Monday 2 February 2009

Transition City Bristol

There is an emergent movement for Bristol to become a Transition City; to become one that is ready to handle a post-oil environment, one in which you grow your food in an allotment, and cycle around instead of driving. Ignoring implementation details like the fact that even in WWII, when the population of the island was on 30M, we couldn't grow enough to live on, it is an admirable goal.

These two cars are participating in Transition City Bristol. They are transiting from commuting by car, to commuting by bike. First, at 18:04 on 27 Jan 2009 the Toyota Minivan, H603EEU


Secondly FM04HYR seen at 18:33 on 28/jan/09.

How exactly are these vehicles transitioning?

They are learning to get around Bristol as a bicycle, both having just used the bicycle-only contraflow to get down Nugent Hill.

Already they are learning the benefit of avoiding much of the Arley Hill traffic jam, and the ability to go through the nearly-traffic-free area around Nugent Hill. Perhaps next they are off to use the bus lane on Cheltenham Road before turning left towards the M32, or may even head to the Montpelier Multimodal Interchange to swap transport modalities.

Once they are confident that they know the bicycle routes round the city, we expect them to engage the next stage of the transition, to actually leave the car behind and get the bicycle out. First things first though: learning the routes.

1 comment:

WestfieldWanderer said...

If I remember my history studies correctly, the last time we on these islands were self sufficient for food was about the time of the Civil War.
The population at that time was about 6 million.

Come the Post-Oil crunch I rather fancy that finding fuel for our cars or breaking traffic laws are going to be least of our worries.