Stopping distance experiments part 1

The Charlie Allinston case has not only raised the issue that fixed wheel, chain-only-braking bikes seem unsuited for the urban environment, but that cyclists themselves are criminals.

This was shown by a Met office video demonstrating how a mountain bike could stop in three metres, while a fixed wheel bike took 12 metres. Which, from the public video, looks pretty dubious.

Ignoring the thinking distance aspect of the problem (to be covered another time), neither of those bikes appear to be doing 18 mph. Martin Porter asserts that with a maximum deceleration force of a bike of 0.3g before the rider goes over the front bars, any bike is slower to decelerate than a car (max force 0.5g). We don't know the exact values. What we do know from experience is

• It's the front brake which does most of the conversion of kinetic energy into heat
• As you brake, you go forwards
• The back wheel, without weight, goes into a skid
• And it always seems to happen faster on tyres with less contact area (narrow tyres, knobbly mountain bike tyres on tarmac, ...)

Mountain bikers will know that to avoid going over the bars on a hard brake or steep descent means sticking your bum out the back, which is partly why dropper posts are so popular: lower C of G, better control on the descent.

Returning to the Allinston case, the police stated that Charlie had 6.5m to stop, and that because a mountain bike could have stopped in 3, his removal of the front brake made him culpable. But: they haven't show the actual CCTV of of the collision, so we don't know exactly what happened

What we can do though, is do the experiment proposed by the People's Cycling Front of South Gloucestershire: try to stop from 18 mph in under two car lengths.

Here then is our summary:

1. an experienced road and mountain biker cannot stop a road bike with touring tyres in the distance of two parked cars and a 1m gap between them. 
2. You can bring the speed down to about 6.5-7.5 mph (update: see the bottom of the post)

Equipment: a team road bike, "roadkill", purchased for $800 in 2000 somewhere in Oregon, a US state which is now charging people a tax for doing so.

• Tyres: Continental Top Contact 700x28 touring tyres, tyres which focus on all weather control and braking over rolling resistance and speed. That is: their braking should be as good as you can expect from any road tyre of a similar diameter.
• brakes: front and rear Shimano 105 rim brakes (from 2000), cables redone 24 months ago, pads Shimano 105/Dura-ace/Ultegra inserts
• Wheels: Mavic rims, hope hubs, again 24 months old and no rim wear.
• Garmin bike computer to determine speed from the GPS constellation and display speed as part of preparation for braking

Overall then: the brakes and tyres aren't going to degrade performance compared to any other road bikes with rim brakes.

Experiment:

1. Flat, traffic free road with enough visibility of the southern sky that GPS signal will work (Trivia: US Navstar satellites never orbit  > 54 degrees north or south, so above the lake district getting a signal is harder; for Galileo details ask one of our local engineers)
2. Two family cars, a "normal" gap between them (nobody had problems fitting today).
3. Turn on the Garmin to record speeds.
4. From a distance down the road, bring bike up to 18 mph & then coast briefly.
5. As you reach the front of the first car, brake as hard as you can safely, arse out the back and down as learned over the years on the MTB.
6. At end of the two car lengths, see what your exit speed is.
7. Repeat a few times.

Not the most rigorous, but with speed numbers coming from 31 orbiting atomic clocks it's as good on the flat as anything else.

Results

1. Getting to 18 mph on the flat does actually require effort, if attempted over a short distance. (This may make cyclists reluctant to shed that speed)
2. Even with warning and planning, you can't stop a bike in 2.5 car lengths from 18 mph
3. You can get down to 6.5-7.5 mph

Conclusions

1. If the met police video released to the media was the one used in court, then the qualify of the experiment has to be contested.
2. As well as the choice of the reference "not a fixie bike" as a mountain/hybrid bike with what appears to be wide surface area road tyres, its not clear that they are doing 18 mph when they get to the marker points where deceleration is meant to commence.
3. If someone else can stop from 18 mph to 0 mph in 3 metres, we'd love to see it.
4. Given warning, you can get to 6-7 mph, which may lead to reduce risk/scope of injury.
5. Given that cycle/pedestrian collisions at what for on road speeds are "low", we shouldn't be doing any cycle-paint-on-pavement bike paths, as they are engineering in danger

It'd be nice to see the logs of the police instrumentation data from their experiments. In fact, its something a defence lawyer should have been demanding: "show us the hard data"

Someone should run Bristol Bike Week event "can you stop in 6.5 metres with and without advance warning", to see what other people can do.

2017-09-11 Update : there's a flaw in the experiment: the measured exit speed is inevitably going to overestimate the actual one on any attempt to decellerate in a few metres.

Velocity (Speed) is distance/time: (d1 - d0) / t

But: what is the sampling interval of bike speedos (GPS and on-wheel?).

1. Not clear from GPS (though looking at the GPX file would probably show it), but 
2. on a 700x28 wheel the circumference is ~2.1 metres. 
3. Therefore the magnet on the wheel will only send packet to the bike computer every 2.1m of travel. 
4. Therefore the minimum distance which can be used to measure velocity is 2.1m. 
5. 18 mph is ~29 kmh
6. which is ~8 m/s
7. If you are trying to come to a halt  from 8 m/s n 6-8 metres then that's only four revolutions of the wheel, so every revolution will have to include a lot of deceleration: 
8. Assuming constant deceleration you are going have  to enter that final wheel rotation in travelling 1/4 of your entry velocity
9. so: it's inevitable that the distance travelled in that final rotation is going to be "something" between the entry velocity and the exit one
10. which is what the bike computer will end up displaying: it will overestimate the actual value

All we can really say is "the bike was still moving 10 m after attempting to decelerate from 8 m/s to 0 m/s"

How to do it better? Well:

1. you could let go of the brakes after crossing your chosen endpoint, coast for a few wheel lengths and so give the computer a constant velocity to measure. 
2. with the sub-cm resolution promised by Galileo's premium channels and a receiver set to sample many times a second, you could build a fully accurate model of decleration
3. you do rigorously measure the total distance travelled, assume constant deceleration over the distance and then work backwards from there to infer your velocity at the 6.5 metre mark

Anyway, it's mostly moot due to the thinking time even before you reach for the brake levers. Followup on that in the week, this time with video data. Essentially: you don't react fast enough.

WN15UKX beats the school run queues

It's term time in the city, a so the morning rush hour is worse, and we've seen the return of the mid-afternoon one, seen here.

In order to get anywhere, you need "flexible and imaginative solutions" as our Brexit negotiators say.


Here the driver of WN15UKX finds it impossible to make progress without risking their wing mirrors.

Residents of the inner city know that having wing mirrors is a sign of weakness, but here the driver of WN15 UKX isn't going to let the fact they value their bodywork slow them down. Instead, a neat little nip up onto the pavement, a quick sprint at 14 mph down the pavement and they are on their way. Maybe he was late for child pickup. Because you wouldn't want your child to walk home: it isn't safe, not even on the pavements.

Its drivers like this which give us selfish wanker BMW owners a bad reputation.

