is slower"


This is one of those things that the less mathematically inclined (i.e. the Brexit leadership) get wrong all the time. Smaller numbers mean "less", bigger numbers mean "more". According to the shiny graphs this PR agency made up, it takes longer to get round Reading. What's worse: you're in Reading.

Two: They missed the key scapegoats of the bus companies: the cyclists.




This issue has been picked up, along with the brazen attempt by a media relations group to appear vaguely independent.


As for the congestion, well, looking at this video from RedVee of the Centre, you can't blame the cycling infrastructure —none— for the multiple lanes of stationary traffic
.

What's causing this? The combination of (a) too many people trying to drive and (b) The Centre being ripped up for Metrobus. Does the bus marketing document note that? complain that "bus passengers are being held up by the millions being spent in the city for bus passengers?". No: they pick on the noisy ones who make lots of noise but don't get dedicated lanes down the M32.

And how do they do that: by calling out the cylists in London of being "wealthy" white men

What is less well-known, is how relatively affluent cyclists in London are compared with bus passengers. Transport for London describes the London cyclist as typically white, under 40, male with medium to high household income. [Further] A report by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s Transport & Health Group (LSHTM) in 2011 describes cycling in London as disproportionately an activity of white, affluent men. Only 1.5% of those living in households earning under £15,000 cycled compared with 2.2% of those living in households earning over £35,000’.

This is something the cyclist campaigners have torn into for being bogus —but we aren't here to argue that. What we are concerned about is that they are using "benefits wealthy white men" as an argument against a transport option.

For if we were to make a list of transport-related work going on in the city which would appear to disproportionally benefit the wealthy it comes down to: anything which makes it easier to get between the more well off parts of the region and their places of working, shopping and leisure.

Specifically

1. Metrobus to Bristol International Airport connections
2. Metrobus as a P&R alternative for most residents of North Somerset and S Gloucs.
3. The Managed Motorway work on the M4/M5
4. Bristol mainline train electrification

And. let's be honest: the entire M32. The people living down alongside the Frome River weren't wishing they had a flyover at bedroom window height: they believed the same bollocks that politicians always say "yes you will suffer, but it will be better in the long term", and so a motorway went in to aid the people from Clifton to head to London; to help the people who moved out of the city to live in the rural wastelands past the ring road and their ghettos of boredom around Emerson's Green. And the inner ring road work started, thankfully never completed: But notice which parts of the city came out worse. Not the bits with money.

We say to FirstBus —who also own FGW railway line—: don't make your war on cyclists a class one. Because that will call into question a lot of the infrastructure you are having built for you by local and national governments.

There is nothing erotic about a naked man on a Brompton

Being as the Bristol Traffic HQ is an open air drinking establishment in Stokes Croft (the wall on Turbo Island), we are used to the sight of nudity.

Even so, our encounter with the Bristol Naked Bike Ride was such that we had to delete our videos for the sake of humanity.

If you find yourself getting excited about the sight of a naked man on a Brompton, well, based on the participants of the local naked bike ride, you've got a bit of an obsession with folding bicycles that you should either get looked at, or at least get in touch with Brompton for a printed catalog.


Can we also observe that this image exposes the lie that "cycling is good for your health". Do these people look healthy? We think not. And as for the claim that Brooks saddles are comfy? There's nothing to say there except look at the expression on some of these people's faces.

For next year's ride, we propose having a review board deciding in advance who gets to ride. We will volunteer our services —provided nobody sends their nude selfies with them wearing nothing but hi-viz and a helmet. You know who you are.

Rejoice: we have a new mayor!

So: we have a new mayor.

What's interesting about the results is the sheer number of people who turned out to vote -and the proportion of those voters who came out to vote out George. Given one of the aims of the mayoral program was to "increase engagement in local government", it has certainly met that goal, one way or another.

A lot of the city are clearly glad to see the back of GF. The big question is: which specific policies got people voting him out -or whether it was his general style of working: Unitarian decisions and dismissal of dissent- which got to people.

Marvin may end up following the Labour Party line -but that party does have a local organisation and many councillors -so there is a structure for propagating the issues and desires of part of the electorate up to the mayor's office.

He's promised to focus on those parts of the city which felt left behind, and address problems such as housing. Given the need to be seen to immediately fulfilling those promises, to deliver, expect work to start there. But given the lead time for such work, expect them to look for some low-hanging fruit elsewhere.

RPZ and 20 zones are in an interesting place here. They have proved controversial, especially the way the RPZs were rolled out. But at the same time, a lot of people in the zones are happy with the idea, albeit not the details: charges, times, disabled access. Tuning those is a simple way to be seen to be listening, without risking upsetting those in the core who are happy with them.

20 mph is also under threat. As with RPZ, the CAPEX is done: the signs and the paint. MR was not elected on a pro-speed platform and, with a large electorate within the inner city air quality "management" area, may be reluctant to upset those who see the benefit. Maybe he even recognises that trying to blame 20 mph for the city's transport woes is ridiculous. At the same time: the anti GF voters view it as part of the "war on motorists", and they will expect something in exchange for their vote.

The often cited proposal "make it purely round schools, hospitals and residential roads" will resurface, even if it misses out that most roads have residents, a continually jittering limit its actually harder to comply with, and that children walk and cycle to school on main roads too. Oh, and any changes to signage means more capital spending.

One tactic the mayor may try here is a discreet rollback of enforcement, though with the PCC being independent, that'll take negotiation.

The other pet peeve of the anti GF voters is all that money spent on cycling. Good news for them there: he didn't spend much. If you compare what Boris did in London over the last four years —the embankment, the bridges, Elephant and Castle— what Bristol got for their money is laughable. What is there? a segregated path that stops half way down Baldwin street and the continuing fiasco of that path near Bemmy.

The money, the effort, the time -and the road space- has gone into Metrobus, not bicycles. It's hard to see what worse MR could do here, short of taking away more space for BRT. We know someone still has their eye on the BBRP —fortunately the people of Easton love it enough to keep the buses out: if it was just the cyclists, it'd look like the M32, the centre and the Festival way do: roadworks for BRT.

Metrobus itself? Marvin supports it. Anyway, given how far it has gone, the current BRT fiasco routes may be considered too late to kill. All future work could be put on hold until it's seen how well it works out in budget as well a use. It would also have be on how well the Elf kingdom of Somerset and the Dwarf Mines of S. Gloucs step up to their bit. About what FirstBus and Wessex Bus deliver. And about whether well a transport authority spanning the CUBA region can kick FirstBus into the 21zt century: contactless payment for all journeys, tickets interchangeable with Wessex bus. It's even about FBus having buses waiting at Templemeads and Parkway for GWR trains from London.

Let's wait and see.

Where is our election coverage?

People come up to us and ask questions. Usually we like them to say "would you like some more beer?", rather than the more frequent question, "Are you aware of the national speed limit in this country, sir?".

Most recently, people have been asking: "where is your electoral coverage?"

