Southwell Street: new BRI signage

There’s some new signs up on Southwell Street, at St Michael’s Hospital

UH Bristol
Private Road
No parking
on double
yellow lines

No Parking at an any time
private property

(small print about how there’s a fine of £60 for doing so and if you don’t play up they will go to the DVLA for your details)
 

Any cycles chained or locked to these railings will be removed -contact security

There are some covered bike racks, about enough for ten bicycles. Why no more?
 
Even after taking away the pavements to provide parking, even after creating a parking basement for staff, there isn’t room for any bicycles.

As to the other signs -and interesting topic. It’s not clear that this is "a private road" -it is just a street in Kingsdown, albeit one whose pavement has been co-opted by the BRI.

Someone with a residents permit and time on their hands should test this

Markov Chains: letting the evening post write for itself

A quick grep of the internet thows up a Markov Chain generator in the Python programming language.

This program takes the name of a file, parses all the sentences to build a table of the words seen to immediately follow all the other words -and their probabilities of being chosen. For example, "lycra" is followed by "lout" 80% of the time, "clad" 20% of the time.

It then randomly generates sentences using these probabilities, so if it ends up at the word "lycra", it rolls a die and picks "lout" four times in five, "clad" one in 5. Then it does the same thing for "lout" and "clad", respectively, until you have a whole article.

Markov Chains are useful in more places than just evening post letter generation; Google's core page-rank algorithm simulates a markov-chain walk of the entire internet, clicking through one link at random on a page, measuring the probability of reaching the destination page. Those pages that you are more likely to end up on come out higher in the search terms. Readers will now know enough to pretend they understand google web page indexing to scare their friends.

Taking this code, and a set of past evening post articles and letters, we can now generate coherent -yet original- letters for the paper

Example 1

by their arrogance." Mr Drummond, who was struggling to get the message. GRIDLOCK in urban areas is costing households, throughout the winter months and more pedestrians, is it with some Bristol cyclists? The other night I was met with typical cyclist arrogance. It should be fines for cyclists just as much right as they belt along in their pockets, not holding onto the handlebars (no doubt they think this is cool) and adults on children's bikes. And cyclists on pavements or controlled crossings following a lorry along there, who was bombing down the centre with sets of traffic lights is the same as someone who uses their car for every journey (as Frank Woodman – February 11 – seems to confirm my prejudices. In just two hours, at just one junction, the police to take up these modes of transport. "Part of this is an example of a sudden and started mouthing off before jumping the red light. Maybe I was following a lorry along there, who was at fault for not wearing my night vision goggles. One morning on the pavement and they fear the city's pavements. The idea for the accidents they cause. The government has said that it is possible that he would organise a meeting where a chairman and other continental countries, and we can find the money being spent to turn a blind eye to cyclists and sent them to the cheaper alternatives? Because most people of working age live busy, stressful lives, so choose convenient transport over cheap transport. SO Mayor Ferguson and, hopefully, encourage him to move on to households. Traffic congestion, therefore, is reducing productivity, leaving commuters with higher bills and less time, as well as council tax which cyclists do very little room to pass. Then, as I reached my destination cyclist

Run 2

dressed in black are the main cause of road congestion. I regularly cycle to work using use the pub's toilet. "I waited outside for her, but I could not get up on the busy road. Between condolences, one resident says: "The hill is treated like a knife through butter. It is encouraging to see," he tells me. "Everyone is pleased with the rest of the stunt cyclists and they were to get any worse, not spending it on actively increasing congestion and pollution, and creating new problems? Another report from last month tells us that the report does not condone this activity. "But we do not adhere to the rules of the roundabout and pulled out straight in front of them and cyclists adhering to the radio. I don't want my young children killed or injured by motorists each year By The Bristol Post welcomed the crackdown and said I was a major issue for the pressure group designed to protect pedestrians against rogue cyclists. He said: "I am all in favour of it. "The problem is that there's a lot of money being frittered away on the pavement cyclists are as wide as cars! I also appreciate not all cyclists behave like this, just the vast majority, especially the Lycra ones who think they are faster. 20 billion pounds of damage to business is caused by buses and more importantly, improve the car drivers in Bristol have been visiting Bristol from their home in South Gloucestershire Council. 

Run 3 -which actually seems more coherent than "Frank Woodman".

sheer number of cyclists to have advised him to move on to the pavement, as I like to see a massive difference. "I don't think there are many others all over the years? There are more motorists than cyclists, it makes perfect sense to just ban them! Why not a cycle-free day for Bristol drivers? I HAVE just read an opinion in this area, but dangerous cycling is. "Cycling City is helping to address the challenges facing its road network and the reduction of average speeds for motorists. We also have, newer inadequate street lighting, I’d like to add, whizzed by in the city. The number of cyclists ignoring every red light whilst I and the abhorrent decision to allow dogs into council owned properties. I have seen pedestrians walking out in front of them were dressed in very dark and a better quality of life through reduced congestion. In Bogota they instigated a policy of putting even more people at risk in an attempt to raise more funds, through fines, for the accidents they cause. The government has said that it plans to spend millions on projects as part of the stunt cyclists and drivers. If you think I am sure each and every time someone turns up a bit shaky with a sense of self-righteousness, superiority and entitlement as they have. Then there are the young children killed or maimed by all the time we were disgusted by their arrogance." Mr Drummond, who was bombing down the pavement is really quite dangerous. There were lights on my car just once a week ago today. Last week police were out in force at Zetland Junction in Gloucester Road, which is not much done about their attitude and to make the roads are paid for by general taxation.

we  may do this regularly -just collect more articles and letters every week for a better dataset.