The Centre: East to West: From Mediocre to Dangerous

Following on from our trip across The Centre from West to East, here is the west to east experience.

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Heading up Queen Charlotte Street from Queens Square, we first get to see a near-collision between a deliveroo rider and a small child running out from the side. It's possible to conclude the rider doesn't have a small child, or they'd have known that trying to control one is futile: asking the parent to do so even more so. "Fuck off you wanker" is the correct response here.

Then it's left onto the half-of-Baldwin Street path. A lot of people accuse Ferguson of following some anti-car, pro bicycle policy. Well, this is the main legacy of his of his reign from a cycling perspective. London also had a mayor prepared to sacrifice the country in his ambition to become PM.

The Baldwin Street path starts of as a reference example of what modern thinking on segregated cycle routes should be: not just a safe separation from cars, but a clearly delineated separation from people on foot, the bikes not having to weave between people -better for all.

It then switches to being a reference example of what you expect to see in Bristol: the bike path suddenly gives up in order to have some car parking, before ending up at some lights. Here the other tax-dodger decides not to stop for the lights, so proving that we do show such events when they happen. Its notable that actually he had less to worry about across the junction than our reporter, what with the past-the-lights taxi and the van swerving over to pick up a mate.

On to Baldwin Street, and what do we see?

• An explicitly cut out path to the lights +10
• Some lights: 0
• No clear indication of which bits of the lights your bike should go to: -10
• Lights green when the road going straight on: +10
• A central plaza where there is no indication whatsoever of where you are meant to go to cycle across to the other side; -10
• Another set of lights with no clear cues as to which side a bike should be on: -10
• The lights now red, so adding a delay of ten seconds: -5
• Roadworks in the middle so not actually proving any way to cycle further: -20
• Some pedestrian lights to wait for and use: +5
• Signs of a bike path possibly appearing by the hippodrome: +10
• The bike path not being ready to use:  -5
• The need to execute (badly) a bunny-hop to get your bike up the kerb *where the road to Colston-the-Slaver-Hill used to be*-10
• Another bit of utterly undelineated bike path: -10
• The utterly undelinated bike path now abandoning you to a road where nobody expects bikes to come from: -20

Overall then: 35 points of good,  -25 points of work-in-progress points (the chaos, the bunny hop, the bike path. And -60 points of fundamental structural flaws. A mishmash of walk/cycle routes with artistic tiles providing now cues as to where a bike should go, so hard-coding conflict into the centre at the cost of some premium tiling.

This was done by someone who wants "an urban realm" design, despite the fact they've just added a new road and bus line through the heart of the area, someone who doesn't actually want bikes there and finds the idea of having a functional way to get across by bike unsightly. It is, to use a technical term, "bollocks".

the worst part is probably the approach to Colston Hill. Until recently, there was a road entrance there. All they had to add was a sign and some build out to narrow the entrance. Everything else was in place. Except they spent money on adding a new pavement and some tiles, and in doing so removed the option of a safe exit. Now all private vehicles on that road will be entering or exiting Pipe Lane: a road where the road signage has been changed so that Colston Street has lost the right of way it used to have. This is now dangerous.

Don't worry Richard Eddy: there's still Colston Mini Mart

Cllr Richard Eddy is apparently refusing to visit Colston Hall, once it's no longer named after someone who'd be on trial for Crimes against Humanity were they to attempt the same business today.



Because yes, it's named after Bristol's most important slave trader, and it's something the city should recognise is an affront to the rest of the country. Naming a prestigious building after a slaver may have been considered socially acceptable in the Victorian era, but we've moved on: time for the city to. That includes the two Colston Schools, the various roads, an ugly 1970s tower block and other bloodstains round the city.

What the renaming has shown up is how controversial the topic still is: from polls in the evening post, to articles in the "foreign-interference in the UK election national press", condemning "political correctness" for this historical revisionism. Well, yes, celebrating slavery is considered "politically incorrect" these days.

It's interesting what it's thrown up through, not just the view of it as a left-wing/right-wing split, but it can also be seen as a Bristolian vs "newcomer" split, with "Bristolian, born and bred" being a code-phrase for "not from London". Well, it's easy for people to feel defensive, but really changing the name of the hall isn't an attack on Bristol, it's moving the city on. Or, as The Bristolian notes: nobody has ever cared about what happens to parts of the city that aren't associated with it rulers, be it schools across the city, the river the M32 was built over, or any bit of greenery that doesn't have the word "Clifton" in its title or address. For people who want to know a bit more about these topics, consider the Bristol Radical History group.

What about Richard Eddy? Is he going to suddenly discover that alongside the history of Bristol's elite, there's the history of Bristol's residents, from the miners of Bedminster to the striking bus drivers of 1960s St Pauls? Unlikely. Instead he's just chosen to be ever excluded from the building-formerly-known-as-Colston-Hall.

We have some good news here: Colston Mini Mart still stands strong against this wave of political correctness

People don't appreciate this, but Colston Mini Mart has an important role to play in the city. It is the nearest place to the Bristol Heart Institute where you can buy cigarettes. You don't appreciate this until you're stuck in there for a week, the same wrist band giving you a wifi password marking you out as someone the door staff won't let out. You're reduced to texting friends and family to visit, bringing up with them a double latte from Costa and a pack of silk cuts. Then you can sneak out after hours onto the balcony and have a quick cigarette while sharing anecdotes of heart bypasses. Nothing to smoke and the remains of your life may be longer, but it will be more painful.



That's what we all have to look forward too. All that we get to choose is: do we get anything from the Colston Mini Mark on the way out. Here then, Richard Eddy will be able to go out with the rest of the city.

Metrobus Enhanced Centre: west to east

Apparently the Metrobus project will bring wonderful cycling facilities to the city.

We await this with curiosity.

We do know that

• right now there is nothing
• there is nothing on the travelwest web site about how to get across alive on a bicycle
• the travelwest web site can't even get their "out of baldwin street for cars" map right.

Overall not a good sign.

Historically, the crossing which is blocked was a walk/cycle crossing where you could cycle randomly around until you made it over. This never actually glued up very well with baldwin street, on account of the railings and the oncoming traffic; you'd have to head over to the bit of the centre which was bus lane only, cycle over the ped crossings there, or go down the bus & bike bit of road the bus drivers felt were theirs. Or you stay on the ped/cycle inner bit, zig zag through people and children, creating the impression that cyclists were tax dodging criminals who cycled where they shouldn't. Yes, the evening post did an article on that topic a very long time ago.


So, we sent our expendable tax dodger to go west-east across the centre to see how things are today


Pretty awful at the start, mediocre in the middle, and just as bad as before at the end.

Awful at the start: well, what do you do? No signs, just a closed off crossing. Our tax dodger eventually went for the coned off lane in the middle and made their way to the new bit of the centre.


Mediocre at the middle. The one thing the Baldwin Street path gets right is: clearly delineated as a bike path. Tax dodgers stay on it, people don't walk down the middle (Except on friday nights, obviously), and people on the pavement don't have to worry about cyclists weaving through them because there's a f-obvious bike lane to use instead.

