Love Bristol Go Brent #3

As we said, the pavement provides extra parking options. First, note the bollards, They aren't designed to stop vehicles getting on to the pavement so much as to make it clear to pedestrians that turning vehicles can cut over that corner. Vans that want to park can just get up onto the pavement past the bollards


Some viewers may think "this road is four lanes wide in every direction, and the pavement is perfectly wide enough to have a good, segregated bike lane". Those people are missing the point.

  
The four-lane-wide road provides enough space for an HGV to do a U-turn.
 d
So letting it get up and park on the pavement in the direction it's going.

You couldn't do that if there was a cycle path here.

The sheer provision of a vast off-road "pavement" here is a fantastic facility for motorists. It's wide enough that street furniture can be kept far enough back to make parking along here easy -regardless of the length of your vehicle.

Bristol just lacks the imagination. Even that "let them park on the pavements" mayoral candidate explicitly mentioned Gloucester road as an example place where paveparking shouldn't be permitted.

Yet Gloucester Road is a shopping street -like this one in London- the provisioning of more pavement parking area is what is critical to keep it alive. Look at the one here -even with all this excellent paveparking it's barely surviving.

Love Bristol -go Brent #2

Continuing our tour of the best ideas from Brent, we want to highlight side roads that don't let pedestrians cross them

by doing this on a "shopping street", Brent makes sure that nobody who actually -insanely tries to walk to the shops will feel as unwelcome as they should be.
  
All it takes is a continual line of traffic, pig-pen barriers to make you feel unsafe, and no attempt to provide anything other than a dropped kerb.
 
The best bit? That wide pavement provides extra parking opportunities.

Park like you've earned it

Being a rich and successful driver presents many opportunities for you to present your achievments to the lesser mortals. You have the car and the personalised plates and this gets the admiring looks, well for a while at least. But then what? How do you tell the world that you have really made it? Anyone can get a flash motor and personalised plates hide the age.

Well, nothing says that you can afford not to give a damn like illegal and downright inconsiderate parking. This car park had plenty of available spaces and at £1 an hour, surely it is within the means of anyone. But no, far better to take not one but TWO disabled parking bays to show you can afford not to care about tickets. No blue badge here nor even a pay and display ticket. That's for the little people.

R8 AMG does this with such finess that they even manage to do this next to a bicycle jumble sale! Let's show the poor people who can't even afford a new bicycle, let alone a car, what real achievement can bring!

Don't condemn this driver. They are giving us something to aim for.

Should we fear the new mayor of City Hall?

A letter hits our inbox:

I know you may have concerns that our new mayor doesn't have the need of the city's important car drivers close to his heart.

Hopefully this picture of him parking his car on double yellow lines in a bus stop will put your mind at ease.

I'd feel more comfortable if he was driving a 4x4 or transit van rather than an electric Smart car, but you can't have everything.

Looks good to us: he's already got a bicycle and a pedestrian in front of the car, ready to run them over.

Shocking one-way contraflow cycling

As everyone knows -tax dodging cyclists love to cycle the wrong way up one way streets -streets put in by an anti-motorist council to make cycling more "convenient" than driving.

Once these tax-dodgers get used to contraflowing, they end up using those routes even when they drive a car -or in this case, a coach -as seen here in Fishponds.



Before anyone says "how do we know this coach driver is a cyclist?" -the answer is obvious. Only cyclists go the wrong way down one-way streets, so this driver is a cyclist.

THINK BIKE - DO CAR

Something is not right. The council are trying to brainwash our faithful Bristol driving masses. "THINK BIKE" messages on electronic boards on our commuter route from our country residences to our city waged jobs. Not local neighbourhoods that we are passing through. This is definitely first and foremost our commuter route.

 

So it's good to see Summerhill Motors sticking up for us, the intrepid commuters, and fighting the walking and cycling message that the City Council are trying so hard to push on us.

 

They've gone to the trouble to park not one, but two cars, successfully totally blocking the pavement and another third car in the bus / cycle lane. A double score! Giving a strong message to not only pedestrians that walking is just not acceptable, but also to those trying to use public transport or cycle too that their behaviour will not be tolerated.

