Tribars: not for urban use

Following on from our coverage of the fact that its sporty cars that lose from the 20 mph zone, we should look at the impact of the figures on bicycles.

Before anyone points out that bicycles are exempt from the limit, consider that if it becomes a speed that people expect, then going above it would create problems for people assuming you are heading more slowly. Though as any tax-dodger will point out, most people passing your or pulling out assume you are near-stationary and plan their manoeuvre  accordingly.

Even so, fast bikes don't have a place in the city. Stick to 20 or less: and if you can do that on the uphills you've earned those numbers.

What it does mean is that just like fast cars, tribars aren't needed in the city, nor are carbon wheels or polka-dot socks.

Yet here we see someone doing 6-8 mph in exactly that setup.

And while it's nice to see that they are staying way below that 20 mph limit, they do have their arms on the tribars. Which is another way of saying "their hands are a long way from the brakes".

As they reach the end of Kensington Place, they approach the give way point at Lansdown Road, where this lack of braking ability almost catches up with them. Because there's a Range-Rover heading north from Lansdown Place —below that 20 mph— and the cyclist needs to make a bit of an emergency swerve from going into it. Which could have damaged the paintwork on the car as well as written off some carbon wheels.

Bikesnob is always taking the piss of triathletes. It doesn't really apply here, but it does send a message to all: plan ahead, keep your hands near the brakes especially as you approach junctions where you are expected to give way.

Note the yellow lines on the road. This is the Clifton Village RPZ, as you can see on a weekday it is now a wasteland.

Bristol's 20 mph zones: it's the hot cars that lose

The 20 mph zone has been up for a year now, so it's time to review it as drivers

1. It doesn't make things slower. Really. It's the delays at junctions & in queues that increase journey time.
2. It makes things calmer. There's less pressure to put your foot down when you do clear a junction.
3. Similarly, as you approach a junction, you can coast down more gently. 
4. As you are going a bit slower, you can take time to look around, which gives you a better view of pedestrians. This is tangibly better at night.
5. It actually helps you pulling out from side roads to main roads. Why? As everyone is moving slower, the time window for you to do things like pull a right turn with cars approaching from both directions is larger.
6. Fuel economy? No obvious difference. The engine may be less efficient in 3rd than 4th, but you don't have to accelerate so hard, and can coast down. Of course, anyone in a hybrid car is laughing as their petrol engine can work even less, and gain more regenerative braking from the gentle slow down.
7. Keeping track of your speed? Third gear low RPM seems to work. If you feel the need to go to 4th, you are going too fast. 
8. Does everyone follow 20 mph? 22-25 is more realistic daytime speed; at night the speed goes up to 30 until the minicabs come out, when it ramps up 40 mph just when the drunk people start walking home.
9. Increased road rage? No obvious difference. As the average commute speed is < 20 mph in Bristol (TomTom's unverified data, not ours), it's hard to see how it could be made worse.
10. Collapse of businesses due to increased white van journey time. Not obvious. Congestion is the limiting factor, not maximum speed.
11. Passing Bicycles? No harder or easier. It's still irritating to be behind someone going along at 12 mph. But the speed limit doesn't make passing harder. We just want fitter cyclists out there.
12. Then there's the "two shopping trolley" man wandering round the streets these days. We have no idea why he has two shopping trollies full of his entire belongings, but he does, he goes down the roads (not the pavements) at about 4 mph. Again, 20 mph doesn't make a difference.

So who loses? People who spent money on fast cars. You shell out all that cash for a nimble toy, for an extra digit or two at the end of your car brand logo —"i", "GT", etc—, tinted windows and some wheels that just scrape easily.  The key "performance" benefits are tighter suspension, and most of all the ability to accelerate better. 

Which is now utterly wasted, as most vehicle's 0-20 numbers are relatively similar. And pootling around at 20 mph means no need for suspension that lets you do 90 degree turns at 35 mph.

That's enough to drive you to road rage: not the fact that you are doing 20 mph, but the fact you spent a lot of money on your status toy and are doing 20 mph.  Even if you want to go faster, there'll be someone in front who doesn't, who appears to drive at exactly 20 mph on a fast ratrun road  like Ashley Down, Pembroke Road or Filton Ave. It's almost as if some people, on noticing an important person driving a high-end Audi or BMW SUV actually take their foot off the accelerator, dropping from 24 mph to 20. Which we consider unacceptable and strongly condemn anyone doing this.

For those people who have spent the money, they expect something in return.

Fortunately, every so often the opportunity arises. Here is one our instrumented tax-dodgers going down Nugent Hill, Cotham, using the bike contraflow to get to the Arley Hill evening traffic jam, and so on to Stokes Croft. As they join the Arley Hill queue, you can see a green light allowing some traffic to slowly get out to places more interesting.

And here you can see the BMW 3 series YF57KTE getting some return on investment. First they can come off the speed bump while accelerating (suspension), then put their foot down to catch up with the cars in front. Those cars in front who are going through on orange we note.  But as the BMW is now almost joined up with them, it can do the "part of the same group" gambit and carry on through on the red light.

That tactic has given them a bit more speed than the vehicles in front, forcing them to negotiate what is effectively a chicaned right turn fairly aggressively: that suspension at work again.

They then need to put their brakes on, not because of the speed limit but because they've caught up with the car in front.

There: 15 seconds of real driving, out of probably 30 minutes of suffering. Not much —but that's all a 20 mph zone offers, at least during the early evening commute.

An introduction to surveys

Richard Payne of ITV has asked by way of our strategic code-sharing and data mining partners, Twitter, how to explain bias and self-selection in surveys.

This is a topic dear to our hearts for a number of reasons:

1. We consider ourselves to Bristol's premier data-driven traffic analysis site.
2. We recently conducted a survey on traffic issues for the city —a survey which has been completely ignored by the evening post, the BBC and ITV.
3. We have just received an SERC grant for a new project to measure the weight of the city using a stopwatch and a trampoline —and plan to conduct our survey at the BRI next week.

