Some submissions for our "legally parked range rover competition
First entry, F192NWK rejected for the double yellow lines. Other than that technical detail, it's very well parked; not inconveniencing anyone. Which makes one wonder, why have yellow lines here, and not elsewhere.
Second up, one of the Montpelier vehicles parked parallel to the kerb, and not on the pavement -so marking it out from all the other vehicles.
This could be a joint winner -we'll need to check this to see if it isn't actually on single yellow lines.
This one, V006BHX fails as it's a Lexus on double yellow lines. But it is a hybrid, so no trees were harmed in the taking of this photograph.
Here we have, on Upper Cheltenham Road, a Range Rover H20SGP setting an example for all the other cars in the area. Parallel to the kerb, not stickling out, not blocking anything. Which shows: it is possible to park a Range Rover. Well done!
Previously, we looked at cars parking at a junction near a school. Here, near Christchurch School, Clifton, we can see that parking sideways to the kerb means that the car B3SJW takes up less pavement space and so offers a safer crossing route for schoolkids going to school. What an innovative idea!
The scooter/bike park is closed, leaving only the school dropoff zones on both sides of the road leading to the entrance. Yet they are empty? Strange.
There are some parents, walking around. A few are waiting at the corner to find out who has parked their Audi TT right on the corner, so making it harder for push chairs to get across.
But look, there is room to get the small child in the push chair across, and he seems really excited to be that close to a car. Small kids love cars -right up there with Bob the Builder and The Shiny Show as valuable role models.
Rather than complaining about the car DG57NSV, these parents need to recognise their effective position in society. By choosing to push their kids to school, to walk or to scoot, they are clearly people with time on their hands. They are clearly not people rushing off to a prestigious job, or they'd be driving past and pushing their kids out on the zebra crossing without even slowing down.
Instead they are walking round the city, enjoying the sunny day, probably heading to someone's house for a coffee and some chit chat. They are not going to contribute to the economy, either by engaging in productive labour or active consumption. They aren't even going to bring petrol revenue to central government by driving. They are non-participants in the economic well-being and growth of the city. As such, its right to prioritise them less than car drivers, who clearly are important, busy, in a rush and when not working hard, paying central government a hefty amount per mile for the right to park where they like in this city.
Pedestrians should give way to cars at all times, and stop complaining.
Only last week, we saw a blue honda receiving some criticism from a Kingsdown local, who was upset that they were parking on the keep clear bit of Somerset street.
Two days later we can measure the effect of such a note. Here the car R462BAE is no longer parking in the Keep Clear area; it is in Fremantle Square instead. Thus it is no longer "causing great inconvenience and is a hazard to builders trucks and other's vehicles." Well, not in Somerset street, anyway.
The elusive "Tomato" also sends in some pics of two cars in Montpelier, being ticked for parking on the pavement -despite the fact that there are no double yellow lines there!
The cars YP05PPV and M481SCJ appear to have been ticketed by the police, so these tickets do not provide evidence that Bristol Parking Services exist.
Tomato says "Amazingly there wasn't even a double yellow line. Further up St Andrews road there was another - the silver one, apparently for the same reason. This is the only place in Montpelier, indeed possibly the whole of Bristol, that I have heard of cars being unfairly penalised in this way, and the last time I know of in St Andrews Road was a couple of years ago when the indignant car owner wrote into Venue letters page with accompanying photos indignantly pointing out how easily a car could still get past."
Yes, the police do appear to be unfairly picking on some cars. We also have some pics of the police ticketing cars in Kingsdown last week, so maybe there is a new police officer walking round the city, still being surprised by how cars park.
Gloucester Road on a weekday: a busy road with shoppers. Yet here is a van parked on the pavement. Isn't the van A12VOL inconveniencing and maybe endangering them? Not at all. by making it hard to cycle on the pavement, the van is actually improving pedestrian safety. So making Gloucester Road a better place to purchase consumer goods and keep Britain out of recession.
Footnotes 1. Photos submitted by "tomato" 2. The Bread Store, on Gloucester Road, does the best chocolate croissants this side of the English Channel. If you want to pretend you are cycling the Alps, get 4 petit-pain-au-chocolate from there and then head south to climb Nugent Hill 30 times in a row, pausing to eat a croissant every so often.