Well, we've been primarily leaving it to other reporting outlets, specifically the Bristolian and Bristol 24/7. If people are putting effort in to analyse voting records, do interviews and organise hustings, that's enough.

A more relevant question people ask us is: who should we vote for?

As the people printing the ballots, we can say "you can't vote for UKIP on our photocopies as he falls off the end". Which is ironic as the spherical model of the earth is one of those sciency-things that UKIP candidates argue about, along with Climate Change and Newton's Laws of Motion (especially the bit that says the kinetic energy in a collision goes up with the square of the velocity).

Instead you get to make your mind up, noting that as Tony Dyer is the only one ever to have bought team members (including the late Chris Hutt) beer, he's got a head start.

What we recommend is you, the voter, place the following items in the order you feel is most important.

[ ] Right to speed at 35+ mph through the inner city
[ ] Right to park where you want in the city
[ ] Fundamental issues in society

The Fundamental issues in society box can include: education; housing; the central-government imposed austerity program and the fact that it will get worse; how and why so few people brought up in Bristol are in science and engineering jobs in north fringe technical companies, Bristol's Air Quality Management Area and other environmental issues; Firstbus & Metrobus. All the things that matter to those people who don't recognise that the choice between 20 mph and 30 mph is the most important issue facing the city today.

Then choose a politician that appears to prioritise issues in an order closest to your own. That's your first vote.




For the second vote you decide who you don't want in: Marvin or George —and vote for the other. Clear?

The M32 picnic area

A known subversive, "Analogue Andy", has been praising the Frome Valley cycle route, saying it joins up communities where the M32 divides them.

Well, if the valley cycle route is of social benefit, it is purely because of the infrastructure improvements the M32 added


Look at this



An all-year, all-weather, family picnic area.

Not even the bearpit benches offer such a sheltered area to take the whole family, park near IKEA, then walk over here to enjoy the afternoon.

We would love to see any photos people have of this area in its heyday, when there were, presumably, many families, laughing kids playing, happy parents bringing flasks of tea from their Austin Morris cars to drink here.

Sadly, even this photo is a relic: the benches have been converted into a skateboard park. The right to have a picnic under the M32 has forever been stolen. Well, unless you have a tartan rug in your Austin Morris.

CS11, the London Ringway and Hampstead

People paying attention to videos may note that more than one of our contributors have London accents. One actually has a South London accent, which is pretty shocking, but they've lived in the city long enough for it to no longer be something to apologise for. Another one of our team has a north-west london accent, the kind you'd get growing up in Camden and Brent. Their dark secret is even worse than having lived south of the Thames. They first went to school in Hampstead. (For locals, that little one opposite the tube station, under the everyman cinema, the one that still believes in hymns and things).


Eventually their parents saw the error of their ways and moved into West Hampstead, making their children walk to nearby ecoles. Under the gentle hand that was the Inner London Education Authority, swimming was taught at the nearest council pool: in primary school you got a coach. Come secondary school, they'd worked out a better solution: the kids were given the money to get the tube during lunch; if they made it to the swimming lesson they'd get the money to go home. This presented the children with two choices: take a tube from Kilburn to Swiss Cottage, or walk to the pool eating the bag of chips you'd just bought with the fare. Tough decision.

What was never considered was cycling from the school to the pool. Because that would involve negotiating the Swiss Cottage gyratory, a multilane mess which you had to cross to get to the pool or library, getting there along Finchley Road, the "A41" coming down off the M1 by way of Staples Corner and the North Circular. It was tube or foot.

In London: the tube is the mass form of transport for anyone near a station. It's why what zone you are in is a marker of house prices, "They can afford to live in Zone 2!"; distance from tube station advertised because it makes such a difference on your daily commute. Off-street parking? Maybe for those few houses that have it —but it's not useful for commuting anyway. Not only is there nowhere to park, and congestion fees to worry about —it's significantly slower than the tube.

Driving to work, at least if you work in Central London, is a minority form of commuting. That's even if you have a fancy job in the city: it's not that likely to have a parking space.



This is perhaps a reason for the volume of taxis in London, they're an exclusive form of travel for people who don't have parking spaces but can afford to sit in traffic jams. By outsourcing the sitting behind the wheel swearing to people from Essex, you can check emails on your phone, only at the cost of many pounds per journey.

The rise of cycling in London, then, is arguably a consequence of dissatisfaction with an overcrowded, expensive and unreliable tube, recognition that the bus service was worse, driving even more stupid and getting in a taxi a transport for the wealthy people with time on their hands.


Nowadays central London has a massive proportion of cycle commuters, those who are happy with a city worse to cycle in than Bristol, those who have learned all the back ways which are mostly survivable. When the new embankment and bridge segregated routes open, central London will show the rest of the UK cities how far they are behind, even Bristol, so proud of itself, can't do a pedestrian crossing of the Bearpit in less than a year, the Templemeads to Bemmy path is missing-considered-deceased, BRT2 has stolen bits of path and parkland, and then there's the centre and Baldwin Street. London is leading in both vision and execution. Which, when you consider the wanker in charge of it, quite saying something.

What London is doing is setting a baseline for the rest of Britain, for cycling and even, with Crossrail, what you can do for public transport. Bristol now needs to step up, making it pleasant to cycle across the city centre without you having to rehearse in your head a safe route and factoring in you won't have a clue what to do by The Centre, and that Templemeads hates cycling.

London needs to step up by moving out of the centre, to make it survivable to get in to the city, to make walking and cycling an option for people who live outside Zone 1. For a hint of the difficulties here, look at Vole O'Speed's coverage of Brent. As visitors to Brent with the "Love Bristol, Go Brent" campaign, we can assure people that he's actually upbeat about the prospects for cycling in Brent.

And Hampstead? With its primary school off a traffic jam of taxis? What hope does it have?




In CS11, it has the chance of a safe route to cycle from Swiss Cottage to the city centre, a feed in route for everyone in north west London. If you can get by bike to Swiss Cottage, you can carry on to your destination know that you'll be alive when you get there. Instead of having to text your loved ones "I'm at work, I'm fine!", you'd be able to text them "I'm on CS11, I'll live today!".

Except of course, the residents of St John's Wood don't want it, as it will make driving to Hampstead harder. And they are leading Britain's Backlash.

The comments are absolutely worth reading. Take this one from "Craig", resident of Hampstead village for nine year.




He is complaining that a cycle lane a mile away will devaluation the properties in Hampstead. That's an area where they are asking for £1.7M for a a flat, £3M for a house. So Craig, nine year resident, is worried that the resale value of his house will drop, by, what? a thousand pounds? Ten thousand? Because really it'd have to be a couple of hundred thousand pounds worth of devaluation.


And here's the irony. The sole reason that he has his £3.5M house is because in the 1970s, people fought to stop it having a motorway over it.



If the GLC had got its way then, the quaint little houses of Craig and others would be in the shadow on a par with London's Westway, a faint miasma of NOx and diesel particles infiltrating the house, adding extra flavour to the coffees their Nescafe-coffee pod cafe macchiatos, creating more traffic on every single road, and generally making the area even less pleasant to live in —as if having it full of people like Craig wasn't bad enough.