To make it even better this is on the "Wesley Way" route that the council have created to encourage people by telling them that this is a safe walking and cycling route! It is also close to a local school, hopefully showing those that choose to walk or cycle to that school that such behaviour is just not right. They should be driving the school run, preferably in a car bought from Summerhill Motors.

 

It's good to see the local businesses sticking up for us, the not local people and helping us to remember to "Think Bike" but then to "Do Car".

Kate Alison Wrigley - Killed Sept 21, Ashley Road

When these photos were taken in October, flags and flowers marked where another Bristolian was killed walking across a road  - Ashley Hill -on the border between St Werburgh's and Montpelier. She was killed by someone driving a silver BMW -no further details are public at this point.


There is not even a traffic island on this stretch of road. There's one further up, but not a zebra crossing, even though a lot of schoolkids use it.

Here, although it says "20 mph", is a busy and often fast road. Cars heading up the hill are acellerating up something which, by virtue of the walls on either side "feels fast". Certain if you are on a bike, it feels safer to go on the old ashley road, parallel to this.

Kate lived on Milverton Gardens -you can see how pedestrian friendly that is.
If you live here, there is nowhere you can get to without crossing this road or walking all the way down the hill. 


On our last visit, the same cars were parked in the same places. They must be "their" bits of pavement.

Because this is just within the 20mph zone, the anti-20mph people will cite this as an example of how 20 mph zones don't work. Sadly, in this instance -it wasn't enough.

Clifton: take the corner!

The candidate for Clifton, Owain George, didn't get elected, so his plans to introduce more parking has failed.

Clifton Residents are forced to make do with what they can get.

From the distance, you can see it's cornerish parked but not the details.

Get closer, and you can see that they'vehad to take the pavement of people heading along the road

BG54OYD has also managed to assert their ownership of the adjacent corner

That's two pavements and a chunk of the road -enough that the Fiat Ka behind it may have a hard time getting out.
 
Other drivers just aren't in the same league

Final possible candidates: Dave Dobbs and Phil Plover

The election is here today, and it is everyone's duty to get down there and vote for someone.

One option is Dave Dobbs, who cites is place of residence as a van in Stokes Croft. That's his key positive feature. If you've seen the flyer about how he believes a great flood came from Mars, well, he's clearly barking mad. But so is Gideon Osborne! And Michael Gove! And they have even more power and influence.

Being totally off your rocker should not be a barrier to holding political positions.

Anyone else: Phil Plover.  He's the candidate from the Waltham Forest party.

We had a look at his transport "ideas", as it's the one we care about.

"It might be good if Bristol gets some sort of rapid transport system – maybe trams or some sort of monorail. "

A monorail. People would laugh at as. Has never tried the one at Birmingham Airport?

" Open up bus-lanes - these are typically empty most of the day whilst the lane next to them is chock-full of slow-moving congestion, spewing pollution out for twice as long as necessary!
  Trams never needed a whole lane to themselves, laying empty 99.5% of the time. So, treating car drivers as sensible people who do care about the environment for them and their children, I would like to suggest a deal with Bristol motorists: when you see a bus behind you, pull in and let it pass - like you would an ambulance. It adds only seconds to your journey time!
  That way, we don't need to waste roadspace on separate bus lanes springing up all over the place, and ALL lanes can be available to ALL traffic, ALL of the time.   Simple, safe and sensible. 

This is good. the exclamation marks show him as one of those evening post commenters who can solve the city's issues with the word "simple!!!" at the end of every sentence.

His key idea here is that people should drive down a bus lane, but when a bus comes up behind them, to get out of the way. It's an interesting idea, let down by his naivety

1. Bus lanes are for short stay parking; you can't drive down them for that reason. This is why buses are usually in the car lane.
2. If you've ever seen an ambulance trying to get up Stokes Croft to Cheltenham Road in the evening rush hour, you'll see that people don't get out of the way for it. When they do, each lane pulls to one side, the left hand side half up on the pavement. Nobody is going to do that for a bus, unless it too has sirens and flashing lights.