Frank Woodman: bristol post's premier fake letter writer

People accuse us of being spoof, some kind of satire designed to wind people up.

Not us. No, the spoofs are people like Frank Woodman, letter writer to the Evening Post.

Fantastic coverage here, going back months. Yet clearly fictional.

How can we be so sure? Because of his wonderful inconsistencies.

December 30, It's easier to list what our city hasn't got

We lack [...] an efficient, cheap and reliable bus/ commuter system, which would encourage many more people to use it;

...

Of course, councillors, mayor and politicians will claim that the public funds are not in place to afford such facilities.

They would, of course, prefer to spend our money on more bus lanes, cycle lanes, 

See? he's actually contradicting himself in the same letter. "we don't have a cheap and reliable bus service because the council would rather spend money on bus lanes". That's like saying we don't have a motorway from Bristol to London because the DfT keeps putting money into the M4. Whoever made up this letter completely forgot to proof-read it before emailing it to their colleagues saying "stick this in where there's some space, we need some more online traffic"

Xmas must have been quiet altogether, forcing a new one to be knocked up the following day

December 31,  Bikes and buses must not delay city's traffic

Cyclists and buses must not be allowed to cause further delays to car commuters and vehicles, servicing businesses.

And again, two weeks later, the business model of advert-funded pages depending on high web traffic calls to the letter team

January 16, Convenience of cars outweighs the costs.

why do motorists absorb these costs rather than switch to the cheaper alternatives? Because most people of working age live busy, stressful lives, so choose convenient transport over cheap transport.

January 15,  Figures on congestion are a wake-up call

Cyclists and buses must not be allowed to cause further delays to car commuters and vehicles, servicing businesses.

See that? On Jan 16 "Mr Woodman" is arguing that people don't use things like buses and bicycles because they are less convenient than driving. And the day before, that congestion is making driving worse.


This is a bubble of inconsistency which we must admire and praise. You cannot complain on one day that congestion is making it impossible to drive round town, and then the next that people don't use alternatives because driving round town is easier.

Its as if someone says "we don't have any controversial cycling stories right now", and someone else goes "let's make up a letter -who is going to be Frank Woodman today?" -before agreeing on "let's print an old Frank Woodman letter, nobody will notice"

Say what you like about Bristol Traffic, but

1. we are at least consistent!
2. we print new content every time

Evening Post Letters

A copy of a letter submitted to the evening post hits our inbox: we wonder if it will ever see the light of their letters page.

When the new Bristol Post was launched it was accompanied by bus adverts showing a smiling driver giving a surprised cyclist a bunch of flowers.

It has been some months and I'm yet to see any flowers.

What I have seen is Councillor Richard Eddy trying to shape the city's transport policy based on the secondhand anecdotes of a friend. Please could the councillor remind his friend that in Amsterdam, vehicles drive on the other side of the road --and he should look both ways when crossing the road and the adjacent cycle paths. Then try walking round Westminster and decide which city centre treats pedestrians worse.

I've now also seen a letter of complaint from Robert J Trott of Keynsham -a letter which includes the tired old anecdote that cyclists never pay for the roads. In fact Bristol's urban streets are funded by council tax -so I believe that the £2200 I pay annually on my band-F house I have the right to walk, cycle and drive around the city.

By his own reasoning, Robert,  a resident of South Gloucestershire, does not have such rights. However, I forgive him and will let him use our city streets. What I would like though is some respect for the policies which we, the people of the city have chosen.

Please can he recognise that we did not deliberately choose these policies to annoy him but as an attempt to make the city itself a better place to live, work and indeed, visit.

Still, awaiting my bunch of flowers,

S.A.

Wingmirror Tax payment issues

One of our vast fleet of vehicles has become eligible for paying the wingmirror tax

 
Which raises a question: when?

Not having a wingmirror

1. gives you a tactical advantage in negotations with oncoming traffic when that oncoming vehicle still retains theirs.
2. lets you drive through monty at least 3 mph faster.
3. stops you having to worry about cars driving past when you are parked in those same montpelier streets.
4. ensures that you aren't elegible to pay the tax a second time.

Any disadvantages?

1. unless the mirror is blatantly hanging off, held on only by duct tape, oncoming vehicles may not realise that you don't care about your wingmirrors; you really need to communicate your status and intent to achieve the best outcome in the negotiation over who goes first.
2. being passenger side, you have to park your car on the wrong side of the road to gain immunity to the passing-car problem.
3. Pulling out from parked is slightly harder. You may even now want to consider indicating.
4. it's not great changing lanes on the M4
5. Bicycles coming up the inside of you on a bus lane have to look out for you switching into their lane before a junction -but they had to do that anyway.
6. Kills that conversation starter in the evening post "a cyclist smashed my wing mirror and cycled off -and do you think they were insured". 

Apart from the motorway lane changing problem, all of these are manageable, and the key advantage "you know you won't break it again" gives tangible tax-payment reductions.

The only time you need a functional wingmirror is the day of the MoT.

Which raises an interesting idea for a new business: wingmirrors to rent by the day.

1. Survey the streets of monty and the taxis of the city, build up some stats of vehicle brands & types in the target market. (example above; VW)
2. Identify those mirrors in the market where the cost of replacement is significant: (example above; VW). 
3. Build up a stock of the main mirror types from some of the discount online wingmirror retailers (yes, they exist).
4. Discreetly let it be known that you can rent mirrors at a rate of £5/mirror/day.
5. Rent them

The need for building up the portfolio of mirrors could be avoided if you start by requiring a weeks notice "to put you in the calendar". You can then buy the mirrors on demand online, building up the set of mirrors you need driven directly by customer demand.