Population: A collection "set" of things you want to measure values from.  Examples: the population of Bristol or all the residents of an area within Bristol.

Subset: Some or all entities within a subset. Example, some of the population of Bristol or some of the residents of an area within Bristol.

Proper subset: A subset of a set which is actually smaller than the original set. (fancy mathematical word: Cardinality). Examples: some but not all of the population of Bristol, or some but not all of the residents of an area within Bristol.

What is important here is that, by definition, a subset of a population must not contain any members outside that population. As examples, a subset of the population of Bristol must exclude people from North Somerset. Similarly, a subset of the residents of an area within Bristol must not contain anyone who does not live within that area.

In our survey we actually measured the origin of our self-selected sample to assess this. We could have just ignored them, but instead chose to include them in our answers on the basis that it was easier just to leave them in.

Data: Numbers. May be analysed by somebody with a statistical background to reach some meaningful conclusions. Without those mathematical skills you'll end up with something as useful as having a rabbit do your tax return.

Measurement: Using some form of scientific mechanism to come up with data about the things you measure. Examples: determining the weight of someone with a weighing scale. Determining the parking and driving habits of people by recording where they park or tracking where they drive.

Invalid Measurement: trying measure something by using the wrong tools, badly calibrated tools or reading the numbers off wrong. Example: determining the weight of people by having people jump onto a trampoline and using a stopwatch to time how long it takes for them to stop bouncing.

Poll: Asking people for their opinions. This is different from a survey in that it is assessing the beliefs of those people, rather than through measurement. Example: asking someone how much they think they weigh rather than putting them on a weighing scale. Asking people about parking and driving rather than actually recording or tracking them.

Leading questions. A sequence of questions which may, unintentionally or not, change the answers to follow-on questions. As example of leading questions, imagine the following sequence

1. Are you aware that being overweight can lead to an increase in coronary heart disease and diabetes?
2. Do you believe that overweight people should be billed by the NHS for medical care for weight-related conditions.
3. Are you a fat bastard?

After the first two questions, nobody will say yes to question 3.

Census: Measuring or polling a Population. Examples: people whose weight you want to measure, or the residents of an area whose opinion on parking you want to known. A census of a population is the only way to come up with a value of the measurement or poll which can be considered 100% accurate in terms of sample set. Everything else is incomplete and therefore inaccurate to some degree.

Survey: Measuring or polling a proper subset of a population —with the goal being to extrapolate the results to the entire population. Examples: weighing only some of the people in Bristol to extrapolate the weight of everyone in the city, or polling some of the residents in part of the city to extrapolate to the opinions of all the residents of that area.

Sample: The proper subset of a population used in a survey. Examples: some but not all of the population of Bristol, or some but not all of the residents of an area within Bristol. Another term is Sample Set.

Defensible: Something which you can present to people who understand statistics without being laughed at.

Invalid Sample Set: A sample for a survey which cannot be used to extrapolate to the entire population. Examples:

1. Including people from North Somerset in a survey to determine the average weight of the population of Bristol.
2. Weighing only those Bristolians who have been referred to the BRI heart clinic in a survey to determine the average weight of the population of Bristol and using a trampoline and a stopwatch to do so.
3. Using too small a survey set for the size of the total population. Example, weighing two people and attempting to reach a conclusion about the weight of the entire population of the city.
4. Attempting to conduct an opinion poll of residents of part of the city without excluding non-residents of that region.
5. Attempting to conduct an opinion poll of residents of the city within, say, residents parking zone, yet deliberately choosing to exclude parts of the area —such as, say, Kingsdown and the city centre.
6. Excluding some of the population on the basis that they do not meet some criteria. Example: excluding anyone who doesn't own a car from any opinion poll on the topic of residents parking.
7. Conducting an opinion poll of the residents of part of the city by only asking those people who have opinions on one specific outcome of the survey. Example: asking only people opposed to residents parking of their opinion on the topic. Conducting a survey by requiring participants to perform some action such as posting in their survey. The latter tends to something called self-selecting samples.

In our survey 32% of respondees declared they couldn't afford a car. These people don't have valid opinions on parking, nor on other parts of our own survey.

Statistical Outliers

These are a fun thing in experiments. Something way out of the expected. You can include these in your answer, though you can also try and work out how the outliers got in there and then discount them —this is especially useful if you are trying to make sure the survey reaches the conclusions you want it to.

Look at our question on the number of wing-mirrors replaced since the 20 mph rollout.

70% of the respondees claimed that they hadn't replaced any wingmirrors since the 20 mph zone. This was utterly unexpected, and, if used when trying to determine the average number of wingmirrors lost per resident per year, we get an arithmetic mean of 0.87 mirrors/year -less than one!

Yet can be explained if we include two other facts from our survey

• the number of respondees who asserted that they lived outside the city: 54%
• The number of respondees who asserted that they were too poor to own a car: 32%

As we are measuring the impact of 20 mph zones, we should be discounting those people from our analysis of this question:

Discounting non-car owners: 70-32 = 38. Therefore of respondees who owned car, only 38% of them got through the year without needing a new mirror.

Discounting non-residents. 54-38: -16! Which seems impossible, unless you consider that many of those non residents will have driven into a 20 mph zone, and so lost a mirror.

Once you discount the non-car owners and non-residents, we get the result we expected: since the 20 mph rollout, everyone in the 20 mph zone has lost one or more wing-mirrors, with the average number being 3. At 15-25 pounds a shot,  that wingmirror-tax is yet another tax on the hard-working motorist.

Causality and co-relatedness
Again, fascinating. Merely because two things appear correlated over time, doesn't mean that one causes another.

In this question Why has congestion got worse in Bristol over 25 years?, 17% said BT added an extra digit to all the phone numbers in the early 1990s. Some people may say "so what?", or even "the growth in Bristol's population caused BT to add more numbers; that same population growth increased the number of cars, hence the resultant congestion". We say something else: It was the adding of that digit which made it possible, in a pre-mobile-phone era, to move to the city. That 17% were right. And from this survey nobody can prove us wrong!