"Make junctions more efficient ("1 in – 2 out") - to avoid delays and make travelling more efficient for everybody, where there is room, divide traffic approaching a junction into two lanes."

What he seems to mean here is actually have two lanes approaching a junction -as this will make it more efficient.

unfortunately, he appears not to understand basic queue theory -not even the wikipedia article. For Mr Plover then:

1. A queue develops whenever the number of items leaving a channel (i.e a road) is less than the number entering it.
2. Widening the approach to a junction is simply "making a wider queue". It does nothing to the overall throughput.
3. With a wider queue, the jam may not appear as long, but it has the same number of vehicles, the same egress rate -and hence the wait time is the same.

Or to summarise: making the approach to a narrow road wider makes no difference whatsoever to your journey time -unless it encourages more people to drive that route in the belief it will -which will then make things worse.

People complain that politicians have no understanding of maths and science -this person is, sadly, an example.

"Where pavements are excessively wide, reduce them to 4-6 feet and create free parking space, where possible (except where large pavements are used by the community eg Gloucester Rd)"

We don't know where he lives, but in the inner city we view all pavements as parking spaces

Increase free parking wherever safely possible - I believe there are a lot of parking restrictions (double yellow lines and meters) where they don’t need to be – consequently, that roadspace is often underutilised while motorists drive round and round, increasing congestion and pollution, seeking an alternative.

We love this "its the restrictions that cause pollution" -theme, we'll have to use it ourselves. It implies that we do care about pollution as we drive our diesel van with the broken exhaust round the city, leave it running while we deliver some special toys to our customers -and it's all down to the fault of the council that small children die of asthma.


  Open up as much roadspace as possible so people can do what they need to do and go home again

we find parking restrictions like double yellow lines no barrier to "doing what we need to do:
 

Controlled Parking Zones (CPZ) – personally, I would find the idea of having to pay to park in my own road very frustrating. It’s mainly a problem where parking is very badly restricted. If parking were freer, it might not be a problem at all. 

No, this is one naive little bunny. Those residents of the expanding CPZ zone aren't paying 30 quid a year for the right to park outside their house -they are paying for the right to use their car during the day -because they can be confident there will be somewhere near their house when they come home. As for the "problem where parking is restricted", no -is where there isn't enough room for all the residents and commuters, even when the pavements are fully utilised (e.g. montpelier)

There' s a risk here that the "motorists drive round and round, increasing congestion and pollution" theme could come back to haunt him here -in a CPZ, there is no point driving round. Hence the pollution and congestion falls.

The whole theme of this manifesto is that the author doesn't live in the city -he lives in one of the suburbs and gets really frustrated sitting in a traffic jam by an empty bus lane, when he gets into town gets angry the only free spaces have double yellow lines, or you have to pay to use -and that his secret near-centre parking zones are being made residents only in a deliberate attempt to make his life harder

Remove large slabs of concrete - Surely squashing vehicles closer together can't make sense. If there's room to keep vehicles further apart, that reduces the risk of collision and means you have somewhere to go in case of emergency (eg a child or elderly person falling into the road).

It turns out this means "remove the build outs that force you to slow down entering quieter roads"

There's some interesting maths here; a mix of game theory (conflict and reactions to collision risk), and probability. Specifically that "somewhere to go in case an elderly person falls into the road"

With a wider buildout, there is more pavement for the elderly person to fall onto, so P(fall-into-road) is reduced; with the reduced cornering speed the energy in the collision is also reduced. Phil's assertion "you have nowhere to go in an emergency" implies that swerving is the tactic, not braking, and that there is no oncoming traffic, so swerving is a viable action.

If you do swerver, not break, then the original amount of energy going into a person falling into the road depends on the probability of you hitting them

e = P(falling)*(1-P(swerving))*mass*velocity^2

In  the new layout
e' = P(falling')*(1-P(swerving'))*mass*velocity'^2

We'll leave it to the readers to work this out -the quick summary is obviously that the velocity-squared variable is the main factor in damage; the probability of swerving out the way would have to get four times worse to result in the same damage reduction as cutting vehicle speed in half.