That was what London dodged: The ringway over Hampstead. Instead they got the status quo, which, with the vast cross-london school run, the emergence of diesel as the fuel of choice, killing those kids from NOx and lack of exercise. And yet these people don't want change —they expect to be able to drive round the city. First the school dropoff then on to the underground parking at Waitrose John Barnes, on to the gym for your spin class, up the road to pick up the children (Walk to school! Have them use public transport! Never!), then nip down to central london for a play or two, parking at westminster being outrageous, but well, so's the mortgage on a little Hampstead mews house, as is theatre tickets, what's another £30 on the evening —why, it's the amount of tip the au-pair would expect, isn't it?

Apparently there's a demonstration of support for the proposal on Friday, March 11. Us: we'd be more tempted to head to the anti demonstration to see who it is arguing against them —because they sound like the Donald Trump supporter of transport.

To close then, one last opposition comment: we can't have cycle paths in our cities because we have road, not canals.



If CS11 gets stopped, it'll because of people like this.

Bristol Drivers: always giving cyclists a hand

There are always complaints in the cycling community (all eight of them) about some war-on-cyclists taking place in Bristol. We know that's untrue: the war being conducted in Bristol is by cyclists, against Motorists!

Innocent motorists, we may add —law abiding, invariably polite and considerate.

Here we one such example, a BMW driver going out of their way to give the cyclist a helping hand up the road



See how they swerved to make sure they were able to help the cyclist? See how they carefully reached out and gently tried to assist the cyclist? Admittedly, they were try to help the cyclist fall over and injure themselves —but they were still trying to do their bit for a cycling city.

We've said before, that Bristol is split between those who like cycling and those who, well, hate it.



We suspect the driver of BMW MX64JWU may have been one of the people in the survey who expressed negative opinions about cycling. We may also suspect they aren't in favour of 20 mph limits.

Well, we always value those prepared to stand up for their principals, or here, lean out the window and try to push someone over for those same principals. We feel this driver should be congratulated with the publicity their action deserves. Does anyone know who they are?

Location: Horfield/Lockleaze border, Wordsworth Road.; that bit which the #24 bus covers.

Video from Dave Edmonds. See the BCyC facebook posting.

Where does Bristol's pollution come from?

20 mph is looking like one of the big manufactured controversy issues of the election. Not, say, library closures, or the sale of the Avonmouth ports and apparent abandonment of Avonmouth. No, 20 mph limits, along with parking restrictions. Who says the electorate isn't worrying about city wide issues?

One of the pro-speeding campaign claims is "20 mph causes pollution".

Bristol has a pollution problem. It has an Air Quality Management Area which covers the centre, and also follows the A38 and M32 out of town. And apparently even the council admits it is killing people.

Where is that pollution coming from? Well, for NOx, the nitrogen oxides which VW tried to cover up, it's coming from Diesel cars. Bristol's NOx problem would be significantly reduced if everyone driving diesel today switched to petrol. Not hybrid or electric: petrol would be a start, especially modern cars that turn off the engine when stopped. And with gearing such that they can cruise at 20 mph nicely.

What is that ratio of petrol:diesel in the city?

We have no data, though the council's ANPR camera arrays will have that information if they could sit down and analyse it. Otherwise, it's that same self-selecting short term surveys which we are always so disparaging of. Here's ours



This was taken by a tax dodger cycling up the shared use pavement on Bridge Valley Road. While most shared use pavements are technically, "bollocks", this one is worth using. The speed of the cyclist (4-6 mph) is at a significant different from that of the motor vehicles, so you will only get passed by everything. The speed limit here is 30 mph, its off the portway and cumberland basin flyover, drivers may not have seen a bicycle that morning and forgotten they exist. And there's almost never anyone walking. If there's a fault: pavement surface quality and sweeping; the usual.

Going up the hill on a bike, you can see the motor vehicles come in waves; a queue heading west from the cumberland basin builds up until there's a right turn light, then they set off. You get a minute or two of quiet, 30s of traffic, then repeated until you reach the top. The video shows one of the groups of cars and vans.

Let's look at engine type, confirming on the MOT checker site whenever the registration number was readable and it wasn't immediately obvious

• white (VW?) van. Diesel
• white van. Diesel
• BMW 330d. Diesel. Passed MoT on Feb 22, 97K miles.
• VW Passat. Only available in EURO-test-rigged diesel models. 100K miles on 16/11/15
• Audi A6. Diesel
• LGV. Diesel
• Ice cream van. Diesel with dodgy fan belt.
• white van. Diesel. 84K miles
• Peugeot 308 Diesel. (Passed MoT on second attempt feb 17; 78K miles)
• Mercedes SLK230K, petrol. 50K miles after 15 years of use.
• Ice cream van. Diesel

11 vehicles; only one petrol engined. That's a ratio of 10:1.

As stated, this is a self-selected dataset, but even so, it didn't involve a cyclist going up and down the hill repeatedly until a group came by that were nearly all diesel. It was just the outlier. If one more petrol car had got through the ratio would have dropped to 5:1, awful, but not as bad.

We don't have any real datasets of the petrol/diesel ratio, and this being an out of rush hour measurement may show bias towards working vehicles over commuters (unless a lot of people go to work on an ice cream van, that is).  But it does point a lot of the blame at our NOx problem at Herr Doctor Diesel and his inventions.

This also means the mercedes owner has something to be smug about, as well as having a vehicle still worth more than the Peugeot or the Passat: every mile they've driven has chucked out a fraction of the pollution of the other vehicles, as well as only doing a quarter as many miles/year as the others. Too bad their wingmirrors cost so much to replace.

Costing out a 21st century police state

There's been lots of interesting coverage of the new Snooper's charter, with light blue touchpaper having a good summary of the fundamental civil liberties issues.

But we haven't seen much in the way of "how would an ISP implement this?"

Which means its up to us, implementers of a PCSO-state adjacent to the Bearpit, to look at how to build this. As proof we know what we are talking about, here is our 8TB JBOD storage infrastructure (running xubuntu server 14) with a Top of Rack (ToR) switch consisting of a netgear base station flashed to DD-WRT. Sticker some recruitment from "Google reliability engineering"


The new bill requires ISPs to store  an "Internet Connection Record (ICR)" of every connection, and allow government access to it on demand.

How would an ISP implement such a system?

First: What is an "Internet Connection Record (ICR)"? The bill has made up something which doesn't really exist and then told ISPs to maintain it.

It is probably a record recording: the originating IP address/port of a TCP connection, the destination IP/port, and the duration of the connection. "probably", because it uses the term "event"

7(9) In this Part “relevant communications data” means communications data which may be used to identify, or assist in identifying, any of the following—

(a) the sender or recipient of a communication (whether or not a person),
(b) the time or duration of a communication, 35
(c) the type, method or pattern, or fact, of communication,
(d) the telecommunication system (or any part of it) from, to or through which, or by means of which, a communication is or may be transmitted,
(e) the location of any such system, or 40
(f) the internet protocol address, or other identifier, of any apparatus to which a communication is transmitted for the purpose of obtaining access to, or running, a computer file or computer program.
In this subsection “identifier” means an identifier used to facilitate the transmission of a communication.