Yes: this could work.

The main competition is actually going to be mirror theft: you need to price your daily rate low enough that it's not worth stealing mirrors off other vehicles

Other than that though: "wingmirrors to rent" could be the new business to transform the city.

Colston Street: back to normal

People will be pleased to know that Colston Street’s bike path is now back to its original role: short stay parking for visitors
 

I would have stopped for a kid but not 'im!

Lovely bit of traffic jam road rage here, with the driver of S164JRP and his dog giving the cyclist a hard time for trying to cross through near-stationary traffic




There's a bit of fun after 1:10 where the driver in front says a lot of kids come that way -would he have stopped then?

To which the driver says "I would have stopped for a kid but not 'im!"

We don't advocate showing preferential treatment to anyone -children, adults, slow-moving elderly. If you let kids cross the road safely, then you will lure them into complacency which will only get them run over as they get older. Furthermore, there's the question of "when does adulthood begin?". Do you stop for kids under 16 but not above that? Is 18 the threshold -even if they are still at school?

It's just too hard to discriminate this way -just abuse everyone and be done with it.

Bristol is not currently under water

As of 11:44, Bristol is not under water. It may well be at 20:45 tonight, or 09:20 Saturday morning

On Avon Crescent, the council are putting up a barrier with sandbags

 Somewhere we have some photos to scan of this road being under water in 1990. Hint, avoid living in places with names like "avon", "harbour", "river" or "mead" -as every so often the water comes back to remind you where the name came from.

The avon is full, though it is draining fast

 And it makes a good change from the normal mud-flat view of the area.

Presumably the A4 portway and Avon gorge cycle paths are places to avoid tonight.

If you do want a view of any floods tonight, although the Pump House is more photogenic, the Novia Scotia pub is a better place to drink beer. They often serve pints of Heavy on draught, to get the Auld Scotia feel.

Aberystwyth Road, Bishopston

Time to catch up with the Aberystwyth Faction's proposals for an improved Gloucester Road -one that makes the bus lane tidal and so adds short-stay parking in the opposite direction.

We have now heard from the councillor behind the petition:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: David Willingham <David.Willingham@bristol.gov.uk>
Date: 17 December 2013 13:48
Subject: RE: Gloucester Road Parking Changes

  The petition neither mentions nor proposes making any changes to bus or cycle lanes as that is not what it is asking the council to change. 

  If you visit Gloucester Road, then you will find that there are various parking bays that could be brought into use to allow the traders to benefit from more passing trade during the peaks, without having a detrimental effect on cyclist safety.

  As a local cyclist who uses the Gloucester Road, I have no intention of trying to make it more dangerous for cyclists, and if done carefully and in the right locations, I believe the proposed change would make it possible to share the limited road space a little more efficiently.

  If the council do decide to act on this petition, then they would be required to perform a highways safety audit of any locations they intend to change, as well as statutory consultation on any changes, so all road users, local residents or traders could have their say.

Regards,

David
--
Cllr Dr David Willingham
Liberal Democrat Councillor for Bishopston ward

So there you go: it's about sharing the limited road space a little more efficiently.

If you look at the petition, it does call out the recessed parking bays outside  288 Gloucester Road -the original Maplins site -these changes are non-controversial and likely to be unopposed, except perhaps matched by some demands for bike parking alongside.

What is a flash point is going to be the sentence "Furthermore we call upon Bristol City Council to implement "tidal" parking on Gloucester Road,". Because its goals, "Parking on the inbound carriageway during the evening peak" means "no bus or bike lane inbound in the evening rush hour", while "Parking on the outbound carriageway during the morning peak." means the same in opposite direction.

This is where the controversy lies. What is being proposed here implies no bus lane to-and-from the North Fringe commute, which means

1. No bike lane for anyone heading to the north fringe
2. No bus lane for anyone trying to get the Wessex red busses. These are the ones used to get to and from UWE -and if the students can't go by bus or bike, that leaves car. We don't want that. They don't pay enough taxes to deserve any tarmac.
3. Anyone commuting by car up the north fringe is now going to get held up by congestion on the A38. As that's something that wasn't covered in the C4 documentary: what it was like to drive down Gloucester Road before the showcase routes were launched. It was much, much, worse. The buses would have to stop in your lane to let passengers on and off, and if there was a bus heading north stuck behind a minicab with its hazards  on near the minicab office, your road would block as the two buses would never be able to pass each other. Gloucester Road was only viable as a driving commute option on those days that the council was actually enforcing parking. Which is something you wouldn't know on the commute until you were committed. 

See that? No matter how you get to the North Fringe, car, bus or even bicycle, the showcase bus route benefits. We don't expect the motoring advocate groups to realise that, as Bob Bull of portishead, official spokesman of the ABD in the evening post, is too busy complaining about his journey along the portway to appreciate how the bus lane helps commuting by car.

We do fear that the bus companies will pick up on this -as will UWE. And the cyclists, well they are the all-powerful-cycle-lobby.

Gloucester Road is going to be flash point there.

• Statistics imply that Gloucester Road has the highest number of reporting cycling incidents. -if you add Cheltenham Road to the figures, the A38 stands out as either the busiest cycling route in the city, or one of the more hazardous. Notable is that the Railway Path, which has the highest use, doesn't appear on the list at all.
• Bristol Cycling Campaign's followups on police involvement in any of these incidents imply the outcome is "not interested". This has the potential to be an issue in its own right.
• Even the mountain bikers are getting involved in this. Because while they are happy doing things like the red bits on the Super Nova trail, they at least know if they do get it wrong, they won't have somebody on the phone drive straight over them.
• A lot of the North Fringe employers have Bicycle User Groups with group mailing lists -easily organised, and capable of co-opting driving colleagues into the battle.
• The cyclists have more influence in the national press.