Sadly, as Phil Plover doesn't get queue theory, probability and statistics will be beyond him too.

There we have it then. The candidate for the evening post commenters. Someone whose entire world view is based on "obvious" answers, yet without the basic mathematical underpinnings to recognise that his obvious is, to us, obviously wrong.

Dave Dobbs it is then!

B.T. nearly-approved Candidate: Owain George

As we fear that Cllr Gollop will betray us, our next favourite candidate is Owain George, candidate for Clifton

.

He says clearly

• I will recognise that cars are the preferred means of travel & free up the city so they can move about again
• Stop the extension of bus & cycle lanes where they do not work, are counter-productive or actually dangerous
• Deal with problems affecting the flow of traffic in the city
• Welcome businesses with staff who need to park at work
• Create more on street parking so that independent shops & businesses can compete with shopping centres

We actually suspected that he was some spoof candidate, as he's almost the opposite of George Ferguson.

• George Ferguson: red trousers, runs a brewery, praises cycling
• Owain George: blue trousers, runs a pub, praises driving. Poses for a photo with his hand on his "tender parts" to show how sensitive he is.

Our real concern is something different: Owain George owns the Albion Pub, Clifton.

Albion Clifton used to be nice pub in Clifton to which you could drive, leave the engine running, pop in to have a swift 8 pints and then carry on with your HGV delivery schedule. Used to be.


Today, the has council needlessly blocked Boyce's Avenue to parking. Here we have a mayoral candidate that can not even stop the council taking away the parking spaces from outside his own pub. How can this person claim to be able to push back the anti-car actions of our city!

Worse than this though: today the Albion is a gastropub.

Gastropubs are a plague upon the hard-working delivery drivers in the city. Before, we could nip into places like the Albion, the Pump House and many other destinations, to take the edge off a tiring job. If you were really hungry: go to a cafe and have bacon and eggs.

Now those pub owners refuse to serve you unless you sit down and order veal with your quails eggs, and make you pay five pounds for some "authentic" beer.

Similarly, he offers to create more on-street parking. It's a nice promise, but where? Clifton has even run out of corners to corner park on -which would leave the zebra crossing between the Albion and Clifton Village proper -but that's where tesco's HGVs park for deliveries.


 


There we have it. The one openly cyclist hating, car parking advocate for the mayoral elections turns out to be a gastropub owner who can't even prevent the street in front of his gastropub becoming pedestrians only.


This is why we think that even though his opinions may be aligned with ours, his inability to execute on them renders him worthless even as the #1 'disposable' vote.


Who does that leave? Spud Murphy, who appears to have left a Wurzels concert after too much cider -and frankly would make Bristol's reputation for being provincial worse -or that traveller who cite his address as Stokes Croft and judging by the manifesto has clearly imbued too much of the Stokes Croft retail pharmaceutical portfolio. No, not Chris Chalkley -someone else.

Bristol Traffic Mayoral Election -Candidate Gollup: cycling city is safe in my hands:

We now have officially backed two candidates for the City for holding opinions that match with our goals: Cllr Gollop (cons) and Owain George (clifton)

Cllr Gollup has already been documented as the sole councillor prepared to denounce the cycle city program
 As he said in 2001:
"The Cycling City initiative brought in match-funding which has delivered new cycling routes but these have largely been achieved at the expense of the majority of road users - by reducing road space or capacity

That is precisely what we think. Except now he is either lying through his teeth to get elected, or he has completely betrayed us. He is quoted in the Evening Post this year:
"Getting more people cycling is absolutely key to the future of the city because it will also reduce the city's carbon footprint and congestion during the rush hour."

​

Councillor Geoff Gollop says as mayor he would encourage sport and cycling

We hope he's  just taken some advice from his London leaders, and is now is lying to get into power.

But how to know. We've tried to contact him to ask "are you really holding strong to your principles and just lying to get elected, or has something happened to your brain?"