Invalid Survey
Any survey that can be considered invalid from a statistical perspective. Common causes are: invalid sample sets, leading questions, bad measurement, leading questions and bad-analysis, including confusing correlation for causation.

For some examples:

1. Asserting facts about the average weight of Bristolians through an opinion poll with leading questions conducted at the BRI heart clinic of 4-5 people, without even excluding any attendees from North Somerset. That fails: invalid sample set and leading questions.
2. Asserting facts about the entire population of Bristol's opinions on residents parking through an opinion poll with leading questions conducted against a self-selected sample set of some people who care about the subject.
3. Getting your maths wrong when you add things up, divide the answers, etc.
4. Misinterpretation of results. Reaching the wrong conclusions. If you want to reach a set of conclusions, you are less likely to question the sampling or analysis if the outcome agrees with your expectation. This is sometimes called confirmation bias

One classic way to bias a survey is simply to discount the "don't know" respondees and other non-participants. If you explicitly exclude these people from your survey —example by asking different people the question until you get one whose answer is interesting enough to write an article about, you've got an invalid subset of the population, hence the results cannot be extrapolated.

This problem of the don't-know answer is particularly bad in any self-selected survey because the members of the population who don't not hold opinions tend not to participate in it. Instead you get that subset of the population who hold opinions one way or the other.  It is also common for any survey which requires an action on behalf of the respondee, be it jump on a trampoline holding a stopwatch, or fill in a paper questionnaire and then post it.

Summary

As you can see, it is a lot easier to produce an invalid survey than a valid one. More subtly, its very easy to misinterpret a invalid survey for a valid one without knowledge of the sampling and measuring process, and knowledge of statistics.

For that reason, while surveys can provide some data about a subject, you can't consider the conclusions to be valid without knowing about the sampling, measuring and analysis —and any bias of the surveyors.

When you reviewing a survey, you should really query

1. The population for which the survey is meant to be analysing
2. The sampling process conducted in order to get a valid sample set
3. How things were measured
4. If it is some form of poll, the sequence and content of the questions.
5. Outliers: what were they? were any discounted?
6. What compensation have you made for non-participants?
7. How do you defend your claim that this survey can be extrapolated to the population it was meant to.

Alongside invalid surveys, you have bad reporting of surveys. Often this where an invalid survey has been conducted yet the survey is reported as if it is actually represented as "fact" or representative of the entire population. This is a shame that reporters do accept surveys so unquestioningly -as if they did, they'd realise how often politicians use bad maths to make decisions. Or, in the case of Bristol, to generate controversy for the local press where otherwise there'd be nothing in the papers to talk about.

Further Reading

We hope readers found this introduction to surveys and censuses informative and timely. Please practice what have learned by using some of the terms introduced above in your everyday conversation —at least once per day. Example uses

• "Please can I sample some of your chips"
• "the causality relationship between eating chips and being overweight is not clear",
• "your survey is utterly indefensible due to its painfully awful selection bias and leading questions  —your attempt to extrapolate it to any larger population hence so ridiculous you'd fail a GSCE if you sat one this week"

For anyone interested in learning more about this topic, here are some great online books on the topic

• Probability and statistics EBook UCLA. wiki-based book. Notable for a section of uses and abuses of statistics.
• Introduction to Probability. Dartmouth College.
  Foundational undergraduate probability book, with the history of the topic included too. Did you know that early work in probability was funded by french nobility so that they could win more money gambling with their peers? you do now. 
• Think Stats: Probability and Statistics for Programmers, Green Tea Press.
  —great read which makes few assumptions about the ability or willingness of readers to stare at equations. 

Clifton: last days of Christchurch School paveparking

Royal Park is yet to get its markings, so we can view the invaluable space the council will be taking away, ruining with ugly yellow lines

Here, by Christchurch School, the lines already exist -but as they can be ignored, they have a beauty of their own

Round the corner, there's more pavement space. Its inevitable the council will put down double yellow lines here —just so schoolchildren can get to school safely

Yet look at our archives: we've evidence back from 2008 that there's enough space for cars and children!



Given that small children on scooters can already squeeze past parked cars, there is no justification in adding more ugly yellow lines —or even enforcing the ones that are already there

Royal York Crescent: ruined!

Royal York Crescent is the grandest of the Clifton terraces, overlooking the entire city.

Only now, look out the window and what do you see? Yellow lines.

Completely out of place in a historic environment, such as this pleasant rural-esque scene of a pickup paveparked behind some bollards

Utterly inappropriate removal of echelon parking opportunities on a blind corner.

There's only a few days until the car-hating council start enforcing these awful yellow lines

A few more days for the village to live

It's worth remembering that the motorist-haters were pushing for bike parking on these streets.

bike racks would ruin one of Bristol's —nay, one of Britain's—greatest Georgian crescents!

 

Clifton RPZ: Yellow lines ruin Wetherell Place

Here's the junction of Wetherell Place and Frederick Place, forever ruined

Remember before, the quaintness of the village-in-a-city look




From a quiet-villagesque pavement to park on, to what ? double yellow lines



This totally destroys the character of the area




And for what? For safe walking round the city? For the benefit of people too poor to afford a car?

Unacceptable.

Castle Parking: Taking the 'P' out of Park

Here's the nice new corner piece of Castle Park and Broad Weir where pedestrians can sit and rest after a hectic day of shopping in Cabot Circus. The Council have gone to all the trouble of landscaping a formerly naff patch of ground in an effort to make it a bit more appealing. And like flies to manure, the paveparkers have found out that you can dump a vehicle there all day, just behind the bus stop.But wtach out, that newly laid turf is a bit wet and the mud might get on your tyres:(

Clifton Village RPZ rollout: first photos!

We're here with the first photos of the clifton RPZ rollout.

As you can see —the paint is now down



In the background, the village has died, the trees have rotted away, and volcanoes have risen up out of the devastation.

Zombies travel the wasteland, eating children and small pets.

This is everything Clifton Tank Command warned us about!