The GCHQ/Bristol university "Problem Book (redacted)" appears to cover this very problem in the "five alive" dataset of IP/IP communications (p70), with every communication record being a list of records of (start-time/8, source-IP/4, source port/2, dest-IP/4, dest port/2, protocol/2. [data size]/8). Using the byte size estimated in the /N values, that's 30 bytes per communication; with the move to IPv6 driven by mobile phones, you'd need 16 bytes per source and dest address, or 56 bytes/record. That's for every HTTP request, skype call, bittorrent block share, PS4 game setup. If they include DNS records, it's for every nslookup command issued.

That's a lot of data in a world of phones and home network connections.

How to store all of this?

We see a number of strategies

The "fuck off Theresa" strategy

Here your ISP implements "for security reasons" an isolated system which collects ICRs, but for which the only way to retrieve them is a 1970s-era punched card reader you have to actually walk to. If HMG asks for something, you say "next wednesday? Come on by. Bring your query on a prepared punched card and we'll have the printer ready for the output. Oh, and we'll bill you for the ink"

The problem here is on P135: "The Secretary of State may make regulations imposing specified obligations on 20 relevant operators, or relevant operators of a specified description.', which includes "obligations to provide facilities or services of a specified description;". You could offer "the fuck off then" system, and they'd say "no, we want this". The ISP would not get a choice in the matter.

The TalkTalk fiasco

A Linux server running MySQL with a front end of an unpatched PHP web application accessible on the open internet over an unencrypted HTTP connection.

MySQL does have the lowest cost/TB of storage out there, and while a single mysql server doesn't grow, you can scale via sharding; storing the mass surveillance records of a few tens of of thousands of users.

Limitations

1. Doesn't handle the "list me everyone who used twitter between 9 and 9:30 query" without going through every single database and then aggregating the results, so pushing out a database query (SELECT * FROM icr WHERE icr.endpoint="twitter.com" AND icr.time>21:00 and icr.time < 21:30), somehow merging them all.

2. Being people utterly out of their depth, that same web UI will be accessible from your customer billing form. That'll be a massive security disaster, unless the people breaking are a group like Anonymous, where it's more likely to be a contribution "; DROP * from USERS" or an attack on public targets (SELECT * FROM icr WHERE user="Theresa May")

The outsourced consultancy disaster

The design here is less a design than a process. Go to a global/national software consultancy (e.g. Capita). Give them lots of money. Wait. Eventually get some software that doesn't work very well, designed to run on very expensive hardware.

This is essentially how major government projects like Universal Credit and any NHS-wide computer systems turn out. The problem here is the "ocean boiling grand vision" along with an inability to adjust features to meet unrealistic deadlines, along with consultants who are too excited by the cash to point out the project is doomed. Oh, and politicians who stand up in parliament announce changes in plans and then keep pretending the project is on schedule.

With this strategy we'd have a police state that came in late and didn't work very well. But: we'd pay for it either via taxes or ISPs, and it will be expensive

Bring it to the Borg

The cloud approach.  All ICRs are Netflow records grabbed off the Cisco switches and buffered locally. Regularly they are pushed up to google cloud storage in bulk HTTPS PUT operations, so storing all your data in google's server farms. We'd duplicate it across sites for Disaster Recovery ("DR") , and host it in the zero-CO2 datacentres ("DCs") to help meet the COP21 commitments which Osborne is trying to pretend weren't made.

Those initial datasets could be converted to more compressed format, with some summary data pushed into the google BigTable database. Queries against the dataset "find everyone who used twitter and facebook yesterday" would be Google BigQuery queries.

This architecture would work, provided whoever wrote the capture, upload and query code knew what they were doing. Google would handle datacentre ops, bill your ISP or HMG by the petabyte of data stored and for the CPU load of the import/cleanup phase and the query execution.

This is the one we'd build. No upfront hardware CAPEX; operational costs O(records)+O(queries). As you get 1TB of free processing month, initial dev costs are relatively low too.

Would the government allow it? Unlikely. Google's nearest datacentres are in Ireland and Finland; all the data would be moved out of the UK and under the jurisdiction of others.

It's notable, however, that Amazon have a special datacentre in the US for Amazon GovCloud, which is is where federal agencies can keep data and run code. We aren't aware of a UK equivalent. They could do this, though presumably after discussing tax arrangements.

[BTW, if someone went this way, as costs are directly proportional to the number of records, you could hurt the telcos and government costs by generating as many records as you can. If every UDP packet kept a sender and destination, you could run something on all willing participant's machines to create costs. Even at pennies per gigabyte, you can ramp up the bills if you leave this code running flat out overnight. Just a thought]

Kafkaesque

The fallback design would be to use the open source Big Data stack; "Hadoop and Friends"

The netflow call records would be streamed into Apache Kafka streams, which would then store the data in Hadoop HDFS, or perhaps feed them through some initial streaming system for cleanup (storm, spark).

Summary information would go into a column database. Normally the checklist item would be HBase, but given this is a government project, the NSA implemented Accumulo would win out.

Assuming there's a way to submit remote queries, those queries need to be secured. We'd come to some arrangement with the government to say "here are the kerberos credentials you need" on a USB stick, restrict access to SPNEGO-authenticated callers over HTTPS and rely on the NSA having no back doors in Accumulo that they aren't willing to tell GCHQ about.

Cost: upfront CAPEX of the datacentre, operational costs: site, power, staff, cooling. ideally you'd host it somewhere with cool air and low cost zero-carbon power, which points us up a Scotland and NE england. Land, power and people are affordable, and before long you could have something on a par with Facebook Prineville, though not, notably, NSA Utah.

Being open source software, you don't actually have to pay anyone for it —if you take on the support costs yourselves. It's unlikely telcos will want to do this, so that needs to be covered too. Once you have enough Petabytes of data, the costs of this system is still likely to be less than with google or amazon.

Otherwise: software development costs atop this layer may be steep, especially if you don't have experience in this.

In fact: all of the strategies have software development costs, a cost which is the same for every telco, all implementing roughly the same application.

Which would leave the government to be in a very good position to walk up to all of them and say "we can provide the software for you —just run these servers with our code". That way they get to run precisely the software they want —and hook it up directly to their central systems in a way which they knows will work.

They could even say "we'll host your servers somewhere and provide the software". That would give the government direct access to the nominally independent telco-hosted datasets, when they were all really in the same big room, running the same application.

There you have it then: four real ways. Two disasters, two viable: one where you hand off the operational issues to Google or amazon in exchange for lots of cash, the other home-built on the open source Big Data stack for more upfront capital costs but lower long term storage & compute costs. And relying on GCHQ to provide the software layer.

The only one that would scale, technically and financially, without giving the Google or Amazon the data, would be Hadoop+Accumulo, with code the telcos probably aren't up to writing themselves.