No answer.

Love Bristol -go Brent

We went over in our van to see how leading edge councils were improving motoring conditions.

Brent, initially.

The first step is competely remove all front gardens and replace them with cars. This not only increass parking capacity by 50-100%, it makes it far more obvious to passers by who is the wealthiest. The house on the right with the Porsche, the 4x4 and the Audi is clearly more important than the toyota owners next door.
 
The other key isse is infrastructure provisioning.

Together with TfL, Brent and Harrow councils have made sure that the shopping areas are very accessible by cars, with laybys and two lanes on this, Kenton Road, for the shopping traffic.

As you can see, there are no cyclists and very few pedestrians -so that car traffic is essential to the livelihood of the remaning shops.

Bedminster Gentrification

A saturday lunchtime and what do we see parallel to East Street?

Not one, but two BMW SUVs on double yellow lines: MV06FUE and SG04TRU. This road, "Little paradise" is on the malago cycle route, hence the small bicycles on the road, showing where cyclists need to be if they want to get doored by the BMWs

If any doubted the fact that Bedminster was now becoming part of the greater southville gentrification quarter -or that residents of Southville didn't secretly drive over to Bedminster to shop, they are wrong
 
What you don't get is people cycling there, as apart from the 12 bicycles filling the six racks that Asda provides, there are no more bicycles in the entire, vast, car park

Clifton Cornerish Parking

The reason the Clifton residents have fought so strenuously against residents parking in the rest of the city is not for the sake of those residents, but for the sake of clifton.

They know that the parking problem in Clifton is the residents -and if an RPZ was ever rolled out here, traditional corners would be taken away, instead of effectively used by WU59TUX

They'd have yellow paint on them, and you'd get tickets for using them, even on a quiet saturday
 
But corners are sometimes the only places left to park.
   
Why should a residents parking zone make cornerish-parking for residents like the owner of WP59LGN a crime?

Search Terms

Here's one of our intermittent lists of search terms that bring visitors to the site. No particular order, just interesting ones

• readers wifes at #9. New one this. Popular. Who knew?
• clevedon viewers wives. special interests. Clevedon is very dark at night.
• mod abbey wood, abbey wood mod, mod abbey wood parking, parking at abbeywood: the exclusion zone is still there.
• bri bristol parking,
• site:.com inurl:blogspot "post a comment" -"comments closed" -"you must be logged in" "driving schools" -got a lot of comment spam on the 2nd2none driving schools argument.
• parking near cabot circus, free parking near cabot circus, free parking bristol city centre, secret parking near cabot circus: as if.
• are quads allowed in bus lanes in bristol - good q. Don't know. Maybe if they are minicabs.
• can you get a speeding ticket in a 20mph zone. Theoretically.
• cotham cpz progress: the paint is up
• found all four tyres slashed in wordsworth road, bristol. Not good. 
• how bad is the traffic on the ringroad around bristol. just dont.
• accident in ashley hill bristol: going to cover this. Pedestrian death, not in the 20mph stretch.
• learner driver on strange three wheeler motorbike on henleaze road bristol uk shouting at drivers. News to us, but we can believe it.
• men take up too much space. The country is split 50/50 on this one.
• my car has been towed by dvla avonmouth Better visit Avonmouth then.
• short cuts fishponds to bristol airport: ask a minicab driver.
• the bristolian cafe: re-opening soon
• unicycle lessons bristol. Why?
• was the bearpit bristol used as a bear pit: it still is on a friday night.
• what does a yellow hatched box mean painted on the road. Somewhere you can stop and legally text.
• why has ashley road bristol uk became so congested with traffic. Become? You've not lived here long enough.
• how to complain against a ticket parked with one or more wheels on the pavement if my car don't fit. Tell the judge you need the range rover to get to the family estate during the grouse season -and would he like to come? Works every time.
• 4x4 funeral car where the coffin goes. On the roof. Deer Body bags work here. If stopped, tell the polis you are returning from a trip to estate.
• bristol escorts 24/7 yate. Fuel costs making city trips too expensive?
• safe dismounting a horse correctly. No idea.
• persecution for parking on a dropped kerb. Exactly. It's the war on motorists. 
• mighty banana van -that's Chris Chakley's -emperor for life of the PRSC. Often found in St Werburghs too.
• traveller vans st werburghs. See above
• news college road clifton bristol car wing mirror. Wing mirror "events" aren't news in the rest of the city. Maybe clifton is being anti-gentrified. 