Prime Numbers are Crime Numbers

Earlier this week, David Cameron said there should be no means of communication which we cannot read

That's pretty significant. Because, as some subversives have pointed out, internet communications is locked down via HTTPS and other protocols that encrypt their data, often using the RSA Public Key algorithm to do it. Which relies on the fact that, given a big non-prime number, it's "computationally very hard", to determine which two prime numbers can be multiplied together to produce this number.

Thus, in order to stop people encrypting their data in a form which the government cannot read, they are going to have to ban prime numbers.

A number which is forbidden to be discussed, shared or published on the web is known as an Illegal Number, the 09F9 key to decrypt blu-ray disks being a notorious example: a number where everyone publishing it initially received an DMCA takedown notice. Certain prime numbers can also be considered illegal, such as one which is actually the x86 linux binary code to decrypt a DVD.

All Cameron is proposing, then, is expand the list of Illegal Numbers, to some other numbers, specifically all prime numbers. That's a big list, so we'll shorten it by providing a set-theoretic definition of primeness:

∀ n in Naturals: ∄ p, q ∊ {2..n-1} : (p ≠ q ∧ p * q = n) 

That is all numbers n in the set of natural numbers Naturals, for which there do not exist two distinct numbers p and q in the set of numbers 2..n such that p times q equals n.

There: simples. And stopping terrorists sending messages the government —ideally a government led by Boris Johnson with Nigel Farrage as his deputy— cannot read is common sense.

Except, well, it's not going to work, not without bringing down The Internet As We Know It. 

Which would be somewhat inconvenient.

We've stated before that we are building a modern police state, a datacentre state, at an undisclosed location in stokes croft. Some of it is being rolled out, such as these undercover CCTV cameras near the Moon Pub. Some crimes don't merit hidden speed cameras enforcing publicly displayed limits, other crimes,  like rolling some locally grown weed —do.

Because we are a small police state of our own, we have agreed to try out the new "no encryption policy" before it is rolled out nationally. 

We do however recognise that encryption is critical to functionality of the internet, so will allow small primes —anything below 2^8. That is, only primes >= 256 are illegal.

We have issued our local PCSO with a list of all of legal primes, and given them a new power. As well as being able to fine cyclists for cycling on the pavement, they are now permitted to inspect phones and other computing devices to see if they contain prime numbers greater than 255. If so, the criminal will be arrested then deported to the Avonmouth detention facility (formerly: Portway Park and Ride) for The Duration of The Emergency.

Our PCSO will also be allowed to stop and search anyone, in case they are "Prime Number Mules", trying to sneak large prime numbers into the area in USB sticks hidden in body parts. We won't go into the specifics. 

Be advised, because connecting to facebook or twitter uses encypted HTTPS connections, even when done from their phone apps, driving while texting is going to have to be made temporarily illegal —banned until our strategic partners release "Stokes Croft editions" of  the applications.

To catch these possible terrorists, we are now recategorising cyclists such as here, RedVee, from "tax dodging scum", to "guardians in the war on terror". They are now permitted to report such incidents as the one above, in case the culprit is not a "hard working motorist", but instead "threat to society". A&S police will look up the vehicle registration, determine whether or not the driver is Muslim, and take action when appropriate.

Templemeads: the city gateway experience

Bristol is getting a new City Gateway: one in the middle of the city.

The phrase "city gateway" should be a warning sign; it means someone has focused to much on some "urban realm" and new visitor experience rather than useful.

The only direction to be coming from where the "city gateway" would be the first thing you see of the city is if you are coming from the train station and have never visited the city.

In this situation, what would you rather see:

1. A six lane road with a bend in it, where, at the jut-out point, some trees?
2. A bus station with buses taking you useful places?

Because Bristol has two public transport city gateways: the bearpit and now this. And unlike the bearpit, we don't fear gentrification here, the Brunel pub suddenly serving beer you can drink, or open air pop-up cafes in front of the train station. (yes, we know about gateway 3, the underpass for walking and cycling. Another day)

But wait! people say, we are going to get a new showcase entry to the north of the station.

That entry point exists already. It's very convenient pickup/dropoff point today, because nobody else knows about it and you can pull off Temple Way early and stop right by the entrance.

It's also known by the cyclists as the way you can get to the station without being run over, the way you can get out without being run over on the way back, and where you can collect pre-ordered tickets from a machine which will only issue them to you if you have both the card and a six-character reference number. Given that you can check in for a transatlantic flight needing only the credit card, we are still trying to determine what security requirements mandate a significantly stricter policy for issuing tickets between Bristol and Bath, but we are sure it makes sense.

The cyclists gain from being able to get to the Bristol-Bath railway path, which is signposted

That's it, the blue one above the no-bicycles and "Cyclists dismount and give way to pedestrians" sign. That's our favourite, as it makes clear that even when they get off a bicycle they are still the Untermenschen of our city, the only ones we can discriminate against until UKIP come in to power and we can ban anyone muslim from the M4.
emplemads.
Anyway, cyclists can get to and from the railway path here. As this is the site of the most recent templemeads access point redevelopment, let's look at it and see what the last designers did in terms of making walking and cycling in Bristol better.

It starts at the Cheesegrater, one of the two Bridges added in the twenty first century. These are the showcase walking and cycling bridges to Templemeads. We'll get back to them after the tour.

Here then, we cycle across the Cheesegrater Bridge, as if the Untermensch were coming from the railway path, go past the "Untermenschen get off and respect your superiors" turnoff, where the Untermensch turns right, along what is currently a wide cycle route separate from the footpaths, and which will be upgraded to "new route for station dropoff". That is good, a bike path that wide is wide enough for a road: its what it needs. And we know from the rest of the area, that cyclists and pedestrians will share a pavement provided there's a sign telling the cyclists to dismount.