The new design has some faint tiles on the ground which may mean its a bike lane. Hard to tell. They don't currently join up with anything.

There's some new lights, possibly split into bike & ped, but with no cues, everyone just spread out. Watch out for the person nearly being hit by the turning bus: bit of a design flaw there, even if that's where the cyclists are meant to be.

Finally, at the end, just as bad as before. It does look like there might be some link off to the left, but again, it's been made out of artisanal tiles rather than useful roadbuilding materials, so who knows. You can avoid worrying about this by getting onto the bus zone, coming off it to get towards the Arnolfini.


Once you've actually crossed the centre, you can get down to the prince st bridge (walking), then on to bedminster. Why? Motaman is having a closing down sale! Bedminster's main shopping destination is being shut down as the building is being turned into flats! Gentrification is coming to Bemmy and it's not good.

Pavements cause pollution.

Known saboteur Redvee has a video up showing the taxi WR54KZX forced to drive on the pavement to turn left into Bridewell Street.



We say forced, as this is clearly due to the Metrobus roadworks going on further ahead on the road. Before Metrobus there were never any queues on the roads leading to the Centre, and so no need for taxis to drive on pavements in order to stop this city grinding to a halt. And, as this is a 2004 EURO3 Diesel taxi, the pollution from its engine is awful, even by the standards of the VW test rigging team. By driving up on the pavement, the Taxi reduced the amount of pollution the city experiences. This is why pavements cause pollution. No pavements: more lanes. No pavements: fewer people walking, no need for zebra crossings or pedestrian phases in lights. We must do more in our city to discourage walking —even more than the Metrobus works team are already doing for us.

One thing to consider though: the taxi did go up the blind spot of that bus. If the bus had turned left the taxi and its passengers could have been crushed.


We propose that every bus and lorry in the city should have a sign warning taxis not to drive up the inside of them to prevent such a calamity happening in future

The Evening Post discovers the Bristol Traffic Photo Portfolio

We don't do much coverage of the Evening Post these days, primarily because we've given up reading it. Eventually you get tired of its whiningly repetitive stance against resident parking and 20 mph zones, portraying them as a war on motorists, the death of the cities, a tax on Bristolians, etc. etc. The one thing we never saw was anything praising how the yellow lines have made paveparking and "optimistic corner parking" illegal —and how this was making inner Bristol a nicer place to walk.

Because the bits of the city with RPZ markings have had their pavements restored, and are now easier to walk round with a pushchair those areas still saying "RPZ isn't needed here", such as, say, St Andrews, where the contrast between that and adjacent Montpelier is now significant.

But no, no coverage of that in Evening Post articles, something we criticised it for in the past in a post looking at the history of pavements, parking and "walking opportunities" along Richmond Road, notable for nowhere to walk but the road and being an awful road to drive up or down: cars almost touching on both sides, nowhere to pass an oncoming cyclist, let alone oncoming car. With the RPZ rollout it became not only better to walk and cycle, it became driveable.

From the sole printed press news source in the city: silence.

It's interesting to discover then, that the paper has now moved on from "20 mph will kill our city" to "pavement parking is epidemic" and "is pavement parking getting worse?" The latter is quite amusing as we've been covering this issue for coming on a decade, and the main reason we cut back on coverage was that the RPZ reduced it so much that life was boring. It was not "epidemic", it is "endemic": so widespread and ongoing it barely merits a mention.

The BEP hasn't picked up on that, instead it's filled the paper with various photos of what to us look like everyday parking scenes in the bits of the city that aren't RP-Zoned. If you find it shocking, you need to go for a walk. Anyway, they had the pics up, no doubt shocking those people who don't walk further than the car they've parked on the pavement outside their home. For us, all too familiar. Very much all too familiar. In fact, one which was so familiar we recognised it as one of our own photos




This photo originally appeard in a post denouncing the car S589JDG for being parked on the specific bit of pavement where Richmond Road narrows —and in doing so, stopping cars and vans getting down the hill. That was the reason it had earned a note criticising its parking: not for paveparking, but for paveparking in a way inconsiderate of other drivers.

That photo was published in 2013, republished in an article 2015, where we used it as one of the "before/after" articles on the RPZ changes, an article which explicitly called out the BEP for its failure to cover the benefits of RPZs for pedestrians.

The photo the Evening Post printed was taken from an article criticising the Evening Post's coverage of pavement parking and RPZs.

Amusing as it is, it is still a copyright infringement.

We have a non-normative policy towards reuse of our images and videos.

The Bristolian: unlimited rights, no permission needed.

Everyone else: ask first

1. If the requester is one of: Daily Mail, Sun, Telegraph, tell them to fuck off.
2. If the requester is any other press org, we'd check with the original submitter, probably give approval with credit due us and that original submitter. (if the original author refused, that'd be passed back too)
3. Videos: Link/embed them without any restrictions (obviously), but no to use in some video remake unless its more than just some branding exercise. And again, the Daily Mail can fuck off.

Now what about publication without getting permission?

1. If it was timely news, again, no problem.
2. If it was some photo from the archives, well that's a different matter. Any failure to check there has to be be a due diligence failure or a wilful disregard of our property.

The last time this happened, we extracted a donation to the Bristol Cycling Campaign. Someone had clearly just googled for an image "car parked on zebra crossing", and copied the photo without bothering to question image licensing T&Cs.

What about now?

We see two ways forward without resorting to the legal system, DMCA copyright takedowns, etc.

Option One: a modest donation —say £250— to the Bristol Cycling Campaign. 

Easy all round, it'd make upfor publish an article denouncing cyclists for cycling over a shared use bridge designed for walking and cycling on. We'd get some good coverage of the fact that the BEP was now supporting cycling campaigners in the city.

Option two: an in depth review how the RPZ makes walking in Bristol better.

We to collaborate on an article looking at richmond road's pavement parking over time, where the van-passing incident was nearly one of the bad examples. Here we could not only provide photos from our archives, we could approach the Montpelier resident forced to walk her kids home from school down the middle of the road. She could not only cover the experience of a parent in the "before" period, but her experience now that the RPZ has been rolled out. Maybe she could even talk about the impact of the RPZ on driving round the area.

Seems a reasonable choice to us. Fund the cycling campaign after a week of denouncing cyclists for going on a bridge built for them, or get an opportunity to work on a fascinating article looking at how a inner city parental school dropoff experience has been transformed for the better by the RPZ rollout.

Personally, we'd like the article —it would be a good follow up to the previous ones, and we don't want the author of those articles to feel chastised for writing the first articles we've ever seen to criticise paveparking. We'd even help with the content.

Over to you, Team Evening Post

Proposed: tax vehicles based on their width

A quick trip through the capital of 4x4s that never see mud in our city, Clifton, makes it clear that even here we don't have space for such fat vehicles. Even the parked ones like that silver mercedes is wider than the parking bay -and that's with the bonus wide Clifton bays.