Putting it together, the shops may think that a review of the bus lane and a tidal system may get wide support -after their success in ensuring they retain their commuter parking in the RPZ-, but they are potentially getting into trouble. How are they going to react if cycling campaigners start handing out leaflets saying "email your councillor" to cyclists waiting at junctions on gloucester road? Can they take the trade of cyclists for granted -or are they going to have to deal with people coming into the shops, creating queues at peak hours, then when they get to the counter announcing they won't shop there as the shopkeepers are endangering their lives.

This is going to one to watch.

As for now, at the time of writing (16:02, Wednesday December 18), the petitions stand at

• Cyclists for a better bike lane: 135
• Aberystwyth: 73.

That's gone in a week from about 62-63 each -the cycling petition doubling, the shopkeeper's going by ten. This should be a warning sign to the councillors: they run a risk of making more enemies than friends here.

The Aberystwyth Faction: short stay parking matters more than life

This is just a first post on what is going to brew up into the next story to keep the Evening Post readers suitably outraged. Remember: we covered it first.

Regular readers may recall our coverage of a recent channel4 documentary, one that showed how the council was enforcing the parking restrictions in the showcase bus route at peak hours -and worse than that, by doing it with CCTV, ensuring that people really really didn't stop there, rather than "stop for 10 minutes -no harm done" stopping.

Well, now it's got national coverage, it's going to blow up

The "more parking" campaigners did manage to hold off the rollout of resident parking zones nearby, so ensuring that the parking areas will be available for staff and other commuters -leaving a remaining problem: where do shoppers go?

The answer is obvious: the bus and bike lanes.

Hence a petition: Fairer parking on Gloucester Road.

This is The Aberystwyth Faction's petition

We call upon Bristol City Council to remove peak parking restrictions from all parking bays that do not cause obstruction to traffic lanes of Gloucester Road, 

...
Furthermore we call upon Bristol City Council to implement "tidal" parking on Gloucester Road, and to permit the following:
•Parking on the inbound carriageway during the evening peak.
•Parking on the outbound carriageway during the morning peak.

This is pretty significant as if they get their way, it means that the bike lanes will be dead, and the bus lanes will only work for people heading towards town in the morning, away in the evening.

Which means that anyone trying to cycle in the opposite direction, say to school, or even to work on the North Fringe -and get there alive, are stuffed.

The right to park outside a shop is more important than the rights of others to live

In the other corner, just warming up, are the people who mistakenly believe that their right to live is more important than allowing people to get a bag of chips without having to park round the corner and walk 100 paces.

Their petition: Petition: Uninterrupted Cycle Lane on both sides along entire Gloucester Road

This is going to go head to head -two pressure groups, seeing who can be the loudest. Those demanding that Gloucester Road becomes like Aberystwyth: free range parking, or those who don't want the cycling clock pushed backwards -but instead want the bike lane expanded and enforced.

It's going to get exciting!

Cyclists: documenting their own failings

A common complaint in the tier-two comments on the tier-three press outlets is "why don't helmet-cam cyclists ever put up pictures of themselves running red lights?"

Hypothesis 1: the cyclists with helmet cameras are not from that subset of cyclists who run red lights, therefore such footage does not exist.

Hypothesis 2: they're just embarrassed when they do things they shouldn't or just screw up.

For some balance then, here's a bit of footage we managed to pick up from one of our in-field tax-dodgers, doing Apsley Road to Hampton Road via the newly re-engineered Lower Redland Road. Regular readers of our site may recall that this is the road where Skansa proposed removing east-west cycling options as part of the Sustainable Travel plan: cyclists would have created conflict with parents driving their children to school sustainably along the one-way system.






0:07 : cycle past a line of stationary cars. While not illegal: still selfish, arrogant and wrong

0:50 : turn right into redland road with the SUV in front, taking advantage of them blocking whiteladies road -but curving over the contraflow in the opposite direction. Yes, the contraflow is new, but that is no-excuse.

0:51-1:50: heading down lower redland road at a speed which -had there been any vehicles behind- have held them up and so created more road rage. Note two cyclists heading the other way, showing that if Skanska's plans had been accepted, there would have been less of that menace on our streets. At 1:30 the new school annex is on the left.

1:50-51: after the vehicle in front pulls out, our tax dodger looks right before setting off.

1:52: as they set off at 5 mph they notice the vehicle in front has actually stopped and have to brake hard: you can see the camera drop, which may be due to the front suspension engaging and/or cyclist momentum carrying them forwards.

The cyclist did stop with over 1 metre to spare -but if they had gone into the back, they'd have left some rubber marks on the rear bumper. And who would have paid for that? Exactly. The unregistered, uninsured, unlicensed cyclist would have run off with what was left of their bike, leaving the owner of the car to pay for the was needed to clean the bumper of and rubber or blood.

While we are at, can we note how hard it is to sport black cars on a winter morning. They should all have hi-viz and some reflective markngs. Consider this: the police cars have hi-viz.

Spicing up the school run

Halfords are reporting a surge in sales of helmet cameras. While one motivator may be that it finally resolves the he-did-I-did and she-did-I-did arguments about positions in road, actions and numberplates, we know the real reason is to provide entertaining content for others to watch on youtube.

Of course, that  content needs to be entertaining, which implies "not dull boring journeys where nothing happens".

This is why we are grateful for FW13EKN spicing up the school run

As you can see, most of the journey down Cotham Hill is boring boring boring. Apart from the delivery van in the middle of the road, nothing worth mentioning. This is a boring journey for the parent, while the child has nothing to talk to their school friends about.