Referral-wise:

1. google.co.uk
2. waronthemotorist.wordpress.com.
3. google.com
4. crapwalthamforest.blogspot.co.uk
5. thisisbristol.co.uk
6. facebook.com
7. blogger.com
8. t.co (twitter redirects)
9. cycling-embassy.org.uk
10. madcyclelanesofmanchester.blogspot.co.uk

It's only taken a month or two and Crap Walking and Cycling is up there as a key referrer; Joe Dunkley's War on the Motorist site still ahead.

Not participating in the daily mail survelliance infrastructure

The Bristol Traffic Project is, as we have repeatedly declared, a community-sourced police state, using the datacentre infrastructure of our strategic partners Google. Google have published some of their datacentre photographs, for people to look at while reading about how google use atomic clocks to implement causal consistency between locations. The reason that Google's "Spanner" system does this is to ensure that all their computers round the world have a consistent view of "when" they are.

The Bristol Evening Post, with whom we no longer have any strategic relationship, hasn't needed atomic clocks to implement a global-scale consistency model; indeed their articles do not usually implement causal consistency; the notion that actions (e.g burning carbon fuels) have side effects that happen afterwards (climate change). Nor are they eventually Consistent: at no point in the future will the various articles and newspapers of the daily mail portfolio ever make coherent sense.

This is not news; it is not important. Except now, anyone logging in to the thisisbristol web site to add a balanced comment about how Cllr Gollop is going back on his word of being an anti-cycling councillor and now pandering to the lycra-criminals is, if they use a gmail.com email address, asked to sign in with their "google ID".

And when you do that, what rights does Google say the thisisbristol web site -hence the Evening Post and the rest of the Daily Mail portfolio say that they want to have to your account:

TINReg is requesting permission to:

•     Manage your tasks
•     View your email address
•     View basic information about your account
•     Manage your contacts
•     Know who you are on Google

What does that mean? It means the Daily Mail/this-is- set of web sites want to:

Manage your tasks
Have the ability to read and update your todo list in google calendar.

View your email address
See your email address

View basic information about your account
See what your claimed gender and age is.

Manage your contacts
see below

Know who you are on Google
See who you say you are

It's that "Manage your contacts" one that worries us. Because Gmail builds up a list of contacts automatically, based who sends you email and who you email yourself, the google contact list is really "a list of who you communicate with".

That's a really interesting piece of information. Know that and they can start comparing your contacts list with the other people who comment on the paper.  And because they have the contacts list of those commenters, the site could even find common contacts between two commenters  -even in the case where the two commenters do not know each other directly. That is, in graph-theory terms, one degree of separation. Before long they'll have built up a graph of the communications between people in the city, which is pretty valuable stuff. Facebook have that to an extent, but only between people who explicitly declare each other as friends. Even so, that subset of links was enough for Facebook to show that there is usually a four-hop connection between any two people in the US: four degrees of separation. 

If the entire portfolio of the Daily Mail web sites start collecting your email address and those of all you talk to, they stand a good chance of building up a map of who talks to who amongst all people who log in and comment in any of their web sites.

We don't trust the organisation. It's not that we don't agree with their political objectives: the imprisonment of subversives, the stance they take against lycra-criminals, 20 mph speed limits and other potential criminals. It's just that we don't see why they need to go behind our backs and build up a graph of everyone who comments on the paper to achieve those goals. It's the people who don't read the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday, the Evening Post, and their other regional counterparts that we need to worry about.

This is what Bristol Traffic is: a police state run by volunteers! There is no need for the DM sites to spy on us -not when we report the anti-motoring activities that the city is up to.