It really becomes clear following the BMW X5 across the suspension bridge. The thing is simply too wide. Why is it so fat? It's to compensate for the fact that it's centre of gravity is too high on account of the raised suspension: this is a land-barge which would topple over on bends otherwise, as Ford Explorers turned out to do. The X5 is so fat that when it meets and oncoming Landrover Discovery, they have to slow down to negotiate passing each other.

In other bits of the city, in everyday cars, drivers would go past each other without even looking up from their
phones. Yet all it takes is one or two selfish drivers thinking "hey! an SUV would be cool!" and our city is brought to its knees.

Hence our proposal: make the VED of a vehicle proportional to its weight and width. The weight: the maintenance cost of our roads. The width: how much they inconvenience everyone else.

Without this, there will be no way to stop this plague of overweight barges on our roads.

Bristol Post: cut and paste journalism? Share the data

There is one news outlet in the city whose coverage is insightful, cuts to the core of the city's problems and of whom every article is worth a read.

Yes, we refer to The Bristolian. Being ad-free there is no need for central-HQ agendas to be pushed; no need to try and generate click-bait content at the lowest cost per article, and so instead they can write independent content.

There is also another news outlet in the city, The Bristol Evening Post, which is part of The Trinity Group, as is the

We've been avoiding covering the Bristol Evening Post since it's "witty" Bikes and Lorries April 1 2015 article. Every link we make to a low-value web site devalues our own rating in google's PageRank algorithm, and since most of their coverage is bollocks there's no real point.

However, today it's time to link to an article, albeit through a nofollow marker: Revealed: The number of cyclists involved in crashes while undertaking other vehicles, covering the 5-6 cyclists hit a year by going to the left of cars in those little painted bits of bollocks on the road.

This turns out to be a seminal piece of work

1. Because it appears in[Cox17], Tara Cox, Revealed: Hotspots in Cambridge for accidents where cyclists undertake other vehicles, Trinity Group Cambridge News , 2017, where 4-5 cyclists are injured/year.
2. And in [Grant17] Rob Grant 2017, Dozens of cyclists have been involved in collisions while undertaking, new figures show, of the Manchester Evening news, where the collision rate is 11/year, no variance/stddev supplied
3. and [Grant17a], Rob Grant, How many Birmingham cyclists are involved in accidents while undertaking, Birmingham Mail,  2017. Here the collision rate is "an average of 8/year", again, without any variance.

As a news outlet that believe in weakly-defensible data to back up all our ill informed opinions, we are always pleased to see our press outlets following our strategy of "have an opinion, grab some meaningless statistic and then turn into an article defending our prejudices. Which as our detractors will point out, we do all too often.

But we do like to see that weakly-defensible data. Indeed, we're happy to critique the DfT's data gathering processes as a relic of the twentieth century, and suggest modern, big data alternatives.

Which is why, given the broad covering of this seminal piece of work, we'd really like to see the data.

Preferably

1. The cleaned up DfT data, either in the painfully generic CSV format, or something more efficient and with tighter typing, like Apache Avro.
2. The data science notebook used to take the data and produce the numbers which got published. A Jupyter Notebook pushed to github would be fine.

Reproducible analysis of the results of an experiment is something which is becoming a big issue in science: given the same data, can different scientists come up with the same answers. Publishing the data and the analysis code is the foundation to this.

At least this dataset is going to be small, it's not like the datasets lurking in CERN CASTOR , or worse, the feed expected to come off the Square Kilometre Array, a feed that has everyone fucking scared right now. 

So to the Evening Post, as one datascience organisation to another,: if you are going to write articles on traffic issues in the city,  even if they are copied and pasted from the same piece of tier-2 prose seen in Manchester, Birmingham and Cambridge: show us the data, or STFU.

A letter to Smiths of Gloucestershire, re the blind overtake of their van VE08NKX

Hello

I'm the cyclist the driver of your van VE08NKX chose to overtake on a blind corner on Belmont Hill, Somerset, at 15:46 on 25 November.

I'm the cyclist who shouted a warning to your driver that there was an oncoming car —a warning he chose to ignore:

And I'm the cyclist who videoed your van nearly hitting the oncoming car.


That car braked to avoid a collision, incidentally, and we both waved an acknowledgement to each other of how close it had been.

I've not got in touch before; I was waiting to see how Avon and Somerset Police were going to respond to the complaint that I'd filed online with them. As the time limit for them to file a Notice of Impending Prosecution has expired and they are yet to get in touch, the answer is: nothing.

Your driver has to consider themselves lucky to have not only avoided a head-on collision with an oncoming vehicle, but to avoid any form of punishment from the police for nearly doing so. That is despite the irrefutable video evidence showing them ignoring a shouted warning and overtaking where they had no visibility. If A&S Police were to adopt the prosecute-on-video-evidence policy which the Central Midlands Police are now operating, they would now be facing a choice between prosecution to Dangerous Driving or pleading guilty to the lesser offence of Careless Driving.

As it is: no prosecution, no pleading, no penalty, no points on their license, and no insurance premium.

That fact reflects as badly on our local police as it does on your employee.

Given the police's utter inaction, you can report to your driver that this particular near-crash won't result in any prosecution.

However, you do need to consider your brand tainted. It's clear from your website that you take site safety as seriously as it needs to be —but it's also clear from the video that your staff are treating off site safety with utter disdain. This driver endangered other road users in a van with your business name and telephone number painted on three sides of the vehicle, making identifying this employer trivial. The more incidents like this, the more videos of your drivers will go online, the more that safety theme gets devalued.

Please: tell your driver that in a world of helmet cameras and dashcams —the era of "getting away" with dangerous driving is over. If they drive dangerously in their free time, it is only the lives of themselves and others and their own driving license which they endanger. When they do it in company vehicles, it is your vehicles they are also threatening, your insurance premiums they are risking, and your brand that they are destroying,

The Psychology of Overtaking and VE08NXK

There is surprisingly little literature available online on the topic of The Psychology of Overtaking.

One paper you can find dates from 1997, Overtaking Road-accidents: Differences in Manoeuvre as a Function of Driver Age, by Clarke et al, of Nottingham University

Without going into the details, in particular questioning whether there's enough information on the general population of drivers and overtakers to reach conclusions about age, it does contain a good introductory summary of past work.

One quote in particular stands out

Wilson and Greensmith (1983) returned to the theme of the ‘‘inertial driver’’ in their multivariate analysis of drivers’ accident status in relation to observed driving patterns, gender and exposure. They report that accident-involved drivers drive more quickly ‘‘...and move around continually (especially overtaking) in traffic’’. The typical inertial driver differs from his high-exposure accident-free counterpart, in that he seems unwilling to change speeds in response to conditions by using gear changes, deceleration or braking.

This is interesting, as it does document a common behaviour you encounter on a bike: the driver willing to endanger themselves and others rather than tap on the brakes.