This is where the black golf FW13EKN comes into the picture. You can first see it waiting for the zebra crossing to clear, as it has just turned right of Whiteladies Road.

As soon as it gets round the corner, the driver sees that there is a spare bit of double yellow line for him to park his car into, and if he veers across the road aggressively enough he can take it before anyone else.

He also sees the oncoming parent and child, and decides to make their day entertaining by veering rapidly in front of them. It'd be easy to blame the cyclists for being unlit, did the father not have a Hope Vision LED lamp on the front of his bike, and the child a high power LED light of their own. No, this action wasn't done because they hadn't seen the bicycles, it was because they thought they could clear them in time.

Of course, tax dodgers being what they are, they did take up the space, and the way the parent blocked the car off he has been held up for thirty seconds -which is thirty seconds less of the credit-card base consumption that is essential for keeping the British economy afloat.

Eric "common sense" Pickles is proposing some changes to parking, including a 10 minute right to park on double yellows, and an end to the CCTV parking enforcement which stopped this driver parking in Whiteladies Road directly. We say: it doesn't go far enough.

1. Bicycles hold up parking and should be banned.
2. Bike racks take up valuable pavement parking space that should be removed.
3. The consultation doesn't make any mention of giving us 10 minutes grace to park on white zig-zags by zebra crossings -of which there are so many in shopping areas.

Without such changes, the inner city will never be revitalised by people driving in from the suburbs to buy packs of cigarettes.

Returning to the video, you  can see the parent appreciating the extra frisson of excitement the driver added to an otherwise unmemorable school run -which is why he thanks the driver for their contribution. It's hard to see, but the driver waves their hand in acknowledgement of the appreciation.

The Grove Road Experiment

The local polis are out on the streets monitoring junctions and telling everyone off if they do something they shouldn't, which comes down to : Cyclists and red lights, cars and ASLs and one or two mobile phones.

Yet anyone who doesn't see people in hi-viz police wear at a junction is either too busy reading their facebook notifications or just dim -they should have noticed what what was happening, and behaved.

But no, people got caught by police wearing hi-viz, on a publicised operation. Which makes us wonder: would many more have been caught if the police hadn't been wearing hi-viz.

Being a data science organisation, we decided to see if people do actually change their behaviour and drive legally when they believe that they are being observed.

We chose Grove road for this, as the "no entry" sign has only been there five years and people still resist this unwanted war-on-motorists infrastructure by ignoring it completely.

Key features

1. Contraflowing it can shave about 3 minutes off the journey time from Redland Hill to Whiteladies Road, so aid the school run or the commute
2. You have to commit before you get stuck in the last twenty or so cars at the Redland Hill roundabout, so either plan to use the cut through always, or make a decision based on congestion.
3. If you change your mind you have to reverse and cut up to Redland Hill again -losing you time, especially as you will now have to wait to cut back in: it will cost you more than if you had stayed in the queue.

Being game-theory enthusiasts too. we like this, as it means

1. You have to decide whether to opt to break the law before you can see if the junction is monitored.
2. The gain of breaking the law is 2-3 minutes saved.
3. If the junction is monitored, you are left with the choice of retreat -costing you more than if you hadn't turned off, or you can continue

People aren't likely to just turn back because you point out its a no-entry sign: they know that, and they've made a conscious decision to ignore it because the gain "2-3" minutes matters to them more than the probability that they will get penalised for driving the wrong way down the road.

What then, does it take?

This experimented was conducted on a weekday between 08:28 and 08:38; this sequence shows all but one of the cars choosing to run the sign (that one was omitted as the camera team were in a conversation with a friend and not watching it properly -they shall be soundly beaten).  Only three cars came the other way, showing that that there are two cars driving illegally for every one legally. This gives all car drivers a bad name.

Experiments included:

• Point and talk: no, driver calls cyclist a git
• Wave at passing car for attention: no eye contact
• Point at sign: car does not slow down
• Stand in middle of road and act like you are texting: first car stops, but the mercedes  CLS 320 S22JBW doesn't.

What does appear to make a difference -and you can see from the final two events -is be blatantly holding a phone up as if you are about to take a photograph of the car. Once the driver decides that they are going to be photographed, then they change their minds and revert to the original route. We got a 100% success on that option.

This argues that it is not public attention that changes people's behaviour, nor is it the presence of registration numbers on the vehicle. It is the drivers' concluding that the risk of there being a penalty of of being photographed driving past the no-entry sign outweighs the cost of reversing back and continuing on the original route.

It doesn't matter if people see you, as long as the police don't.

The irony is, of course, that the entire experiment was being filmed on a helmet camera -yet somehow the sight of a phone being used as a camera changed driver behaviour in a way that a cyclist with a helmet with a camera attached did not.

Editorial: Bristol Traffic is not Anti-Bristol-Post

Another day, another batch of tweets and comments confidently claiming that Bristol Traffic is in fact anti Bristol Post.

In fact, some of our staff peruse the web site -and at least one person has actually bought a copy.

We too consider ourselves part of the local press.

So why are we accused of being anti-Evening Post?

We think it's partly because we we dare to acknowledge that in order to gain advertising revenue and retail sales, the Evening Post needs to generate local controversy stories. Anything against the local council -now the local mayor- is good, along with anything "anti-progress", such as campaigners against : Ashton Gate being turned into a supermarket, the Bristol Rovers ground becoming a supermarket, the South Link Road turning South Bristol into a traffic jam. But there aren't enough of those stories, and when there is a lull in the "Ferguson wants to make parking in bus lanes a crime" story, the post has to fall back to anti-cycling articles to generate interest.