How much would this cost?

Hardware: Facebook-based open compute servers.

These are never publicly quoted, as you have be shopping for $1M+ before the design starts to make sense; at that point you get off the web site and onto the phone.

Looking at the Penguin Computing icebreaker storage servers, holding 30 3.5" HDDs in a 2U system. with ~44 "rack units" of capacity in a normal rack, you get 22/per rack (we're leaving space for Top of Rack switches) == 660 disks.

With 4TB HDDs, you get 2.6 petabytes in a single rack. Heavy bastard with serious power budget, but compact enough that you can fit one in various telco sites, doing the initial storage/preprocess there before uploading to central facilities in off-peak times.

A 4TB HDD costs $115 from Amazon US; let's assume $75 for the OEM. You'd be paying $50K for those 550 disks. That's all. Servers, let's assume $1.5K for each chassis(*), 33K, so $82,500 per rack, excluding networking. Let's round that up to $100K.

We'd end up with a system whose pure hardware costs, the CAPEX, come in at $100K per 2.5 PB of storage. For 1MB USD you've got 25 PB. At, say, 60 bytes per record (==56 + 4), we'd get 426e9 records per rack. That's what's technically known as "a fuck of a lot of data". More subtly, if you look at the cost per record, in cents, its $0.000000234375. That's "a police state too cheap to meter" (**)

Which is what we are getting here. The big change isn't "the terrorists are using phones", or even "surveillance is getting harder than ever". It's "with the right technologies, we can record everything the population does for next to nothing"

Welcome to the future: privacy is over.

(*) Chassis costs depends very much on RAM and CPU; put in intel Xeon parts and lots of RAM and you'd be paying $8K/node, plus more in the leccy bill. That's what you'd expect to pay for the more compute-centric nodes, rather than the cold data storage, which is what we've costed out.

(**) These numbers seem to come in too low. Either there's a major underestimate of something, or the author should have used a spreadsheet rather than the calculator on their phone.

Stolen Rat runs of the city: Fry's Close

Our coverage of Bristol before the war on motorists began got a lot of interest, so expect some intermittent coverage of places stolen from us.

Here then: Fry's Close.

This used to be a secret shortcut from Park Road, Stapledown, over to Blackberry Hill, bypassing a jam on Park Road and a mini-roundabout. A treasured rat-run of the early 1990s

And now: abandoned to cyclists, pedestrians and their pets. At the bottom of the vale, there's even a path linking Eastville Park (on the right) to a path leading to UWE. That is: students are being encouraged to cycle.



This is just wrong.

Now: does anyone actually remember when this road closed? One team member has distinct, fond memories of the queue of stationary traffic heading towards Blackberry Hill from about '89-90, but certainly by 2006: gone. At some point between those dates, the council stole it from us, the taxpayers.

Big Shout Out to SWC scaffolds van HK15FYH!

We don't normally go to S gloucs on the basis that it's boring.

Nice to see that today, the driver of SWC scaffolds van HK15FYH / HK15 YHF decided to lighten up the journey of our tax dodger by not bothering to slow down for the roundabout.



This isn't a great junction, so the cyclist lined up for a right turn, waited for the traffic coming from the MoD abbey wood direction to go, then set out, slowly enough to be able to react to problems. Which was good, as you can see that the van coming from the left doesn't appear to slow down at all, not until shouted at.

If you look at the still, you can see why: he's got his shiny gold iphone six in his hand



It's interesting to see the driver's reaction: they look up from the phone, look at the cyclist, then drive off, without even bothering to show a hint of remorse.



Which raises the question: report the driver to the police or not? Because that may be the only way to see some remorse, and perhaps even him stopping texting while driving.

Bristol's Parking Problem: 2016 style

There's an article up on the evening post saying for the first time in a generation, a majority of people are using either buses, bikes or walking to work instead.

This is fascinating. Too bad there is no coverage of the methodology of the survey other than it's "a survey of the commuting habits of thousands of city residents". How did they conduct this survey? A random call of Bristol numbers? Did it include s survey of the rural backwaters of S Gloucs and N Somerset? Did they look at the distances travelled to measure commute-miles, rather than just journeys? Did they ask firstbus and wessex bus lines for data, along with ANPR logs and phone company travel datasets? These are the things we need to know.

Anyway, in the list of people the paper called for an opinion, they reached for their Fax Machine contact list and got in touch with Hugh Bladon, Bristol's member of Association of British Drivers, who is always woken up from his sleep for a quote. Hugh Bladon actually lives in Weston Super Mare, a town which is still looking forward to 1974, so it's always surprising that they can contact Hugh for a quote. That's 20 miles away, a distance quoted by Google maps as 38 minutes drive from Stokes Croft on a Sunday evening. If Mr Bladon really does commute into Bristol every day, he'll be spending an hour each way, first on the A370, A38 or M5+ portway, then in stop-go mode through town to finally reach his destination. And for what? To live in Weston? That's the place where Banksy hosted his Dismaland Exhibition —and that's not a coincidence. Probably the main problem they had there was people walking round town laughing at stuff and taking selfies in front of the sea front, not realising they weren't actually at the exhibition yet. Why would anyone voluntary live there? If you have children, think of what it does to their minds? And, think what it does to your life, with 2+h a day sitting in a car.

Essentially, you can't trust the judgment of anyone who lives in WsM of their own volition. So the fact he is called on to be the ABD spokesman is a bit worrying for them: can't they find anyone else?

And what did he have to say? Rather than go for the survey methodology —always the first line of attack—, he accepted the findings and then blamed the council

I suppose people are getting fed up with travelling into the city. here is not enough provision for people to park, and I suppose more people are using the park and rides. I would also think George Ferguson and his 20mph scheme are frightening people who think they might get a ticket for doing maybe 23, or 24mph Those are the sort of things that drive away people.With the expanding economy, I would have thought more people would be in cars. It might also be there is not enough parking. Cycle lanes now take up a lot of tarmac where road parking used to be.

This is hilarious. We have never heard of anyone too scared to drive into the city in case they get a ticket(*).

Blaming the RPZ for removing a large amount of free-at-point-of-use commuter parking is something he should have gone for, but instead he imagines that people are scared of getting a ticket for driving at 24 mph. That's like saying people are scared of using the M4 in case they get a ticket for driving at 74 mph. They aren't, you don't.

As for the "Cycle lanes now take up a lot of tarmac where road parking used to be.". He must have a different cycle map than everyone else. The purpose of cycle lanes is to provide short stay parking. Even bus lanes are only closed to parking for 3 hours a day, 21 h a week.

But he does have a bit of a point: there isn't enough parking. Only what you want to park has changed.

Look at this video of a Bristol (not a WsM) resident cycling to the shops on a weekend.

1. There are no cycle lanes.
2. There are still people driving, not scared of getting a ticket for driving at 23 mph.
3. A lot of the people driving don't seem to looking where they are going.
4. None of the car parking space has been re-allocated to cycle lanes.
5. There are lots of bike racks,  about 8 opposite where Havana Coffee used to be, two over the road by that, then more by costa coffee and sainsbury's.
6. All of these bike racks are full.