The Danger of Twitter

Twitter alert!!!

Now, here at Bristol Traffic, none of us do Twitter.

It's not our thing, so we leave that to others like @ipayroadtax to point out how cyclists continuously get in our way, without contributing to the costs of our roads.

More importantly, we don't do twitter because we know how it can be used to persecute us.

Take this example: here's an innocent tweet from a motorist (@andythomas365), sitting waiting for the lights to change just north of Stokes Croft:

Nothing wrong with this, you might think, except some clever clog spotted it and has now alerted the Police to the use of a mobile device to take photos whilst driving...

See that? 

The Police are straight on to it, even pointing out where to go to find out how many points you may get for using a phone while waiting at the lights.

Our advice: stay away from Twitter!

2nd2none Driving School -paying for placement

As our commenting policy states, we reserve the right to make fun or criticise anyone who leaves comment spam.

Today though, we see some ready-for-moderation comments that surprised even us -not by the content, but the destination:

Lakisha Clogston has left a new comment on your post "Discussions with the BSM and other Bristol Driving...":

Hi, just a moment back I was searching for the information on the same topic and now I am here. So much information, really well executed blog. This is really informative and I will for sure refer my friends the same. Thanks
driving lessons bath

And

Lakisha Clogston has left a new comment on your post "Eric Pickles Declares war on the voices he keeps h...":

Nice start guys...I went through the website and I found that you made decent point here. Keep up the topic that everyone can choose one of the best. Thanks...

driving lessons Bristol 

Where are the Links to? Why 2nd2none driving school! Proud owners of WR08HXK!



This driving school has already featured in

• March 2010: Coverage.
• November 2010, 2nd2none shows how it's done
• December 2010: A local driving school discusses the highway code.
• July 2011, Discussions with the BSM and other Bristol Driving Schools.

The last of these is one of the articles our little web page spammer actually tried to comment on. 

Isn't that fantastic? 2nd2none are paying some second-tier spam idiot to leave comments on our pages, comments that because of the rel=nofollow tag that blogspot added, would never have brought them higher up search indexes. And because of our comment moderation policy, would get picked up as spam and promptly deleted -from pages that already mentioned the brand!

We have been giving 2nd2none free coverage! All this time they would have been willing to pay for placement!

This is going to change our entire business plan. Up until now, we've been accepting money in exchange for not putting their vehicles or brands up on our site. Now we are so successful that things have changed.

In future, driving schools will be expected to pay for coverage.

Eric Pickles Declares war on the voices he keeps hearing in his head

A new daily mail article has used the title "Eric Pickles Declares War", this time "war on Tory Councils who oppose his planning reforms".  As such we have dropped in ranking to #2 in google searches for that term.

We have been in consultation with an "consultant" who claims to "work in the same building as Eric Pickles". This person, who used the clearly fake name Grant Shapp MP, is says the solution to this problem is to regurgitate our existing content and seek new links.

Well, there's not a lot to regurgitate except to observe that Eric Pickles regularly declares war -but never seems to win them. 

• War on Motorists: lost.
• War on Street Clutter (August 2010) -look at any street and you can see he lost there
• War on Town Hall Pravdas (November 2010): gone all quiet in the hope nobody realises that he isn't winning: the Afghanistan strategy. 
• War on council trade unions (October 2011): again, silence. 
• War on unauthorized protest camps (august 2012): not until pleb- and traveller- culling is legalised will this go away. 
• War on Conservative Town halls who use their decentralised authority to oppose a decision that comes from central government (Sept 2012).  To early to tell.

That's a pretty awful track record. Hasn't anyone noticed this? That whenever a press release or article comes out starting "Eric Pickles Declare War" -then the war is lost.

We could almost use that as a weapon itself: threaten to deploy him on behalf of the other side. Imagine how Iran would react if the UK government said they'd get Eric Pickles to declare war on Israel and the US -because the moment Eric did that Iran would be doomed.  Or if the 50th anniversary of the Cuban Missile Crisis was celebrated by having Eric Pickles declare war against the capitalist oppressor of the cuban people -there'd be starbucks on the corner of every street in Havana before the ink was try on the press release.