We think it's partly because sometimes we use it as a source to identify "mad local campaigner of the week" stories which are printed unquestioningly in it, like the person campaigning against a traffic light that is the sole cause of traffic jams Whiteladies Road. Our defensible datasets do have the misfortune of showing up such people as ill-informed idiots without enough foundational knowledge of how queues work to be allowed near traffic planning.

There are two types of Bristol Post article. There are those written by human beings, which can be interesting and balanced.

Then there are those that are machine generated by taking a set of prewritten sentences, selecting a proper subset of this and then printing them in a random order. These are the articles we are against, because we can create them ourselves and gets boring after a while. And being so repetitive, they even destroy the value of our Evening Post Bingo Cards.

The problem with the human-written articles is that they are so petty they actually cause your brain cells to commit suicide, its like reading a Thomas the Tank Engine novel to a three year old for the seventeenth time. Not only that, they are so out of date, as we showed about their "shocking" discovery that some parking bays near the university were going to be turned into bike buildouts.

And as their number of editorial staff dwindle to a number that can be counted on one hand, they end up having to actually use stories from us and other sites leading to a lag where you can read about Arley Hill texting on our site, or wait a week and get the evening post stance. Why go to the BEP to read about Colston Hill's bike lane improvements, when Wheels On A Bike covered it three weeks earlier.

Frankly, we can't be bothered to read either kind of article these days:, be they machine generated, or human generated off borrowed online content. They are beyond salvation.

Bristol Parking on C4

Channel 4 did a documentary about Bristol's driving and parking issues -you can watch it until early december.

Being Bristol's premier "rational" commentary on parking -and the one with the best historical datset, it's a shame to see us being excluded from the program in exchange for a little old biddy who walks up and down Gloucester Road telling people to move if they don't want a ticket.

Some initial observations

• That TomTom claim that Bristol is "the most congested city" is bogus -it is based on the definition of congestion as "the most significant difference between peak hour journey time and off-peak journey time". We've discredited this before. By their reasoning Bristol is "more congested" than London because driving round London takes forever at any time day or night.
• The focus was on Gloucester Road, with some coverage of the M32 from cameras, and somebody "bold" trying to cross the end of it at Newfoundland Way.
• Stokes Croft coverage was limited to making the assertion that the riot was about a supermarket, not about drunk people being help up by the police.
• They treated one person on the streets of the croft shouting at a traffic warden as unusual, which shows the under-researched program didn't spend more than half an hour in the area -otherwise they'd know that shouting at complete strangers there is a common activity.
• Anchor Road popped up with a mini blocking the bus lane -if the council had done the right thing in the 1970s and turned the harbour into a motorway exchange, there wouldn't be such a narrow approach to an unwidened Jacob's Wells Road. Nor did the closure of the A4 outside college green get covered -let alone queen's square. The way the council has systematically resisted road widening and even converted roads into parkland was not covered as a cause of congestion and parking problems
• George Ferguson appeared to be cycling over the Cumberland Basin bridges, that mess of entrances and exits where nobody ever knows which is the right one to exit on, a road where the on-ramps heading north are angled perfectly to keep the small amount of visible tarmac hidden in your blind spot. Cycling there showed he is in fact a very "bold" mayor.

A key theme was that the council need to tow cars parked in bus lanes because at peak hours the road traffic collapses when this happens. Yet nobody considered it is only buses, cyclists, motorcyclists and taxis that are held up when someone pops into a fish and chip shop for a couple of minutes -AND THEY SHOULDN'T BE THERE!

By eliminating the bus lanes, gloucester road could have more parking for staff and customers to the shops. We'd have to eliminate the buses too, as it would otherwise be like before the clearway went in -when your lane would be held up by a bus that was hanging back to let an oncoming bus get past a minivan with the lights flashing.

You see -there was one key point missed: it is buses that cause congestion. Bus lanes simply eliminate essential parking spaces. And as you can see from elsewhere in the city, every busy high street needs its delivery vans.

One confusing aspect of the C4 programme is that the residents and shopkeepers of Gloucester Road seemed to be complaining the urban clearway preventing parking from 07:30-09:30 and 16:30-18:00,  one and half hours of an 09:00-17:30 shop's opening hours.

Yet they were generally protesting about the RPZ plans.

Which are completely independent of the showcase bus clearway restrictions

And which, by eliminating commuter parking, should actually increase side-street short stay parking

Yet they were protesting. Which makes no sense whatsoever, except that the word "parking enforcement" appears in both contexts. But the urban clearway zones are for traffic flow, so coming to the council house to complain that an RPZ will destroy Gloucester Road is utterly incoherent. They could complain that the showcase bus route is destroying it today, but that is a separate issue.

Why complain then?

1. They have conflated the loss of commuter parking with the fall of civilisation.
2. They are dependent on commuter drive-by customers who will not pop in to the shops if they have to drive round the corner to park.
3. They fear that a reduction in commuter car traffic will impact revenue
4. They will not be able to drive to work themselves.
5. They believed what that Evening Post told them.

Other Gloucester Road issues which surface in the video

• That chip-lady walking up the road telling people to move or they get a ticket? If the council's goal is traffic flow over revenue, then the fact that she is doing this without being paid is not some act of civil disobedience, it is being an unpaid traffic enforcement officer. Also: that chip shop is just up the road from her house. While we don't normally encourage walking. looking at her trying to 3-point turn, walking would actually be faster here -and she should warn people about the council while doing it.
• The Prince of Wales pub did not get any coverage, even though it is a core institution -nor did Grecian Kebabs or Rocco's Pizzeria. None of the long-standing institutions got the coverage and respect they deserve.
• If you want to get your hair cut on Gloucester Road, go to Franco's. Everybody knows that. If another hairdresser on the stretch is complaining they are losing customers who aren't stopping on the drive home -there may be other factors at play.