There is nowhere to park a bicycle



Our reporter cycles down hill, avoids getting hit by the 4x4 turning from Aberdeen Road without looking, and the hatchback pulling out from the other side of the road without looking, carries on a bit, having to wait with a car in front for a driver taking their time to reverse park, then pulls over themselves to find somewhere to park. First rack: 12 bikes; no room for more. Visible across the road: two racks, four bikes, no space. They continue down to Whiteladies Road. On the far side of the road, there's space for about 30 bikes, looking fairly full. On this side of the road, 6 more racks, space for 12. Except, again, full.

One of the bikes there half of an abandoned frame, lying on its side. So the the tax dodger gets to do something nobody who drives in from WsM can get away with; they stick their own bike on top of it, lock up, and go to the shops. So we see approximately six cars worth of space allocated -all from the pavement, we note- for bicycles, which is a fraction of the space allocated to car parking. What we see in this video is, on Cotham Hill alone, 32 cars, two spaces free. For bikes, 48 spaces: all taken, albeit some with dissolving relics.

Is this an unusual event? Not really; the same situation was encountered on Gloucester road an hour earlier: one space outside Maplins, someone else queueing for it before the tax dodger had even unlocked. Because on that side of the road, there are about eight bike stands, from Zetland Road up. In contrast, if you wanted to drive there, there's more space.

Essentially, we are seeing a shift to cycling as a transport option in some parts of the city —and we aren't seeing the city adapting to that.  Hugh can complain about removal of parking, but there is significantly more space allocated to parking here than any other other form of transport.

This little stretch of Whiteladies Road is interesting, as it is what the ABD use in the videos calling the council "bonkers", showing how shops have suffered from a lack of parking and have had to shut down.



Well, our anecdata beats theirs, at least in terms of being up to date, and what it says is "Bristol does have a parking problem, but it's not just for cars".

(*) If you have —or know someone who has— stopped driving around out of fear of getting ticketed at 23 mph, please get in touch.

WN60HDC: Sign Language

If you look at any of the London cyclists videos, they normally involve shouting, swearing and recrimination. Well, a lot of Bristol coverage is like that —but it can be done less confrontationally.


Here is a silent movie showing the exchange of opinions on the merits of texting while driving between a tax dodger and WN60HDC WN60 HDC


After a point and a dismissal of he phone in use, the tax dodger points to their camera and then the number plate, the driver then responds with their own pointing action.

This is of course the site of our experiment where we see 1 car in 6 looking at their phone screen on a weekday morning. Here, on a saturday afternoon, Whiteladies Road is less congested, so it's surprising to see someone having time to check up on facebook. They don't check for very long, perhaps they don't have any friends.

Hints of a left hook

Nothing spells "left hook" like a van coming up alongside with its indicators on. However, this one did actually wait for the cyclist to get past.



For London viewers: note the stressful conditions of Bristol streets. This is actually Sustrans NC4, as marked by some fading paint.

For ABD members from Weston Super Mare and 1973: note the parking spaces stolen by the RPZ, the cyclists in one direction, and how a van was held from turning by another bicycle —costing the company and city money.

Prewar Bristol

A lot of newcomers ask us: "what was it like before the war began?", or "How was the city centre before it was ruined by the war?"

Well, the War on Motorists began over 25 years ago —and the city is still suffering under it. Before the war, you could drive from temple way over the rickety flyover, straight to the centre, then past the cathedral and out to the A4, with only a couple of traffic lights in your way. Not now.

Some of the history of pre-war Bristol is still there, if you know where to look. Redcliffe Way for example —have you noticed how wide it is? Or why the road from the Jacob's Wells Road roundabout to (what's left of) the Bristol library is wide, yet deserted. All distant memories of a city before the war.

Here, in our historical artifacts, we've found an A-Z map of Bristol from 1985, when the motorists were not yet under attack by a car-hating council.


Look at the subtle differences

1.  Castle Park is as it once was: parking. A large amount of its surface area was dedicated to medium to long stay parking for "Broadmead Shopping Precinct" —one of Britain's premier shopping areas. Now: stolen by greenery. And of course, there's a bike path. And look what happened to Broadmead —its decline is not a coincidence.
2. There's a road, "College Green", where now there is a park: "College Green". Newcomers just don't appreciate how wonderful it was to have a main road going past the cathedral entrance, between it and the council house —showing the council what mattered to Bristol: fast-moving cars. When Anchor Road was reworked in the early 1990s, it was designated the through road, and College Green taken from us; Dean Road becoming a cul-de-sac.  And of course, the park added a bike path. This was one of the first losses in the war —and possibly the greatest strategically. No longer did the council get to see a main road out their windows. And without that, they lost their way: they forgot what mattered.
3. Redcliffe Way goes all the way through to The Centre, via what is now known as "Queen's Square". That got captured by the tree-huggers at the turn of the century —who went out to plant trees to commemorate their victory. And of course, a bike path.
4. The infamous rickety flyover has gone. Nobody who has arrived in the last 15 years will ever appreciate the thrill of driving over that single lane flyover, wondering if today would be the day that it fell down. Stolen, replaced by a lights-controlled gyratory. And of course, a bike path.
5. Templemeads had a motorail terminal. Actually, this was news to us. Apparently you could drive onto a sleeper train and get to Scotland overnight. Of course, being able to drive up the M5, get stuck at Spaghetti Junction, crawl over Wolverhampton on the M6 and then eventually get to the A74 replaced that. And even now, with the M74 and new motorways round Glasgow, the speed enforcement on those motorways have made the journey worse.
6. The railway path doesn't exist. While they didn't steal our roads for that —they could have converted that old railway line into a new road, or at least extra parking. Instead: a route designed to encourage more law-breaking cyclists to come into the city.
7. The M32 ends at the "Allied Carpet and sex shops" junction, rather than the more convoluted "queue for Cabot Circus Parking" junction. Again, the addition of vast amounts of parking has made congestion worse on the M32. And, with more lights, pedestrian and cycle crossings.
8. Nine Tree hill is open to through traffic. This was the great partition of Kingsdown. Before then you could drive down Springfield road, cut through Ninetree Hill and make your way to Jamaica street —allowing you to get all the way from The Downs to the city centre without a traffic light. Not now —and by forcing everyone to drive down Whiteladies Road, St Michael's Hill or Arley Hill+ Cheltenham road, it only makes congestion worse. And again: there's a bike path on the roads they stole.
9. Prince Street Bridge. Two way, Closed to cars —possibly indefinitely.
10. Lots of the other little "P" areas have been taken away by offices and housing. And what have we got in exchange? Nothing but the multi-storey parking of The Galleries, the multi-storey parking of Cabot Circus, the underground parking at @Bristol and the vast amount of parking behind Temple meads. That's it.