Carrying on from there, Herr Untermensch continues along past the "wet wood with afterthought traffic calming when they discovered people were actually cycling over it bridge", or as we will now call it "the rattling wood bridge" Then: along the river. This could actually be a nice route to the city centre, except that its existence is kept a secret. Even the pedestrian signs to Cabot Circus don't direct people this way, not when there's some main roads to walk past. Oh, and a new "city gateway" of course. In theory, then, this riverside walk could be made a walking and cycling "city gateway", one that took people to Cabot Circus and even the new Broadmead, whenever those plans surface. This path is also the most direct route to the Bus station, 15-20 minutes and traffic free the whole way. Maybe: but Bristol has always been proud of the inner ring road, "temple way", and should celebrate it. On bike, an Untermensch will eventually reach the Counterslip Road where they can see that the council would rather provide three parking bays on a bridge than any form of cycling infrastructure. Just something to bear in mind whenever someone talks about a war on motoring: we still have those parking bays on the bridge on Counterslip Road.


Finally, down some steps and along the remainder of the path to Castle Park. To summarise: a quiet route from the station, which with some minor effort could me made a gateway to the city:

• Lighting
• Signing
• Tax-dodger routing on the counterslip
• some way to get bikes up the stairs.

Finzal's reach will address this by adding a slightly different bridge, one to the west. As you can see from the consultation, this will be a curvy bridge, like Peros' the cheesegrater and the slippery wooden one.

There've been some mixed feelings about this. The cycling campaign felt that the route wasn't designed to take the cycling traffic volumes which would be seen if the councils goals of numbers of people cycling were actually to be met. On the other side, the Bristol Civil Society came out against it, because

Finzel’s Reach Bridge would not be the choice of most people walking or cycling between Cabot Circus or the Old City and Temple Meads Station; they would choose to cross Bristol Bridge or St. Philip’s Bridge. 

This surprises us. Certainly people walking and cycling choose to use Bristol Bridge or St. Philip’s Bridge, but that's because "those are the two bridges they can use", especially when "the nice route by the river isn't known about by all". They also chose not to critique the bridge for the reason we would, which is

we are sick of architects trying to give us fancy bendy bridges as they don't appear to work. Given Bristol's history of being built around a bridge, being internationally renowned for its suspension bridge, can we have some bridges which now actually meet their design goals of "getting people over the rivers safely"?

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, back to the Cheesegrater. This is a bridge which has warning signs telling people not to cycle over it when wet, and even for pedestrians to take care. Think about that. 

• A bridge.
• Two transport modes: walking and cycling
• Expected traffic volume: more than one person walking or cycling over the bridge at the same time, possibly in opposite directions
• For use in Bristol. Which has rained a lot in the past 1000+ years, enough for people to know that wet surfaces should be a common state, sometimes being replaced by "icy surface". Yet the cheesegrater bridge utterly fails to provide anything resembling traction in this situation. 

Now look at the implementations we've had in C21

Valentines: 
Surface: wood, slippery when wet or icy, rickety
Shape: S-shaped, for no apparent reason other than someone thought it was innovative
Designed for: walking and cycling
Not suitable for: anyone trying to cycle over it while someone else is walking over it
Amelioration measures: stick up some barriers over the bridge to discourage anyone actually trying to cycle over it.

Cheesegrater
Surface: metal,very slippery when wet or icy
Shape: S-shaped, for no apparent reason other than someone thought it was innovative
Designed for: walking and cycling
Not suitable for: anyone trying to cycle over it when it has rained in the previous 24 hours
Amelioration measures: cyclist dismount signs.

There then, are the two features we have had in terms of innovative city gateway work near Templemeads in the past 15 years. Two bendy bridges that completely fail to meet their design goals. One could just be misfortune. But a second? Didn't someone from the design team look at the first and consider how had it failed? Or did they just say "yes, bendy bridges with slippery surfaces are fashionable, let's do one too".

They didn't, did they. Which means that there are civil engineers out there who are still being allowed to build things. What we fear is this: they are involved in this new Templemeads work.

Step 1: find out who designed the rickety bridge and reassign them to doing bridges in Morocco and other low-rainfall regions.
Step 2: find out who designed the cheesegrater bridge and reassign them to doing something completely unrelated to civil engineering, or indeed designing things that people are expected to use. Working on Windows Phone User Experience, perhaps.

Whatever happens: we have to make sure they weren't involved in the new Templemeads "city gateway" as we know its not going to work, even before looking at the designs.

Clifton may call itself a village, but it is not rural

Some revolutionaries exploited some known PHP hack and defaced the travelwest web site.

Cue cause for coverage in the guardian, Muslim Hackers take down bus schedule web site, including describing how people resorted to facebook to ask the Arab Security Team what the schedule for the #8 bus is.

Well, it's good for Bristol to get some coverage in a paper written in London but sold nationally. Sadly, the paper covered the story with a photo of a stock bus stop in the rural road middle of nowhere. This is surprising, as we'd expected at least one of the paper's unpaid interns to have studied somewhere in the city.

For future reference the #8/9 bus meanders round the northwest bristol urban areas, with Clifton is furthest point in its orbit from its terminus, Bristol Templemeads.

Here, then, is an authentic Bristol #8 bus. Sitting at templemeads with the lights out and no cue whatsoever as to when the bus engine will be spun up and passengers able to get to their destination.



This, and non-determism of Bristol traffic flows, mean that if you live in 30 minutes walk of BTM, then, even if you are on the #8/#9 bus line, you are better off walking, except when one or more of the following conditions are met: its wet, you have luggage, you have a child with you. Even there, given child fares are non-zero in Bristol, walking with a child is still appealing.

As for Clifton being a rural idyll of empty roads: no. The residents may imagine it is a village, but only by the same criteria that stokes croft could consider itself a village: it was one a couple of centuries ago. Avonmouth village has far more villageness.

Dear Guardian: when you next want a photo of a Bristol bus stop -please get in touch.

Tablets in the car are the new status symbol

Anyone can text and drive; here on Arley Hill on a weekday you see about 1 car in 4 texting.

What do you do if you want to show that you are really important?

Step 1 is the expensive car, like the BMW

That's good, but it's not enough, now that phones have become the new status device. What else can you do?

That's right: a tablet, here put away when they noticed someone taking photos of them.