The RPZ issues for residents are independent of Gloucester Road -but something for coverage another time.

Residents Parking: Bristol's Poll Tax?

According to the evening post, opposition in Montpelier and St Pauls is rising to the point where civil disobedience is contemplated. Already we have an unnamed pensioner pushing for active resistance: "We need to paint out the lines and pull down the signs."

Well, being able to park outside your house is a fundamental right -and when you consider that the troubles in Northern Ireland grew out of a failure of the civil rights movement there, it is better to accede to such demands before they get out of hand.

Even so, hopefully the area will go for rasta colours on the kerbstones, not royalty.

We'd like to highlight a particularly insightful solution to the problem from "Pogo_T_Clown :

Given the tendency of communities to descend into NIMBYism when they're tasked with self-policing, I think this is a flawed idea. However, I do believe that it would create quite a burden for the council to determine the needs of each street in the city. As such, I would suggest a "Street-twinning" system where, for example, a street in Clifton would be twinned with one from Bedminster. The residents of the Clifton street could drive over to Bedminster and provide an objective view on the level of parking required. The people from Bedminster could catch a series of buses to Clifton and return the favour. This would save the council money and improve ties between the communities in Bristol, which could only be a good thing.

This is an innovative approach which we hope the leaders of The Parking Rebellion embrace.

Clifton: premium knives out for the residents

As we said yesterday, the knives are out in Clifton. And when we say knives, we mean the  Messermiester Meridian Elite 9" Kullenschliff Chef’s Knife on a granite kitchen unit, freshly sharpened after its wash in a Miele dishwasher that actually texts your iPhone when the wash is done.

Why? Because the Clifton Business Improvement district's press release on the RPZ contains the phrase "99% of those surveyed feel there should be less residential permit parking in the Village with more pay and display and business permit parking"

The 99% surveyed are the businesses obviously, though they don't give full details about the population size for the survey, number of responses, whether the responses are a representative sample of the population -all the things that we, as a data science organisation, would expect. As the release also says "over 300 business" (sic),  then perhaps that was the population, and the response was over 100, with 1 person saying "no".

This may seem a small detail, but we like defensible data, which is why we like to back up our datasets with photographs, and are prepared to email councillors for the data behind their claims.

Similarly, we like data to justify conclusions, such as "Through BCC’s actions shoppers are more likely to migrate to Cribbs Causeway with free parking and to Cabot Circus where there is sufficient car parking and an efficient bus service."

Note how they avoid noting that Cabot Circus hasn't got any free parking. Because it doesn't -yet there's invariably a queue on the M32/Newfoundland Way approach on a weekend, showing that if people are prepared to drive a distance to the destination, they are prepared to park there for a while. And, if you look at the Cabot Circus pricing, you'll see that it is priced for shoppers not commuters. Because the Cabot Circus operators know that parking is too important to waste on commuters, not when you want revenue-earning shoppers in there. Cribbs Causeway don't have that problem: they have a separate one, namely it is in the middle of nowhere unless you have a car or take the bus.

Anyway, the key issue here is "less residential permit parking in the Village with more pay and display and business permit parking"

If they'd stopped at "less residential permit parking in the Village with more pay and display ". There would have been a nice argument "we need more space for visitors than residents", which could have been a negotiating point -how much for exclusive residents vs shared. Given the residents are (presumably) sacrificing their right to double park in the Mall, unless the Mall Garden Residents Association comes round to approving of echelon parking, instead of saying "please double park instead". they are already sacrificing a lot of the parking capacity of the area.

With a nice tangible "paying customers => money" equation, the BID team would have gone into meetings with the residents with a good negotiating point.

Except they go and spoil it with that final clause "and business permit parking".  That lets the cat out the bag. The reason the Clifton BID want resident parking capacity reduced is not for those customers who would otherwise drive to Cribb's Causeway or go to Cabot Circus. No, it's for commuters into Clifton: the shops and other businesses, such as the soon to be re-opened private hospital whose  management have just discovered that there is nowhere on site for their 100 staff to park and they'd better have a plan here.

This is why the BID is going to go head to head with the residents, and why they have to get the Astroturf out to make it look like the resistance to the RPZ is going to come from residents who will suddenly get hit with bills of "up to" 192 pounds for their car.  It's not about how much residents will have to pay for their #3 car. It's not even about the 0-48 pounds they will have to pay for the #1 car. It's about whether weekday parking space in Clifton should be allocated to residents or to the staff of the businesses in the area.

Which is why this is going to be so much fun to watch it would be worth attending and just asking completely off topic questions like "I only park on zebra crossings -will that still be legal" or "if Bristol Zoo is complaining about staff parking issues, is it because of their history of opposing park and ride to the zoo in favour of letting visitors pay to park on the downs?"

Yes, the wednesday evening event will be entertaining -please attend if you can. Being at Clifton High school there will be free parking for your 4X4 on the school keep clear area -and, as the commuters will have gone, other spaces further up college road if you find yourself forced to walk

Keep Clifton Village Astroturfed!

The knives are out in Clifton, the only bit of the city that has successfully resisted the cycling movement


There's now a movement, Keep Clifton Special, meeting at Clifton High School, 7pm wednesday 13th.





Looks like an Astroturf movement by the Clifton Business Improvement District, who are serving up the full PDF.