You can see, then, the multipronged battles which we've been fighting —and losing— in the war on motorists. Those bits of red paint on the main roads aren't the real war, they are just the victory signs, the equivalent of unionist and nationalist kerb painting. No, the battles fought have been far more strategic

• The closure of the inner ring road, the replacement of College Green and Queen's Square's main roads with parkland and bike paths. And in doing so —increasing congestion on the remaining roads.
• The closure of important rat-runs, closures which partition whole parts of the city. And in doing so —increasing congestion on the remaining roads.
• The replacement of surface parking with multi-storey parking facilities. And in doing so: encouraging congestion.

This is what we are up against. And while it's easy to point to the current mayor and say "20 mph zones! RPZ zones!" and accuse him of conducting a war on motorists, those aren't the real war. Those are details in a conflict going back decades.

DfT: Number of cyclists on M32 still zero

If you go into a bike shop you can pick up a freebie map of where to cycle in the city —one that's actually good for walking and running too.

You can more easily get a map of where not to cycle. In any overview map of the city, it's the red roads on the cover, along with the junctions between them.

 

Which is quite a coincidence really, as those are, essentially, the locations of the Department of Transport traffic survey sites


This is why the DfT traffic survey, showing a levelling off in cycle use, has to be treated with some scepticism. Frankly, if the number cyclists on the A370 and Cumberland Basin Flyover, or Temple and Newfoundland Ways was measured at more than zero, we'd actually suspect a measurement error.

Joe Steinsky tears into the numbers, with a graph we've stolen without any attribution.



The sheer variance in that cycling graph shows its flaws —you have to worry about how meaningful it is.

Even so, it's going to be taken up by those people who find it supports their opinions. In Bristol, that's the usual anti-cycling lobby: the evening post, the evening post commenters, random twitter haters and conservative party council and mayoral candidates.

If you encounter it —don't be afraid to ask "where are the numbers of people walking or on a train?", as you aren't going to see any of them on the M32, A370 or Temple Way either.

Out of Bristol, the group people need to worry about is actually the DfT themselves. Their 2013 traffic model predicted a fall in miles cycled after 2015, the data they've published appears aligned with this, so helps congratulate their modelling team on their skills, perhaps promoting them to the DEFRA Flood Modelling project. Which is why the cycling troublemakers need to be pushing back on this, not just asking for the council to collect better data on routes such as the BBRP, suspension bridge, Create Bridge crossing (oh, wait, BRT2 killed that), Prince St Bridge (oh, wait, BRT broke that), the Chocolate Path (oh, wait, BRT2 again), but maybe the castle path, farm pub path, eastville park path, and up through Stoke Park to UWE, etc. And then advocate the DfT to include such data in their modelling of urban use. And include walking too. Because that's a legitimate form of transport and is as much at risk of neglect as the cycling.

At this point, the locals who sneer at Bristol traffic for being car-hating extremists will accuse of us discounting data we don't like, just as they themselves do with all climate change research that brings bad news, models that predict warmer winters with more floods.

For those people, know that we slagged off the survey the moment we encountered it in progress.

This is it: four people on a footbridge overlooking the M32. We faulted it at the time for being an inadequate way of measuring car traffic in a modern city. It is only this week that we discover that one of the people sitting there with a little "clicker" was waiting for cyclists and presumably getting bored at the inaction.

 

Four people sitting on a footbridge, counting cars on one single weekday in a year. And using that for the traffic statistics and future predictions of Bristol's road needs? That is not modern "data science". In fact, it's more of a practical A-level project —though even there you could do more with a camera and at-leisure replay.

Manually counting one morning in 365 just doesn't produce valid data. Was it a weekday? Which day? Was it a schoolday? Or was it half term with reduced traffic counts? Was it raining? Such experiments may have been a viable strategy in 1963, maybe even 1974 with the M32 open and three Austin Allegros an hour driving down the "Bristol Parkway" to see the shopping wonder that was 1970s Broadmead.

Nowadays, it's a historical relic of a process, no doubt hooked up to a traffic model that considers pedestrians at a junction "a cost", values cyclists as being worthless (OK, that still holds), and considers time in a traffic jam is as cost, rather than a valued quiet texting time between the office and the hell of parental responsibilities.

If you want modern data, throw the hi-viz tops off the footbridge, use the now-rolled out ANPR camera arrays to log vehicle movements, and start to do some decent analysis of the data beyond just "how many"

1. Split by vehicle type and time of day. Do vans come in earlier or later?
2. What fraction of the traffic is in-city vs "Greater Avon" vs out of Town?
3. How many pass out the city on a different route shortly after entering it?
4. When do people commute in each direction? Is it a simple 9-5? How many are 9:30 to 4:30, vs. 08:00 to 18:30? And does that vary from direction into town?
5. Do vehicles coming into town on the M32 return the same way? Or do they take a different route? (Not as unusual as you think; from city to N. Fringe, M32 after 09:00 is fast, but for a return between 17:00 and 18:30, Filton Ave has more predictability).
6. There's apparently a rise in vans. How many are for internet-shopping deliveries vs. independent locals vs. service organisations?
7. How many people commute from Wales? By motorbike? (it's a free bridge crossing, see).
8. During school half terms, do many commuters change their driving schedule and/or route?
9. Do red cars go faster? This'd be a really interesting question to answer, something you could do today by combining the M5 ANPR dataset with one of vehicle make/model/colour. It's not enough to measure the ratio of red to other colours, you need to compensate for the fleet, to make it more "do red Mark IV Vauxhall Astras go faster than other colours"?

Ignoring the final question, which is more of social commentary than anything else, the other questions all directly define the motor vehicle use that's made of the city's road infrastructure. Information that could be used in some way, not just for better DfT modelling, but for moving traffic understanding beyond simple anecdotes.

Transport for London have a data team; they do churn through the oystercards, the C-zone stats: they do understand some of the use of the city? Not Bristol —and clearly, not the Department of Transport, who are still shaping the country's transport infrastructure based on four people and a clipboard.

[footnote: that cover is from a 4th edition A-Z. Look at its rendering of the inner-ring road and see if you spot what's changed?]

Press, politicians and 100 year floods

This post covers basic probability theory.


The media and the politicians seem to be completely confused by the concept of flood frequency, particularly in the abuse of the concept of "a hundred year flood".

The use of that term creats the misguided idea that you get such a flood every hundred years, and that having had one a few years ago, you aren't going to see another one for nearly a century.

This is shows a complete misunderstanding of statistics and probability. Which for the people being evacuated from their houses you can partly understand —you can't expect them all to have studied maths to A-level or remembered the details. What is wrong is that the press keeps using the same term, along with "20 year flood", misleading the people. And the politicians, they are equally a bunch of Oxbridge PPE-graduates who don't have a single cartesian coordinate between them —but should at least have those science advisors to explain the basics. FFS, there is the whole "Royal Society" which is meant to explain science to royalty, and, given we still live in a feudal state, the crown's ministers, Cameron included.