They shouldn't be self-conscious! They should be proud! Tablets are something to show off!

Brunel 150

Sunday saw a fantastic display on the Downs.

And a confirmation that engineering really does work.

After 150 years the Downs were opened up to as many cars as possible for a firework display, which lasted 15 minutes.

Yesterday the roads around the Downs became a thing of the past, and parking prohibition became a mere memory of some ancient time when Engineers were lauded for their contribution to the 'Modern World'.

Luckily for drivers the 'No Cycling' signs did not apply to them, so they were able to park and drive right across the Downs to avoid the gridlock caused by the other traffic and escape into the night. Pedestrians were particularly helpful in getting out of the way if hooted at whilst they walked home. It was fantastic.

Unfortunately, the Downs have returned to normal today, and if you are driving a car you will need to use a road.

However, Bristol's biggest car park WILL be celebrated with fireworks every 150 years from now on.

On the Downs.

In cars.


 

Bristol: cycling discriminates against the obese and the unfit

There's a bit of an upset in Birmingham currently, where (conservative) councillor came out and accused cycling of being discriminatory on race and gender, and that the £23 M could be better spent on things like parking spaces. And that it is also biased against women who want to wear modest clothing.

Well, we agree, in Bristol it is a discriminatory form of transport too. But not on race or gender.

No, in Bristol, Cycling discriminates against obese people with no legs and a lifestyle focused on fry-ups rather than hill climbs. These are people who suffer in our city.

Take this scene here, a mature Bristolian rastafarian working his way up Bridge Valley road. He's very much not a young white man -but to get up the hill on a road bike he has to be fit. A large proportion of our population —especially the residents of the suburbs, are significantly overweight, smoke, and generally live an unhealthy lifestyle.

These are the people that our city cycling project discriminates against —and no amount of cash on cycling infrastructure will fix that, unless the infrastructure involves lifts and escalators.

These are also the people that the city's expanding RPZ project discriminates: people to unfit to walk more than 15 metres to their destination. Removing all the free parking penalises those people who are too unfit to walk or cycle anywhere, by forcing them to pay.

The only person who cares for those people's needs is Eric Pickles –because he is the only politician who understands what it is like to obese and unfit. This is why his "short stops on double yellow lines" proposal is targeted at them: now they will be able to stop outside the newsagent to buy a packet of fags, then drive on to the chip shop to buy the evening meal.

Segregated cycling facilities will make this worse by removing short-stay parking opportunities, discriminating against the obese and the unfit merely by their very presence.


Returning to Birmingham, gateway to the M6, the councillor's colleague, Councillor Hutchings came out with the other part of the story, when he said “he feared hoards” of cyclists would have “a severe impact on pedestrians and motorists”. That's the other way a cycling program penalises the obese and the unfit. If you aren't fit enough to cycle round the city, driving is all you can do. The more cyclists there are, the more you get held up.

This is why the very presence of cycling infrastructure and increased cycling is so discriminatory against overweight suburbanites who will be hit by the triple whammy of cycling infrastructure removing main-road short stay options, the RPZ removing back road long stay parking, and finally cyclists themselves being in the way. Oh, and of course there's the 20 mph zone slowing down the journeys from their houses to the chip shops.

This is why it is critical that the Birmingham councillors recognise that cycling doesn't discriminate against gender or ethnic groups —if that city doesn't get the funding then it could come Bristol's way, and things would only get worse!

Scotland: a nation once again

It's in the balance right now: which way will Scotland vote?

It's time we stopped being impartial and stated our preference: Yes

Why? One reason is that one of our reporters lived there in the 1980s and remembers how a London-based government killed its entire manufacturing base: the shipyards, Ravenscraig, the coal mines, all the time promising that new industries would take its place: the service industry, the financial sector.

Well the financial sector did go big, but mainly so that London grew so wealthy that nobody can afford to live there. Edinburgh gained too -but it turns out those bankers got so excited about short term bonuses they turned out be a con. Meanwhile, what was left of the scottish industry died. Now, an independent scotland isn't going to get the clyde busy again, but at least now it'll have a government that actually cares about Glasgow, unlike Westminster, which has only just discovered where Glasgow is.

The 1980s also came with the Poll Tax, showing how Westminster was happy to impose its daft ideas on scotland first, a country that could be "an experiment". Aye, we remember that.


An independent Scotland would have a a government that cared about Scotland. You don't get that today, and you have no guarantees it will happen in future.

What you do have today is all the legacy politicians going north of the Border and promising more devolved powers. Promising is the key word: no politician can make guarantees. That's particularly true in the Conservative party, who have to keep their backbenchers happy and try and stop voters defecting to the UKIP, which they can only do by having policies that keep Daily Mail commenters happy. They will try and weasel out of every promise they make to Scotland, and over the years, pull more of them back.

As an example: Eric Pickles. We have a government that claims that it is in favour of "localism", in which councils and people get more of a say in what they do. Yet the councils and people are only allowed to do what Eric Pickles wants them to. He's killing the ability of Bristol Council to drive round schools with a CCTV camera to catch parents endangering schoolkids by parking on double yellow lines and keep clear zones. He's killing the councils ability to use CCTV to enforce bus lane parking restrictions. Why? He'd rather appease daily mail readers who believe in "Common Sense" over having safe schools and a functional transport system. Do you really believe that any promises of devolved power to Scotland will be kept when you have ministers trying to restrict how councils enforce bus-lane blocking?

Scotland going independent will force the rest of the UK to think "how will we be governed". The north of England does have legitimate rights to say "we deserve to have devolved powers to ... there's enough of a cultural gulf between there and London, enough of diverged economies, that it makes sense".

The same goes for Bristol. We're the same size as Edinburgh, diverged from London -yet we don't effectively even have a say on whether or not parents  can park outside schools. Any rethinking of how the UK is governed needs to address that.

An independent Scotland has the potential to bring change that will benefit Bristol. It's not guaranteed -yet it delivers an opportunity which can exploit

A vote for no is a vote for the status quo: irrespective of what the promises are.