Here is a classic example on Belmont Hill, N. Somerset




Although it's a sharp bend, the gradient of the hill means that you can see oncoming traffic, especially when they have their lights on in the late afternoon. Look up to the top right of the picture and you can see a car coming down the hill. Bear in mind, it is still daylight, there may be an unlit vehicle or cyclist, and they would not be visible.

The presence of the car hasn't stopped the van VE08NXK from choosing to overtake precisely at the corner, going round the bend on completely the wrong side of the road. Either they hadn't looked or they didn't care. The driver coming down the hill was distinctly unhappy.

It would be really interesting to see what the reasoning of the driver was here. We cannot but suspect that it would be a "the cyclist forced me to make a dangerous overtake" claim, when really it was a "I was unwilling to adjust my speed in any way". Maybe we shall find out, having just reported them to A&S police as part of "Grass a Driver week".

Grass a driver week: MK59USB, texting across a junction

Apparently some police forces in the country are now rolling out enforcement of driving too close to tax dodgers, maybe even section 59 ASB orders, which are interesting as there is a lower burden of proof. It doesn't impact penalties or insurance, simply threatens to take the car away.

We watch these experiments with trepidation.

Meanwhile, Bristol has a page to report incidents for their records alone.

This week we are conducting a small experiment to report a few dangerous drivers to this site, to see what happens. Expect followups if there are any results.


First, MK59USB on Tyndall's Park Road, crossing Whiteladies Road while reading their phone.



There are now pedestrian crossing lights on some of the arms of the junctions, specifically Tyndall's Park Road has a walk and ike one (a small dip in the kerb allows the bikes over); Whiteladies Road inbound also has green. These require left-turns to be restricted, which has long been a rule more ignored than observed. The council has recently done some raised corner sharpening; be interesting to see what's happening.

Where there is not any pedestrian crossing is on St Pauls Road —the Clifton Side— people run across when there is a gap, such as when vehicles heading inbound are waiting to turn right, and in that little gap between Whiteladies Road going read and TPR/St Pauls Road going green.

Which means this mercedes is about to head towards a junction where there are likely to be people sprinting across. Will they put down their phone?

No, is the answer, they keep on looking at it, going down to one-handed so they can hold the steering wheel with the other. About half way through the junction, they look up, notice the cyclist, and hold the phone down out of sight.

Interesting question: what would have happened if the tax-dodger hadn't been there?

The experiment begins, then, by filing this on the A&S police site, see how they react.

What about the full report an incident process? Too much hassle given its inevitable that nothing is going to happen. If they don't act when you go to the station with a CD of a video and a complaint, it's unlikely that they will react to a youtube URL.

Metrobus on the railwaypath? Again?

the West of England partnership, henceforth known as the Bringers of Woe, have a consultation on a transport vision for the future.

Key points

1. More people are going to live in Bristol
2. More people are going to live Weston Super Mare, despite evidence to the contrary.
3. More people are going to live in middle of nowhere dormitory towns near bristol, and hold unrealistic expectations about being able to commute into the city 

So, they have come up with a vision. That's a sort of a value between "no idea whatsoever" and "have a clue". Interesting to read, and so derive goals not just of Bristol, but the Outer Wilderness

North Somerset doesn't want anyone cycling to Bristol. We knew that, but their map doesn't even show the existing Festival Way as "a strategic cycling route", let alone propose it actually continue the extra 1-2 miles to reach as Nailsea. Instead they want an uprated A38 and a few tens of millions making the M5 more dangerous by turning the hard shoulder off at peak hours. Most interestingly the A38 to go to the M5 in a new junction. It's not clear what that will do, but apparently "This corridor experiences severe congestion ". If that statements is true, then the adverts for the Junction 21 Enterprise Zone you see while wasting hours at passport checks at BRS are lies. The advert? "15 minutes to Bristol". The reality? Not a chance. Yet here we are, with North Somerset saying "good transport links" on the J21 site, yet "experiences severe congestion" in another. One of those two statements is false —and if its the advertising, someone may want to complain.

Suggest: N Somerset consider alternative transport options to sitting in a traffic jam on the M5, and be open about its issues in the J21 site.

South Bristol doesn't get a callout of its own, just coverage in Bath to Bristol corridor. There's a small problem here in that the key public transport route between the cities is the train —and central government have removed electrifying this stretch of line from their "vision". That is, not even on some random future deadline which they can postpone, it's an outright "we don't plan to do this". Which means that the one change which would have really improved carrying capacity on the line, reduced transit times and pollution from trains in the cities? Gone.



Saltford is promised a bypass.


They also discuss LRT -Tram- along "the A4 Corridor". That's an interesting term there, as it doesn't mean "Along the A4", it just means "along the Avon Valley". There are two other options there (ignoring tarmacing the river). There's the train line, and then there's the Bitton-Bath stretch of the Railway Path, the stretch which has the steam trainists practising their hobby on a weekend. Could this be time to reinstate steam trains between Bristol and Bath? Brunel would be proud —they didn't have electricity in his day, after all.

Suggest: residents of South Bristol may have transport issues of relevance too. Anyone who cycles in Bristol might want to look more closely at the LRT routing.

Avonmouth, Shirehampton and Clifton Villages



Still a vision of getting the Henbury train loop in; still a vision for some more stations. Gloucester Road to Filton  and beyond and Whiteladies Road/A4018 to Cribb's causeway down as Strategic Cycling Routes. We have no idea what that means, and suspect the WoEP don't either, other than it means "no need to care about it anywhere else". Not that being a strategic cycle route will stop anyone painting out the bike lane.

Other points

1. "enhancements to the public realm". This is planner-speak for spending money on brickwork rather than functional transport systems.
2. There's not a single mention or illustration, anywhere, of people walking other than the phrase "cycling-and-walking" where the money will be split and each group will get their half of a pavement which will now have a white line down the middle. Yet for the inner core of Bristol and Bath, walking is the primary transport option. (we have no idea what it is for W-s-M, it probably involves riding a goat). 
3. Page 14, or "other charging mechanisms.". That's either a parking tax, Low Emission Zone tax, or a c-zone charge.

And finally, a look to the north east. That dashed green line? "Light Rail Transport —Route to be determined"


Unless you are going to build a tram line down up Fishponds road, there is only one place to put anything in there: the Bristol to Bath Railway Path.

The last time the WoEP wanted to put a bus down there, there was a mass uprising of inner Bristol, with some support from outside. Doe they really think things will have got better now? Do they not realise that killing the path for the sake of a slightly faster commute to/from Emerson's Green is going to be acceptable? Not a chance.

Suggest: recognise that the traffic volume, walking and cycling, down the BBRP is higher than any tram can achieve, and doesn't cost £2.6B. Council would be better off filing plans to run trams down there into the box of "stupid ideas we will pretend we never considered".

We say dust off and nuke the car from orbit

People have coming up to us recently and been asking questions on our apparent lack of driving. The recurrent queries are

1. Why haven't we seen you parking badly?
2. Why haven't we seen you driving badly?
3. Why haven't you driven right behind us in the fast lane of the motorway at 90 mph, flashing your lights at us?