A "hundred year flood" really means a "1% chance per year flood". Assuming that the effects of the previous year's weather has no bearing on its successors, the probability of having a 1% flood the year after a 1% flood is, wait for it: 1%. The probability of having one in the five years after is, wait for it: five percent. And in 15 years, it's 15%. So the fact that York is currently underwater for the first time since 2000, means that the the two-flood-in-15-year-event, which had ~15% probability, has occurred. Which is not impossible, even for a "hundred year event". In fact, when you start counting since, say, 1995, you are looking at the probability of two 1% floods happening in a 20 year period —which is actually 20%: 1 in 5.

For the curious, assuming that the flood events are entirely independent, it'd follow a Poisson Distribution

Except, certainly within a single winter, we know the events are not independent —if the ground is saturated from previous rainfall, the rivers bloated from previous storms, then the probability of another storm triggering a flood is higher. If the land is already full of water, then it only takes a little bit more to tip things over the edge.


That "hundred year flood" really means, then:

The meteorologists' model of rainfall over a single winter, of the volume and frequency of rainfall, predicts the probability of flood of a specific volume occurring at 1%.


The probability of  a 1% flood re-occuring may follow a poission distribution —and hence the likelihood of multiple floods happening within a few decades is actually quite high.

Floods do appear to be happening more often than even a Poission distribution would apply, so what does that mean?

Some hypotheses spring to mind

1. The rainfall model is correct and we've simply had the misfortune to have a rare-but-not-impossible series of storms.
2. The rainfall model is correct, but the estimates of probability of storms within a season are wrong —that is, bad historical data created optimistic estimates.
3. Year-on-year flood events are not independent.
4. Changes in the terrain: farming differences, the building of houses on flood plains, etc, changed the runoff of the system, so amplifying the effect of rain
5. The rainfall model is in fact wrong due to failures such as the failure to consider the impact of global warming on the evaporation of water, the actions and position of the gulf stream, and/or the fact that with warmer air, it falls more as a a liquid ("rain"), than in a crystalline form ("snow" and "hail").
6. There was a more pessimistic (i.e. accurate) estimate of rainfall, but managerial or political pressure discounted it in favour of one which played down the risks, reducing the requirements and cost of flood defences, and obviated the need to press for changes in the agriculture system within the catchment area

Note also that these hypotheses are not exclusionary. The model could have failed to consider global warming, been based on bad historical data, and not planned ahead for the conversion of flood plains into suburban housing estates —then been downplayed by politicians who disagreed with the answers.. Which, when you think about it, is entirely possible.

That's why the term "hundred year flood" is so bogus. More accurate is "a 1% flood based on a broken or pre-global warming model with incomplete data without considering urban sprawl, and probably downplayed for political reasons". Using the term "100 year flood" does nothing but create unrealistic expectations that the floods aren't going to re-occur, year-on-year.


Someone in the press could look at the model, the data, the politics and determine what's actually happened, then try and explain it in a way which doesn't use terms like "hundred year flood". Because the science is there, the maths is there —and someone needs to hold the politicians and the scientists to account.

[These photos are all from Jan 4, 2014, showing the Avon fairly close to breaking its banks. Avon Crescent was actually underwater in winter 1990

BRS: Lessons from PDX

The Bristol Traffic team has actually been on a council-funded trip round the world to see what ideas we could adopt in the city to make it more successful. Finally, after months of first class travel and hotels, we have found it -in Portland Airport.

Portland is a relatively small city in the US; less population than, say, Glasgow —and doesn't actually merit an acronym or nickname the way, say 'NYC, LA, Vegas" and others do. Instead it tends to adopt the initials of its airport, PDX. Bristol is similar, except most people in the UK don't know the initials for Bristol International Airport, BRS. Well, use it enough and maybe they'll learn.

Anyway, the first thing you see thing when you get off your plane in PDX is the signs towards some bicycle assembly area. THIS IS NOT WHAT WE ARE ADVOCATING.



A bike assembly area in BRS would only go in if the airport could charge cyclists for using it —and they could only do that by making it illegal to assemble your bicycle near the airport. They'd probably just make it illegal to cycle to it, just as LHR have done by converting the cycle tunnel to road traffic and fining anyone who cycles down it.

No, what's of interest to us is the sign 180 degrees behind the camera here, the one at airport security

Please be advised recreational marijuana is not permitted on flights travelling outside of Oregon.

That's a bit late to see that sign; there isn't one when you load a 14 kg rucksack in as hold luggage, and it is clearly one with implications. If they have to have a sign saying "you can't fly outside of Oregon with weed", then by implication "if you are flying within the state —you can". And they are right.

It is now legal to grow 4 ganja plants of your own: provided you live more than 1000 yards from a school. Imagine that —people would be looking at the catchment area maps of the city to make sure they weren't living near a school; it would turn the current game on its head. House prices would actually go down the closer you were to a school.

It even complicates the university: should their agriculture department start projects to advise farmers on the growing of industrial scale marijuana? Some proposals are on hold because it conflicts with federal funding, and despite the enthusiasm of graduate students to study for a PhD in Marijuana Agriculture, the existing farmers have many years of experience growing weed. All that is happening now is the farmers can do it in public and pay income tax.

Because that's where things are going: industrial scale farming for selling in California and Seattle. It's now got a new problem for the city: how to manage the planning permissions for where to grow and process this "new" commercial product.



It's actually been an open secret in the state that weed was the big rural earner with the demise of logging; it battled with Intel x86 parts for maximum income and profit margins —it just wasn't something that could be discussed publicly. And, unlike CPU foundries, it's something that those towns whose livelihoods had been destroyed by the end of logging could take up, more reliable income than tourism, and generally a wholesome product people could enjoy,

Imagine if Bristol legalised the recreational use of ganja, the growing of plants, and in N. Somerset, full scale agriculture.

It would transform the city!

We would become the powerhouse of the south west, one to rival London! We'd get visitors from all over the country to spend a weekend —and Weston super Mare would become Britain's most popular summer holiday destination.

It would also finally end the gulf between the city and the countryside. The North Somerset Agricultural Show would be transformed from somewhere where range rover owners from near the A370 could turn up and talk about their "crops" to one where range rover owners from near Montpelier could turn up and talk about their "crops" —and the Somerset farmers would listen intently, offer to buy some of the product, then even offer the city folk some paid consultancy.

As the ganja industry grew, North Somerset would move beyond a dormitory county for the city, to one where people would commute too from the inner city, to help "work the farms". Oh, and then there's the pick-your-own harvesting event, which would be a national festival.

And of course all this will bring in money: the tax from the plants, the income tax from the staff, staff who will be earning more than minimum wage as they bring the skills acquired over the years to full use. All those visitors, those tourist events -more money, enough for Weston to move beyond Dismaland as a national tourism event. And all the town will be outside on a sunny summer evening, lighting up in the parks, turning up the sounds of Bristol music, and getting stoned of our heads.

How about it then, prospective candidates for Bristol Mayor? Who is going to look at the lessons from Portland, Colorado, Seattle —and campaign on a "legalised marijuana industry for the greater bristol area"?