A reader called SP left a couple of comments implying maybe were over-sterotyping BMW drivers. Interesting thought. Yes, there is a fair amount of sterotyping going on, but mainly of range rovers. BMW drivers are just like any other local driver. They need somewhere to park on weekday, here the car RF55NAE outside Christchurch School, Clifton. The take kids to school in the car, a car they have to park near the school, here N707WJB outside Christchurch School, Clifton. And they sometimes leave their car with the door open while they do the child dropoff, so as to make sure no kid with a scooter or bike dares to scrape the car RE52ZKO while they take their primary-school age child to Christchurch School. Or on the keep clear zones at the corner, by -wait for it- Christchurch School, Clifton. Sterotyping? No, documenting. None of these cars are on double yellow lines, only one (EZJ8266) in a keep clear zone. The rest are just up on the pavement by the school entrance, leaving enough room for through traffic and generally blending in. Which is why their coverage is actually fairly minimal. It's not as entertaining as the problem of how to park a Range Rover in Montpelier, or as ironic as driving school cars parking where they shouldn't. And it's certainly not as photogenic as an ice cream van driving down a bus lane. Maybe we could start sterotyping them, but well, it's been done already, hasn't it? Maybe once we've got bored of making fun of range rovers or driver deadlock outside schools at dropoff time.
People in Somerset Street, Kingsdown have started adding stroppy notes to cars. The Toyota WP56PNF has a printed sheet saying "Warning police notices nearby tell pavement parkers that they may be towed away".
Which, given the fact that it doesn't happen may be true -the signs are there- but meaningless. on a different day, the honda R462BAE had a handwritten note. "Your vehicle is illegally parked and is causing greate inconvenience and is a hazard to builders trucks and other's vehicles" At the bottom there is a threat. "You will be reported to the authorities". The author of the document was nearby; he'd phoned the authorities a few hours earlier but nothing had happened. Which doesn't surprise anyone. What is interesting is that some people in this street do actually care about parking issues and are trying to deal with it. Our Kingsdown dataset implies that the main vehicles parked along this keep clear/double yellow line area are actually a couple of local cars. Maybe it's just outsiders that get the rude notes.
Clifton Suspension Bridge was closed to cars again last weekend, and probably will be again the next two weekends -pedestrians and cyclists walking their bikes only. Which makes it a lovely time to walk over. No traffic, no noise, and nice views of the city You can also see that they are adding a new layer of plywood over the thicker beams. Once completed and resurfaced, these repairs will mean the bridge is good for another 20 years. From now until 2028, then, drivers can be happily oblivious to the fact they are driving across a wooden bridge base.
One of the pressures for driveways in Bristol is that it gives you somewhere to park. The other is that you can more sure your car will be there the next day. Here, on Upper Belgrave Road, by the edge of the downs is evidence of what can go wrong. Next to to the cyclist illegally cycling on the downs is a parked Corsa, first in the line of cars of residents on the houses on the other side of the road. This is an odd road: cars coming up from the Oortway will have had a chance to zip up Bridge Valley road, and with the park on one side, it doesn't feel urban. Some drivers come up here pretty fast. And clearly someone one was coming up too fast, not paying attention, and -presumably at night- ploughed straight into the back of this parked car. Hopefully nobody was hurt, and the residents heard the sounds, came out to investigate, and got to exchange insurance details -with an insured driver.
It would be useful to have some data on average and peak vehicle speeds up Bridge Valley Road and along the edge of the downs. And perhaps instead of "improving" the blackboy hill junction with lights, add lights and red light/speed camera to the junction at with Ladies' Mile road, so that cars get to slow down, whether they want to or not
Heading up Romney Avenue, here's a police car in the bus stop. There's a citizen in the back with them, they are out on call, so can park where they like. And they do need to park here, because there's nowhere else to park. Taken up by other police cars, and now the fire engines are looking for somewhere to park. It pulls round the corner; there seems to be a house there that merits attention. Lots of it. And more police cars turn up. We have five cars and two fire engines now, and a possibly unrelated one up the road. Interesting. Either there's something serious up, or the police only visit Lockleaze in numbers.