At Last. Reclaim that Illegal Road Tax.

Yes. We're sick to death of the endless phone calls reminding us we can claim for mis-sold PPI we bought years ago*.

Yes. We're sick of the texts telling us we can claim for that accident that wasn't our fault.

Yes. We're sick of being promised a new kitten if we watch the internet for long enough.

But most of all we're sick of the WAR ON THE MOTORIST!

So thank goodness it's now possible to use a new website to reclaim overpaid taxes, entirely legitimately. All Road Tax ever paid since since 1937 can be reclaimed here:

http://roadtaxexpertuk.wordpress.com/2014/09/15/welcome-to-road-tax-expert-uk/

and Road Tax Expert will help you through a full refund of any Road Tax paid since 1937.

You could be eligible for up to 77 years of repayments!!! That's probably thousands and thousands of pounds.**

*We didn't.

**non-hypothicated tax payers are ineligible. Apparently.

Scandal: Britain's rulers, judiciary and media are a clique of art and law graduates

There's been lots of press this week, rightfully noting that Britain's rulers are an elite clique of a few schools and two universities.

What was not picked up on was

1. All of them have arts and law degrees. Usually the arts degree is "PPE: politics, philosophy and economics", which is an oxbridge-only degree with no real-world relevance outside local and national government. 
2. A whole six percent of the current MPs have science degrees.
3. It applies to the media too, where again schooling, networking and the willingness to work £0 interns get you a job.

This utter ignorance of the scientific method "let the data guide you, not your ill-informed opinions" shows up throughout much of government policy.

• Badger culling. The scientists said it wouldn't work. They were right. 
• The East Coast Mainline returning more money to the treasury than any private rail company, yet the government opening up the franchise again. What is it about spreadsheets that they don't believe?
• The price guaranteed per MWh for nuclear power generated at Hinkley Point C, despite the way the price curves for solar and other renewables saying "massively over the odds"
• Global warming. It may be bad news, but that doesn't stop you pretending it doesn't exist.
• etc. etc. We have politicians on all sides of the house who have agendas and beliefs and who are not prepared to consider how many of those beliefs are defensible

And as noted, the media are as bad. Which means when the politicians say things that are blatantly wrong, this doesn't get picked up on. The classic example is when politicians say that cycling in the UK is safer than the NL as annual fatalities/head of population are less. They can quote the numbers because they are dividing the death rate by the wrong value ... it is as defensible as saying "the uk is safer as annual cycling fatalities per sheep in the country" is less. It's completely bogus, either said knowingly to defend a position —confident that it won't be challenged by a media without the understanding— or uttered because they are clueless and don't recognise its flaws themselves.

This whole "25% of London Guide dog owners" story is the ignorant abuse of statistics:

"A survey by the charity found one in four blind and partially-sighted people were involved in a crash"

As has eventually reached the press, this came from 14 people who may or may not have had guide dogs, and therefore is pretty much meaningless. 

In contrast, we are data driven organisation.

Admittedly all our content is self-selected, hence utterly prone to selection bias and observer bias —but we are aware of this fact and happy to admit it.

1. we back up our assertions with photos and videos, not anecdotes about cyclists hitting wing mirrors and cycling off. 
2. by surveying the same streets repeatedly, we build up a defensible dataset. For example, we have no evidence that the fabled "stokes croft bike lane" actually exists other than as a short-stay parking area for the post-office and the mercedes owner who lives next door to it. 
3. When our assumptions are proven incorrect, we are happy to admit it. For example, when we had evidence that the infamous YA55VDY delivery van could park legally when there was a space for it.

we also know what a survey is. 

For the reference of others

1. Census: you measure the entire population (i.e. set of things you care about).
2. Survey: you measure a proper subset of the entire population in the hope that this data can be used to reach conclusions about the entire population. 

The critical thing is that for a survey to substitute for a census, it needs to be a representative sample of the entire population.  If it is not, then it can only be expanded to the non-representative portion of the population.

In the case of the guide dogs, it could be expanded to say "25% of the kind of people who follow our twitter feed and can be bothered to fill in surveys claim to both have guide dogs and to have been hit by a cyclist"

That's a very different statement. But it is all that can be made.

Which brings us round to the point. It's bollocks, but it is a bollocks that will be repeated blindly by much of the press then believed by its readers —and it will also be believed by politicians who don't have a clue about how numbers work.

Maybe we should just make up random facts too.

Clifton: riot of the self-entitled

The Economist has discovered the Clifton Popular Front in their article Four wheel Fever.

This shows what press a tank in a city can have.

The paper did fail to note what bad press a tank in a city can have, such as when the driver of the tank feels that a protest against an RPZ in Clifton is more important than a protest against bombing of UN refugee centres in Gaza


As the paper nodes, "CLIFTON, in Bristol, is an unlikely hotbed of political activism. ". It is however, a hotbed of self-entitlement, be it the right to park your 4x4 on a double-yellow-lined corner near your fee-paying school, the right to double-park near your house -and the right for commuters to park on pavements.

Which is the problem: a clash between a mayor trying address the traffic problems for the city with a part of the city that believes in the inalienable right to drive the kids to school even if there is no parking, to drive to the local shops even if there is no parking, and to drive to work even if there is no parking.

A lot of the city believes that, but Clifton is one part of the city that has come out in protest against it. There's also the Aberystwyth Faction of Gloucester Road, but they have gone quiet. And in Clifton, its the traders who believe in the right to drive to work that are being most vocal.

The article is interesting, we just have a few points to add

"Bristol is one of the most congested cities in Britain. Traffic during the evening rush hour moves more slowly than anywhere except Belfast, Edinburgh and London. "

That's something we've looked at before. "Congestion" is an odd concept; for Bristol it is often defined as "the city with the highest variance between peak hour and non-peak hour traffic". Bristol becomes easy to drive around between 09:10 and 16:30, whereas outer london is always near-stationary. Another metric "average traffic speed" fails to consider that journey time is defined as distance/velocity, so if the distances are short, so is the time. In London, people travel further to work.