For reasons which may be covered in a future post, the Bristol Traffic Important Car for Important People has now been officially written off; the insurers of the Important Car for Important People providing a rental car until a settlement is reached. The answers to the question are thus:

1. We have —just in a Vauxhall Corsa 1.4
2. We have —just in a Vauxhall Corsa 1.4
3. We can't, it's a Vauxhall Corsa 1.4

Here it is in all its glory, just after stocking up on marmite at Sainsbury's Brislington.

Compared to a team member's MkII Astra 1.4L of many decades ago, the Corsa isn't that bad for luggage room, but manages to be tangibly slower. All the weight of modern safety equipment like airbags and ABS, along with power steering, electric windows and the like have made for a vehicle which struggles to break the 20 mph limit. Our urban speedo watching is now one of looking down at the mph dial as it gets into the late teens, muttering "go on Corsa, you can do it!".

Unfortunately, free vehicle that it is, it comes with a fundamental flaw: a £500 insurance excess and undamaged bodywork. It has both wingmirrors and the alloy wheels lacking those scrapes which mark a car christened for use in urban Bristol.

It's not a matter of whether the car is going to end up with a wingmirror held up with duct tape, wheels documenting the kerb heights parked against, or graceful scrapes aquired on daily use. It's when. It even constrains parking choices: you start worrying in the night about what it will look like in the morning —that maybe you shouldn't have parked sticking out quite so much on that corner.

Accordingly, rather than await the day when the car is returned and a large bill for damage presented, the team decided to return the car early, and borrow a parent's '53 reg Peugot 307 HDi. The parent in question had a little medical incident in August, their car parked up since then. Taking it away from them should help get them used to the post-driving lifestyle, which, in Portsmouth, "city by the sea", means getting used to FirstBus coming by once an hour, except on Sundays, when it drops to "who knows"

Vehicle collected, successfully driven to Bristol. Compared to the Corsa, it's stable, and it's manual transmission and the minimal turbocharger give it a better 0-20 number —still not great for getting on the M32 from the secret Mina Road access point. With the changes there, you can't even be at 15 mph before you approach the merge point.

But it's stable, and pre-commissoned for abuse in an urban environment. All it needs is cleaning up, the parent being one of those who like to hoard things in their vehicle.

All goes well, the interior binned; time to go to the boot. Four cans of WD-40 and three de-icers seem overkill, but as a Glaswegian who used to own a Mini, the owner no doubt had picked up some habits they couldn't get rid of. That's not the issue though, the issue is what turns up once the boot contents are purged, and the layers underneath explored.

What's there? Moss large quantities of it. Enough that you have to look for David Attenborough and his camera crew.

And under the moss? Water. Large quantities of water.

The entire spare wheel compartment has about 2-3 cm of water in it. This is, well, unexpected, and best accompanied with the expression "What the fuck?"

Now, Pompey is a coastal town, and it could be that there have been some high tides flooding the streets —tides covered up by the Portsmouth Tourist Board. This is unlikely, as the loss of the city to climate change is something that UKIP would be highlighting as a positive outcome of climate change.

Discounting that, and deliberate human action, the other key hypothesis has "it's been collecting water from rain". With the car unused for a few weeks (this photo was taken early October), water could easily have seeped in to the stationary car.

Except: it's been a really dry Autumn. Has it really been long enough for the spare wheel bay to fill with water and plants to start growing?

No, this car has been collecting rainwater for some time.

For anyone with ageing parents, there's always the question "when should they stop driving?" You always hope that they stop before they end up in a serious crash, maybe just a small one involving a bollard where the police suggest politely to put away the car keys.

Maybe, just maybe, the fact that you've clearly been driving around not noticing the strange slushing sound coming from the back, or the odd fusty smell. One can but hope. That or bribe the garage doing the MoT to make sure the car fails.

The wealthy in society, the Camerons, the Rees-Moggs, they look forward to inheriting the family estate, what with its greenery and lakes.

Us: we fear the family hatchback.

Causes of Congestion in the Greater Bristol Area: hint: not 20 mph zones

What has made congestion in and around Bristol worse —for those people driving or sitting in buses?

Some people are saying it's common sense that it's the 20 mph limits, and that common sense beats data. No: thinking beats common sense.

we can argue about whether @georgeferguson_x did things to make traffic worse;

RPZs didn't; they add more passing places to the narrow roads, and if they discourage people from driving in, could reduced traffic levels.

20 mph a factor? Not given average weekday traffic speed. (Source: Waze)



One key point is that if the average speed in a road is 2-7 mph, as Stapleton Road is enjoying, then 20 mph is an unrealised dream. It's not the problem. Question is: what's causing that delay?

The main factor is the number of people choosing to drive. Evidence of this comes from looking at the M4 heading away from Bristol, which is going at 12 mph.

By choosing an away-from-city route we can avoid blaming metrobus related roadworks or buildup from urban congestion. There's none of : cyclists, bus stop buildouts, traffic lights or 20 mph to blame rather than accept the root cause of the traffic jam is the decision of you and others to get in the car that morning..



It's people driving places. Which may be correlated with population growth, and the growth of north fringe sprawl housing and offices. North Lockleaze, or, as it pretends to be, Chiswick Village? New. Those fields north of the A4174 by Emerson's Green? Houses you get to see from the M4. That's a change: more suburban housing, more people driving around the city.

Secondary factors to motor traffic in town:  junctions, buses stopping, vehicles turning right, cars parked where they shouldn't. All amplified by traffic volume: bigger queues, longer waits, more turning vehicles, more people "just parking for a minute" in a bus lane, so forcing the bus to try and pull out and increasing overall unhappiness.

Traffic lights? They have a worse (but fairer) throughput compared roundabouts; see Modeling Roundabout Traffic Flow as a Dynamic Fluid System (skip the pictures and look at the pics on P8-11, knowing that "flux" means "number of vehicles arriving per second"). Essentially, all of junctions overload, but two-lane roundabouts get the most through.However that paper assumes that you can get off the roundabout, which as we know at peak hours (Hello Bearpit! Hello St Pauls Roundabout!) doesn't hold. Furthermore by modelling traffic as an incompressible fluid, they miss out on the game-theoretic aspects of the problem, as in: why you'd pull out in front of other vehicles, even if you know it will block others.

Because one problem roundabouts and traffic lights both have is people blocking junctions, so stopping cross traffic getting through. If anyone has evidence of yellow-hash do-not-block zones ever being enforced, we'd love to see it. We lack that evidence. What we do believe is that it would reduce junction deadlocks and so boost cross traffic. Again, evidence would be good. Perhaps the council could run an experiment —like enforcing the law for a week.

Fast moving cyclists? Nope. They just go past the queues and have an average speed above cars at peak hours. This clearly upsets some people who resent the fact that they have to drive a Fiesta 1.1L up the A38. We would hate driving a Fiesta 1.1L too, even on an empty road.