08:38 on a weekday morning, a queue of vehicles heading into town. The bikes and the buses, can't use their dedicated lane though, because there's a van in the way, one parked for a delivery. There are double lanes just round the corner where parking wouldn't have inconvenienced quite so many people, but remember this: its not cars that are being inconvenienced here, and bicycles and motorbikes have no rights. Buses have the most problems. The root cause here is probably not the driver. Its the scheduling software in DHL's offices, that don't take into account congestion or parking difficulties, and the satnav that will start to complain if the driver goes off route to look for somewhere to park. The driver of the van EY54NZU has to park here, because head office expects it, it's the only way to stay on schedule.
Deadlock: in which more than one entity try to acquire the same set of resources, and by doing so create a situation in which none of them can acquire enough resources to get work done. In traffic, it is where vehicles trying to enter a junction stop the vehicles in the junction from leaving, and hence nobody can achieve their goals.
Here's a spot of bother in Clifton. There's the Volvo XC90 WV57EUU, which we already have indexed, here helping pedestrian access to the school by slowing down traffic. It's not on the pavement today, or blocking a driveway, just right on a corner where there is a double yellow line to remind people not to park. Its' not dangerous, look -kids still manage to cross the road alive. Unfortunately, while such conscientious traffic calming helps most vehicles slow down, it does nothing for coaches trying to do a turn -they need this space to get round. A traffic jam is now building up with three lines of cars, and the Volvo desperately trying to reverse a car for which reversing was never a design goal. Or if it was, that and "fuel economy" came lower down the list than "create the illusion of security" and "wide"
What we in computing call a "deadlock" has developed: nobody can get out because the other vehicles are blocking each other. Here's how it gets resolved. The Volvo struggles to reverse.
Leaving room for the Mercedes to pull through, and get stuck in the same place. Nice bit of forward planning there. Must work in investment banking.
Incidentally, the reason the Volvo had such a hard time backing up is not just land-barges like this are a dog to reverse, there's another parent blocking the other corner, again on the double yellow lines, this time in a pickup WR56UUH.
You could hang around all day waiting for a situation like this to resolve itself. But we have other schools to visit, so we must leave them to it.
It's gridlock in Bristol centre and drivers suddenly lose the ability to read signs. Or huge letters on the road. Funny though, how they manage to read the numbers on the keypad of their mobile phone when they need to call anyone on the move.
Having met the odd traffic planner/civil engineer in the past year, one problem is that they have a technical language to describe things, a language they use to communicate with their peers -but also to exclude those who are not educated in civil engineering. What to do? Josh Hart is going for the "learn the language" approach, by studying at UWE.
The rest of us don't have the time to do that. Instead I'm guest lecturing at a local university on computing topics, which is going to provide the answer. Instead of wasting time learning civil engineering concepts and terms, take software engineering/computer science terminology and apply it to traffic. The advantage of that is that you don't need to understand the details, to be able to handle the reply when you say "The O(1) scheduling algorithm delivers fairness but under 80% saturation the router tends to drop packets on the floor". Because if you are saying it to the traffic planners, they don't understand either. But it scares them. Which is important, as from the early findings, there isn't much in the way of science in traffic management; there's no experimentation. Just some simulation programs written in the early eighties based on inadequate data. That's a belief-driven approach, not the evidence-driven one that is the basis for sciences.
If it were a proper science, it would be data driven, from repeatable experiments. For example, before proposing replacing zebra crossings on Blackboy Hill with puffin crossings, they'd check to see if pedestrians would stop on the red light,. Once they knew what number of people would ignore the light, include that in their simulations and risk analysis. Then they'd stick up some temporary lights to see what happens to the congestion, before dropping a few hundred thousand pounds on it.
Anyway. Henceforth, this blog will sometimes introduce computing terminology for the reader. Enough to intimidate the odd traffic planning consultant. Especially once we start collecting the data they don't seem to have. First up: deadlock.