The Council proposes to charge residents up to £192 per permit, businesses up to £240 per permit and visitors up to £1 per hour to park

Up to: meaning £192 for your third 4x4. We say 4x4 as there's a discount for the #1 car if it's class A.

We all enjoy and benefit from the thriving mixed community that is Clifton - homes, shops, schools, restaurants, hotels, places of worship and all manner of others from professional firms to the Zoo. But we may lose it forever...

"Mixed". Except poor people and cyclists -which is why we consider it special : the least diverse part of the inner city. It's also why its more boring to sit in a cafe there watching the passers by than it is to sit in the Canteen watching fights break out in Turbo Island.

High streets across Britain are under attack from supermarkets, out of town centres and the internet. Clifton Village is no different. Our shops cannot survive on local trade alone and charging shoppers up to £1 per hour to park would kill them off. There is no benefit to anyone in living close to empty shops!

This  is a fun one. See the "no benefit of living close to empty shops". What that means is the clifton BID are trying to win residents over by saying "all your shops will go away". Whereas the Clifton co-op mini-mart cannot survive on local trade alone.

A recent survey of all Clifton businesses found 100% thought the current proposals would damage their businesses and Clifton as a whole
Several businesses are already preparing to leave Clifton. These businesses currently provide local employment and support our shops. We want to keep Clifton as a special place for people to live, work and spend their leisure time

There's a big jump here from "shops that will go out of businesses if an RPZ comes in" to "businesses already preparing to leave clifton". It's a good attempt to conflate them, but falls down on the "support our shops".

What it means is this: keep Clifton free for shop staff and businesses to park in.

We have no public car park in Clifton and a very limited bus service.

In its favour: no cycle parking either. Not given the council has never rolled out its on-road cycle park. It does have the Clifton Down train station -but that is still a walk from the village, and the number 9 bus meanders there so slowly you would be faster going down Alma Road on a space hopper blindfolded. Yet there is nothing to stop the clifton BID providing a free/discount minibus for staff and shoppers.

Neither is likely to change in the foreseeable future and many people have no realistic transport options

Surely making the area an RPZ will actually free up parking spaces for shoppers that would otherwise be occupied by commuters? Isn't that perceived as a benefit? Of course not! What's being discussed here is staff and commuter parking, not residents or shop customers.

We all want to keep out commuters who use Clifton as a car park and then walk or take the bus to the city centre.

This is the issue. It's not "keep out commuters who use Clifton as a car park" it's "keep out commuters who aren't important enough to work in clifton.

But we can achieve this without spoiling this beautiful conservation area with obtrusive signs, pay and display machines and double yellow lines everywhere

No it is not cluttered by anything right now



All the cars in these photographs are an integral part of the historic landscape -and as they are commuters for the nearby workplaces, essential to the lifeblood of the village



This is where the whole yellow lines and clutter argument is a dangerous one to go near -and why we never do it ourselves. It's too hard to defend. Especially when there is double yellows in the core of the village, near where the bollards for the few tax-dodgers who enter the village go




Clifton is special and deserves a special parking solution. Without it, Clifton will become a shadow of its current self and we all – residents, businesses and visitors – will be the losers.

The knives are out here, and the Clifton BID is the one with the kitchen knife slowly pointing it at the residents. Because it is not after shopper space -not really, not given so little exists on a weekday-. It's after making sure that they get enough commuter space for their staff-and that's only going to happen if the space gets taken away from the residents.

Anyway: wednesday could be entertaining!

The cycling police state: first they came for themselves

Cycling is apparently, "the new golf" for the silicon valley people -the cyclists building the new surveillance state.

They can pop out on a weekend and climb the Santa Cruz Mountains

In the distance, the airship hangars of Moffet Field, which we covered earlier.

We pointed out that the NSA could easily run a fibre cable under the cycle path to the Googleplex. We broke that news two weeks before the "legacy" printed press. Nobody can accuse us of being a spoof now.

What do these police-staters talk about? Their plans for watching everybody. But who do they start with? The drivers? The pedestrians? No, they come for themselves, with the Strava application running on their phones, measuring their time up Old La Honda.



With their phones they can measure their speed, compare it with others, and give them their performance on a ride

 
Which is where we have some bad news for this particular tax-dodger. 2400 of 7500 puts them only just inside the top 1/3 of climbers, which isn’t very good, not for someone near the top of ninetree hill. And that heart-rate numbers makes it clear they were suffering all the way up, heart rate jittering between 170 and 184.Which tells us that they are under fit, getting old and losing peak heart rate, and possibly overfond of consuming beer at those establishments at the top of Ninetree Hill, such as the Hillgrove.

No, this person wasn’t up to having business deal conversations with anyone else, not in aerobic deficit for half an hour. If cycling is the new golf, this person isn’t a good golfer.

Which is information that Strava now knows. In fact, it will know

• who they ride with.
• what their fitness levels are.
• whether they are Soft Southern Jessies who don’t cycle in the rain.
• what their commuting schedule and route is
• what their leisure hours are
• what health issues they may have

This is valuable information -and yet they are giving it away for graphs of how fit they think they are.

For everyone worried about the cyclists building a surveillance state, know this: they will practise on themselves first until they have it right

Ghost Bikes

You cannot be too careful on a dark All Hallows' Eve when you drive home. Ensure that you look all around you, especially at the industrial units on your right as you turn from Trinity Street onto St Philips Road, who knows what nasty creatures maybe lurking there. But just remember, you must shield your face from the baleful red glow of the video camera of a possible Ghost Bike rider. We say possible, as this driver of YCIIEUX did not actually pass though the apparition, so it's not proven yet that they exist...


View on YouTube
(video and text from Obsydian Bris)