Cyclists at under 12 mph? No data. They are easy to pass when there is no oncoming traffic, so as the overall traffic volume increases, get harder to pass. Having bus lanes and functional (i.e. not blocked by parked cars) bike lanes, lanes considered safe enough by cyclists that they use them would eliminate that problem. And, if parking spaces taken away for them, reduce justification for driving in.

Oncoming traffic? This is a problem in much of the inner city: there isn't space to get through down a road in the presence of oncoming vehicles. As well as traffic volumes, we have to consider whether the rise of the Urban SUV amplifies the problem. Not only does that oncoming Volvo XC 90 on the school run take up more space, the VW Touran parked alongside the Audi Q6 means that there is less open road to play with anyhow.

Roadworks? We know about those, especially: in the centre, on the M32, along the A4174, the A370 and by Cumberland Basin. Hopefully they will be transient, as in "fixed before 2020"



One thing is for inevitable: the cost of delays caused by these roadworks won't have been included in their already broken cost model.

When that Metrobus work is finished, will the problems go away? Not without some fundamental change in how people get into the city —which means that you need a compelling story from places like Yate, from Portishead, and the other dormitory towns. A railway from Portishead here is potentially compelling, because you get a direct line to Templemeads without traffic delays.  It's a shame that central government beliefs (trains bad, BRT viable) and local government issues (naive optimism) have caused a focus on FirstBus as a solution.

Will Metrobus be compelling for those actually in its catchment area? We have no idea whatsoever. Which gives us something in common with the metrobus team.

Anyway, to close: for anyone saying "it's the 20 mph zones", or "its the traffic lights", we say "explain how the M4 moves at 12 mph on a weekday morning?"

Traffic Jams are caused by texting drivers

With the proposal to expand penalties for drivers using phones, there have been lots of claims that the number of people texting has increased. That's something always worth validating with real datasets.

Back in September 2013, we observed that one driver in three on Arley Hill was texting.

Fast forward to 2016 and what do we see?

On a single pedal-up-the-contraflow, we didn't see more than 30% texting, we'd actually consider it to be less. L008HUJ/LD08HUJ (not found in DVLA DB), CN02JKO, VN11OYA (taxi?), BG62YGA, BD65WXL, CE53GMG. Six cars out of thirty one; approximately 1 in 5. Less than before.

What you can see though is that some drivers are so engrossed in their texting that gaps are building up in the queue.



That's the BMW BD65WXL and the Zafira BG62YGA

The Zafira's MOT expired on 7th Sept: that vehicle is not legal. And look at the gap the driver has let develop.

You have to be utterly oblivious to your environment to not notice that there as was a gap of 5+ vehicle lengths in front of you. Five vehicle lengths! You don't normally get that in the city, or the motorways nearby, at least not during daylight hours. Yet she's happily looking down, oblivious to the world. And she wasn't happy when this was pointed out to her. Now, it may seem irrelevant, these drivers are all in the same queue. But anyone wanting to turn up Nugent Hill (as opposed to illegally contraflow down), is having that opportunity denied to them, so creating needless congestion. Equally seriously, once the queue gets all the way to the roundabout on Cotham Brow, it has the risk of getting someone stuck in the roundabout, so blocking cross traffic. And all because they're curious what their friends are up to on Facebook.

There we have it. If people say "why has congestion got worse?", we will respond "our data implies that while the number of people texting hasn't increased, the time those drivers spend on their phone has —so making congestion worse".

Finally, at 1:11, the driver of CA09AKF is reading a kids picture book. Now, there did appear to be a child on the back, so this could be the way of keeping a bored child happy. Except: how do you read a picture book out loud? Do you turn it over going "tree!" "fish!", or what? Because the whole point of kids picture books is that you give them to the child to stare at the pictures while you do important things like check facebook for updates. If find yourself wanting to grab the picture book from the child in the back seat and read it yourself, well, life is bleak. Make sure your phone is charged up next time.

Always good to to say hello

when driving, you only really have one emotion you can share: anger, through one button for the horn and the flicker for the lights. In contrast, on a bicycle, you can have spontaneous conversations with passing cyclists —even strangers.



Here we see our instrumented tax dodger striking up a conversation with a fellow cyclist. To make it more personal, rather than shouting out anything from a distance, say "I am coming through why don' t you look before you pull out", instead they wait until they are alongside the other cyclists before starting a bit of banter with a "hello!"

Unfortunately, the other cyclist doesn't appear in the mood for idle chatter, and appears distinctly unhappy to have been surprised by the greeting. Of course, if he had actually looked before pootling out onto the roundabout, he wouldn't have been surprised —indeed, our camera-enhanced tax dodger may have missed the opportunity to make a new friend

Clifton Occupied by Tax Dodging Cyclists!

We were shocked and disappointed that we were unable to drive to Clifton in our Important Car, then cross over to Somerset and enjoy a round of golf with Liam Fox MP. Why? Tax dodging cyclists in the road —out road, blocked off to us,Important Tax Paying people, handing it over to olympic medal winners and the like.

Lycra louts who do things like blow their noses in public

If there was one redeeming feature, it is that a lot of other people were as upset as we were to see this lycra-clad vermin —and they were standing there screaming at them for bringing the city to its knees.


We we trapped in the city. Clifton was even begrimed with a large screen showing off that the portway and Bridge Valley Road had again been stolen.



This is exactly the kind of thing people voted against George Ferguson wanted to stop, but still the city wants to let people cycle around.

It's fundamentally wrong. Look at this scene from The Promenade

Where are the revenue-bringing shoppers? Or the high-income tax band residents? Nowhere. Just one person on a bicycle who probably lives in a postcode other than BS8.

This is unacceptable!

If there is one redeeming feature, it is that Clifton Village is still not set up for more than six bicycles at any time, as their three sheffield racks were overloaded. Some of the tax dodgers even went as far as leaning their bikes against the wall of The Mall pub and trying to buy beer inside.



This is not some run-down bicycle friendly part of town where you can lean bicycles against walls; it is trying to stay upmarket. Fortunately, most of the cyclists in the area realised they were unwelcome and cycled off to other parts of the city once the event was over, leaving us nearly the only people walking round an near-empty village. The fact that village was so empty shows precisely why such cycling events must be prevented.

But how to do this? We were going to spin up our automated cyclist-hating letter generator and have it email the Bristol Post. But what did we see on the Downs?



Yes —shocking, isn't it! Our paper, the one that hates cyclists, actively trying to sell copies to cyclists!

We fear that the Evening Post has, purely in the mercenary need to sell to people under the age of sixty, has decided to start trying to ingratiating themselves with tax dodgers. They may think that will help them, but all it will do is alienate their current readership. It'll be like when all the pubs in Hotwells, including the Spring Gardens, the Pump House and the Mardyke suddenly decided they wanted to post gastropubs instead of places to get drunk in and start fights with strangers. This isn't progress: this is a sign of the decline of the city.