The Evening Post is always complaining about bicycles on pavements. A few dedicated car drivers do their best to discourage this by parking on the pavement, here at the zebra crossing between Cotham Road and Cotham Road South/Cotham Brow. There is about enough room to walk through, but not for bicycles. Well done BMW J2LXX! Thank you for standing up to pedestrian's rights! A lot of kids cycle down here on their way to and from school, and families with push chairs, but today they get to go in the road -where they belong! [The reason the pavement is so wide here is to improve pedestrian safety, and to make the corner sharper; the one whose visibility is now hampered. O2 keep trying to put in a phone mast disguised as a lamp post twice the height of the trees, but keep getting turned down as the wall abuts some listed pillars. I almost phoned this one in to Bristol Parking Services, as I was annoyed that they were on the pavement by the zebra crossing. But as the office closes at 17:00, at 17:02, you can park where you like]
This is the St Michael's roundabout, where religious dissenters were burned alive during Queen Mary's rule. Obviously in those days the mini roundabout was not present, as the dissenters would have been run over before the burning was complete.
On the morning this photo was taken, the ongoing BRI electrical work has resulted in bits of St Michael's Hill being dug up, and single lane access blocked by traffic lights. This has created a traffic jam, which goes across the roundabout; some vehicles are waiting in the roundabout itself, trying to avoid eye contact with everyone else. The Renault Clio, for example, has just come out of Cotham Hill and turned right into the traffic jam, so making it harder for vehicles coming up St Michael's hill to turn right onto Cotham Road.
These two cars, the fiesta and the BMW are both trying to turn down Cotham Road, which isn't actually wide enough for two vehicles. The fiesta was partway through turning left from Hampton Road when the (fast moving) BMW appeared round the parked cars, sounded its horn and forced its way through. I don't think the Fiesta driver was very impressed; there was much sounding of horns and emergency braking by both vehicles.
There's an interesting question here: who is at fault? Is it the Fiesta driver, who didn't give way to the 1-series BMW on the roundabout. Or the latter, which didn't give a car that was midway through a manoeuvre the right of way? Or did they both have unrealistic expectations?
Keep an eye on this car, WV57EUU, here showing it is black/yellow colour blind, and hence oblivious to the double yellow lines. And the 'No parking at any time' marking on the wall, which is also yellow/black Designing user interfaces and web signs for colour blindness is a common best practise: you don't rely on the ability to distinguish red and green as the sole way to navigate a site, as red/green blindness is very common. What we have here, yellow/black blindness, is much rarer. There is little that can be done to mitigate it, though London try with their red-marked lanes.
It is pedestrians who are meant to get priority in road/junction designs. Not cars, not cyclists, not FirstBus. Yet they normally come out worst. A bit of pavement narrowed in St Pauls for an extra car lane; pavement elsewhere covered in bike parking stands for the bikes. And then there are all the cars half way up the pavement.
So its nice to report something different: the emergence of extra seats at the tops of hills.
Here on the climb up from St Werburgh's
And here on Brandon Steep, the road south of Brandon Hill.
These sofas will help people gradually take up walking up hill, by providing places to rest, and so make Bristol a better place to walk round.
This is what's left of a traffic island in Whiteladies road. Something has wiped out both the illuminated island signs, and the central lamp post That lamp is bent at quite an angle. Whatever went into the island was big and fast. Hopefully nobody was standing in the island, waiting for a safe moment to cross the road, when it happened, as if they were they'd be as dead as a stock-exchange quoted bank.
This shows a flaw in the traffic island design. It provides somewhere to stand, but doesn't interrupt traffic flow. You have to wait for a gap and rush across -if you can. And clearly waiting for a gap isn't safe either. Traffic islands just don't work.
To stop people making a mistake attempt to use it, the van DE54SKN above, the car WU54YFH below --
--and a Peugeot 206 WV51EHT further up the hill, all try and improve safety on Whiteladies Road, by discouraging anyone from attempting to use the islands. This is a brave and selfless act, done at the risk of getting a ticket for parking on the yellow lines, done by some of our local drivers who are clearly aware of the dangers of the islands and doing their best protect the lives of pedestrians.
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