"Locals will pay £48 ($81) for the first permit to park near their homes."

Locals in some of the city already do, Kingsdown (KN) and Cotham South (CM) being examples. Nobody protested there, showing that it's not the residents in the inner ring that have the issues. It's those people who have adopted a lifestyle that assumes that free parking will be available near their place of work, and consider congestion to be something imposed on them, rather than a consequence of their own decisions.

"In Clifton, a suspension bridge links Bristol with North Somerset. “Everybody and his daughter will park there and walk across,” predicts one resident. Rather than solving a city’s traffic problem, Mr Ferguson might just end up pushing it elsewhere."

If you ever visit Abbot's Leigh on a weekday you will see that it is already full of park+walk commuters. Why? You save on the £1 bridge toll, adding up to £10/week for commuters. There's also more chance of finding a parking space there. Claiming that the RPZ will force commuters to park elsewhere really means "the expanded RPZs will force commuters to walk further". Oh, and as the Downs is out of the zone, park+bus and park+pedal from there will continue to be as popular as it is today.

What the paper does pick up on is the fact that South Gloucestershire council has a big chunk of the Bristol metropole —and a very different transport policy. S Gloucs has the "Leeds Strategy": wider roads. They've had the space for this, but all it does is amplify congestion in the North Fringe. That conflict between strategies is going to place Bristol and South Gloucestershire in head-on conflict between long.

What are the cyclists building? Surveillance State 2.0

Out in Twitter Land, one of those paranoid characters accused the cyclists of "building a police state". They are, but not the toy one he imagines from helmet cameras and ANPR recognition. No, those are surface dressing, something to get irate about while the real mass surveillance state gets "deployed" -as the developers call it, "for the duration of the emergency"

Because this new police state is special.

1. The cost of storing the data is offloaded to to private companies, its a privatised police state.
2. It's designed to scale: it is now affordable to store a "record" about every SMS message, or HTTP connection opened up. 
3. We, the population, are paying for the privilege of having the companies record everything we do, and the state being able to ask for it when we get it back.
4. We've moved on from Irish nationalists and communists to "paedos" and "jihadists" as the enemies. There's something dubious about the paedo one, what with the BBC of the 1970s being worked out, and the attention moving towards the houses of parliament. As for the Jihadist rising, yes, we do have idiots who are getting politicised by watching online videos. But the number of people killed by these naive fools is still a fraction of those killed in the troubles: a we didn't have a mass surveillance state then.

So what's changed since the 1970s? The back infrastructure for mass surveillance states now has O(1) scalability; the front end consumer electronics

In computational complexity theory, there's a notation, Big O Notation, used to describe the scalability of system. It doesn't describe how hard things are, but how much harder things get as the problem gets bigger.

The Deutschland Demokratic Republik, the DDR, is notorious for having the worlds most comprehensive mass surveillance society. But they did it by hand. 


For every citizen to watch, they needed a watcher, so the scalability of their state was linear, written down as O(n) scalability. Double the population, double the watchers, double the costs. That's if you trust the watchers. If you want to keep an eye on them, well, if we assume one monitor per 8 stasi members -and that those monitors need watching too, the scale becomes O(n)+O(n/8)+O(n/64)+... You get the point: it doesn't scale. The DDR tried, but it placed too much overhead on their economy, and even being the most efficient of the communist states wasn't enough. Eventually the population chose they wanted those consumer toys rather than the police state, the army felt the same way, and because the russians chose not to send their tanks in, down came the wall.

Nowadays though, we can build a police state with O(1) scalability, where the 1 has a name: Google.

  
Yes, everyone views them as a search engine, or an email service, but behind the scenes they've been developing that infrastructure for storing a snapshot of the web, indexing it's cross page links ("metadata", as they call it). The Google File System, GFS, and its computation layers on top: MapReduce, Pregel and Caffeine,as well as most recently, Spanner. As the abstract there says, "it is the first system to distribute data at a global scale".


What else have google done? Android: a smart phone OS, that they give away, indeed, they even sell their nexus phones at a loss. Why? Because it is profitable for them to give away the OS and sell phones at a discount, in exchange for you to carry a little device wherever you go. One that checks in with Google regularly, giving Spanner data to replicate, Google FS something to store, Pregel something to join together.

   
We are all paying every month for the right to carry a bit of electronics that continually reports to your mobile phone company where you are, who you call, who you text, when you connect to facebook, twitter, whatever. Even everything you look up in the map. Google want that data because the more they record about you, the better they can get about predicting you (remember those Markov Chains?), the better they can target advertising at you.

And government? They want that same data. If they said "every adult has to carry a machine that tells us where you go, what you look up in maps and who you talk to", even the Daily Mail commenters would be up in arms, the UKIP protesting about it being european, and not even the Lib Dem apologists could think of any way to pretend it was good.

Yet we are already carrying those machines that tell google all this stuff -all the government want to do is get that same information. Which they do by pretending it's minor, "metadata", "call records", "web connection information", phrases that aren't obvious to people the same way "where you are", "who you speak to" and "what you do on your computer".

That's what they are after though -they are just hiding the fact so you don't wake up screaming, realising that you are already living in a mass surveillance state that even the DDR would be jealous of -jealous because of its scale, the information it collects, and best of all, the subtlety.

That's the police state the cyclists have built -those bay area pedal pushers- and anyone complaining about CCTV surveillance is simply so woefully innocent it's actually quaint.

Is is a good text?

Now that summer is here, the car windows are down and people can engage in spontaneous conversation.

Here, we can see a tax dodger having the rudeness to walk over a zebra crossing and lights, then, as they set off, decide to talk to one of their superiors -here the driver of Audi WR11FGG.


It's always hard to think of an opening for an impromptu conversation, but here the driver has left a way open by virtue of the fact she appears to be reading email on her smart phone as she drives down the road.

Admittedly, she does seem a bit surprised by the way the cyclist tries to strike up a friendly banter -but then as she was looking at the phone while driving down Whiteladies Road, she was unaware that were any tax-dodgers in the area.