Gateway to Clifton: The Christchurch Mini-roundabout

Today we celebrate the Bristol School run week, now combined with the FirstBus failure week, with very unexciting documentary of the "not quite a roundabout" junction at the end of Suspension Bridge Road. If you are expecting to see anyone nearly being run over, people on phones, etc. Look elsewhere. Sorry. This video is here just to look at what transport issues Clifton has which the Clifton BID and resident groups never seem to cover.

Clifton likes to be known for its village, its Bridge and one or two of its pubs. The real Gateway to Clifton is something never discussed: a mini roundabout at the top of the village, just by the church.

To get an overview without going to Clifton, look at it in streetview and rehearse approaching the roundabout doing a right turn in a car from every road. Work out: when you should give way, when are you technically "in the roundabout and so should expect others to give way", and "is it actually possible to do all the turns legally". The answers being "no idea", "don't expect anyone to give way" and "no".

If you are cycling over the bridge, or driving near it, you have to negotiate it. It's disconcerting on a bike, especially with a child, as you cannot predict what anyone can do. It's a collection of random actions, vehicles coming in at speed, nobody knowing who to give way to —or even what side of the roundlet(*) to drive on. It's not great on a car either. There may actually be some protocol for the locals, but if so they it isn't widely known. We don't know it, certainly. What the locals and regulars do know is not to expect anyone to treat it as a roundabout —and never assume that you have the right of way.

You can see all of this in this unedited 9 minute view of the junction. Keep an eye out for the black Range Rover coming out from the left, and count how many times it does it.



This junction is fundamentally the wrong shape for a roundabout, it has two left turns, one hard, one soft, with the hard one's give way markings about 90 degrees to the roundabout itself. No visibility for anything coming off Suspension Bridge as to what vehicles coming from their right are doing —vehicles which don't often slow down, and hence won't see any cars coming from the left until they pull out. Two manoeuvres can only be executed by driving completely on the wrong side of the mini roundabout. There's one car coming the wrong up the one way street, though it does execute the junction safely. Lots of vehicles going through without pausing, including one of the cyclists coming off Clifton Down. And a couple of times cars on the roundabout have to give way to vehicles pulling on in front of them. Note the lack of tension though —regulars are forgiving of what
happens in a junction of such ambiguity.

Meanwhile that Range Rover coming off the left hand side does it five times in a row: our reporter got bored and went off while they were still doing it.

Before the video recording started the RR driver had stopped in the middle of a zebra crossing to let someone out —presumably they were now waiting for that person to return. But why were they driving round in circles given that with the RPZ roll out there's enough free parking, parking they'd have driven by? Unless they enjoy driving in circles and don't pay for diesel, the only other possibility is they had/planned to use up the 30 minute free park elsewhere. But why not just pull over with your hazard lights on? This is just a sign that some Clifton residents really are different from the rest of the city. The rest of us have mobile phones to co-ordinate dropoff and pickup operations, and to offer something more interesting to do while waiting than making right turns at this mini roundabout.

Finally: consider what it is like to try and cross this junction on foot. While it's not near the centre of the village, at the end of Manila Road (where the BMW drives out from the wrong direction of a one-way street), there's a primary school, some other ones nearby. And at the end of Suspension Bridge road is of course, the Bristol Suspension Bridge —one of the key tourist attractions in a city after Stokes Croft and the M4/M5 motorway interchange. As part of "beautiful suburb of Bristol, tucked away from the hubbub of city life and located just a five-minute drive away from the centre." we'd expect more. Maybe the shops sell postcards of it or something.

(*), Yes, Roundlet is a real word.

Gateway to Clifton: The Christchurch Mini-roundabout

Today we celebrate the Bristol School run week, now combined with the FirstBus failure week, with very unexciting documentary of the "not quite a roundabout" junction at the end of Suspension Bridge Road. If you are expecting to see anyone nearly being run over, people on phones, etc. Look elsewhere. Sorry. This video is here just to look at what transport issues Clifton has which the Clifton BID and resident groups never seem to cover.

Clifton likes to be known for its village, its Bridge and one or two of its pubs. The real Gateway to Clifton is something never discussed: a mini roundabout at the top of the village, just by the church.

To get an overview without going to Clifton, look at it in streetview and rehearse approaching the roundabout doing a right turn in a car from every road. Work out: when you should give way, when are you technically "in the roundabout and so should expect others to give way", and "is it actually possible to do all the turns legally". The answers being "no idea", "don't expect anyone to give way" and "no".

If you are cycling over the bridge, or driving near it, you have to negotiate it. It's disconcerting on a bike, especially with a child, as you cannot predict what anyone can do. It's a collection of random actions, vehicles coming in at speed, nobody knowing who to give way to —or even what side of the roundlet(*) to drive on. It's not great on a car either. There may actually be some protocol for the locals, but if so they it isn't widely known. We don't know it, certainly. What the locals and regulars do know is not to expect anyone to treat it as a roundabout —and never assume that you have the right of way.

You can see all of this in this unedited 9 minute view of the junction. Keep an eye out for the black Range Rover coming out from the left, and count how many times it does it.



This junction is fundamentally the wrong shape for a roundabout, it has two left turns, one hard, one soft, with the hard one's give way markings about 90 degrees to the roundabout itself. No visibility for anything coming off Suspension Bridge as to what vehicles coming from their right are doing —vehicles which don't often slow down, and hence won't see any cars coming from the left until they pull out. Two manoeuvres can only be executed by driving completely on the wrong side of the mini roundabout. There's one car coming the wrong up the one way street, though it does execute the junction safely. Lots of vehicles going through without pausing, including one of the cyclists coming off Clifton Down. And a couple of times cars on the roundabout have to give way to vehicles pulling on in front of them. Note the lack of tension though —regulars are forgiving of what
happens in a junction of such ambiguity.

Meanwhile that Range Rover coming off the left hand side does it five times in a row: our reporter got bored and went off while they were still doing it.

Before the video recording started the RR driver had stopped in the middle of a zebra crossing to let someone out —presumably they were now waiting for that person to return. But why were they driving round in circles given that with the RPZ roll out there's enough free parking, parking they'd have driven by? Unless they enjoy driving in circles and don't pay for diesel, the only other possibility is they had/planned to use up the 30 minute free park elsewhere. But why not just pull over with your hazard lights on? This is just a sign that some Clifton residents really are different from the rest of the city. The rest of us have mobile phones to co-ordinate dropoff and pickup operations, and to offer something more interesting to do while waiting than making right turns at this mini roundabout.

Finally: consider what it is like to try and cross this junction on foot. While it's not near the centre of the village, at the end of Manila Road (where the BMW drives out from the wrong direction of a one-way street), there's a primary school, some other ones nearby. And at the end of Suspension Bridge road is of course, the Bristol Suspension Bridge —one of the key tourist attractions in a city after Stokes Croft and the M4/M5 motorway interchange. As part of "beautiful suburb of Bristol, tucked away from the hubbub of city life and located just a five-minute drive away from the centre." we'd expect more. Maybe the shops sell postcards of it or something.

(*), Yes, Roundlet is a real word.