If there's a failing of this government, it's not that Eric's declarations of war have all been complete failures -it's that they haven't realised that he could be used as the country's last-resort strategic armament.

Empty Threats

A sign on Colston Street, in the secret off-road parking bays

Please do not park here on the pavement

Building Maintenance work is in progress and access is required at all times.

Please be aware

your vehicle may be removed by the police for illegally parking on the pavement.

We, the people of Bristol, will resist such war-on-motorist threats to remove our right to park on a pavement.
 
We, N685LRT and DF09DVP do not fear!

Stokes Croft -and Rita's- gets more coverage

To show we ahead of the mainstream media, here is a video on nine months old, showing Stokes Croft from the Ashley Road juction down towards the centre -though it stops before the bearpit.



As this is the inbound route, Rita's gets fame, while Slix must await its chance at glory. Maybe the sudden death of many of its customers from food poisoning may be that opportunity.  Biblos crops up, as does Lick'n Chick'n, though not Mr Falafel -that particular falafel outlet postdates the video.

There is only one lorry seemingly parked on the bike lane, which surprises us. Perhaps they closed the road for the filming. The small child skipping is something one would not normally see on a weekday.

They probably  gave all the drunks a free bottle of meths each to go away.

This video gives us another idea to ask our prospective candidates:

which is your favourite fast food restaurant in Stokes Croft?

This would be good as anyone who can't answer it will fear to be seen as out of touch or not visiting the inner city; those who do know the area will worry about whether to go for Slix or Rita's, or be seen to be elitist by going for Biblos or a pizza from #51. And of course, anyone who actually claims eating at Slix or Rita's and enjoying it, we'll, they're lying as much as David Cameron's anecdotes about eating pastys at train stations.

suboptimal data collection strategies - or a secret plan to spy on us

A strange sight: four people wearing hi-viz sitting on the St Werbughs crossing of the M32

What are they up to? The "Highways Agency" text on the back gives the game away -they are monitoring traffic flow, with multiple people to independently monitor different lanes,
 
Some questions spring to mind

1. Why hi-viz? Really? It's a pedestrian footpath that some cyclists also use. Unless you have a fear of being run over by one of those two-kid-wide pushchairs, its the safest place in the city to sit. 
2. Counting traffic by hand? Why not just go to the bit of the Highways Agency that collects the ANPR data and use that instead. If you hook the M32 data up with those of the M4W, M4E and M5 feeds, you can even work out where people go to after leaving the M32. As any vehicle not found on those other feeds must have got off at Eastville or the North Fringe, you get those figures for free.

The fact that they aren't using the ANPR data may be sign that the UK Government police-state-on-motorists isn't as all encompassing as the daily mail and daily telegraph warn us of; that there isn't any coverage of the M32 at all. The four people on the footbridge are therefore implicity sharing a secret with us.

That or there is ANPR scanning of every vehicle entering or leaving the city, and those four people are sitting there to pretend that there isn't -they think they are counting traffic but their numbers are being discarded in preference for the machine-collected statistics. Only someone very paranoid would think that. Which is precisely why we suspect it.

The Mayoral Elections

So far we've been silent on the topic of the elections -it's down to the conservative and UKIP candidates to see who gets the white-van vote. Although the tories are targeting the white van constituency at the national level, Cllr Gollop is now being pro-cycling city, which makes us worried. It could just be he's realised that the elves of Somerset and the dwarves of Gloucestershire have no vote, so there's no point promising anything to the commuters who keep this city afloat.

 
What we haven't seen from that candidate is any sign that he really does support these bicycle things, which is why we do think it is just a facade. It's the other candidates that worry us.

Here we are shocked to see Cllr John Rogers, LD candidate for the election, alongside his folding brompton bicycle and looking cheerful, here in the autonomous district of Montpelier, leaning his toy vehicle against the community bike rack put in to help the vans turn the corner.

The Bristol Traffic Project is considering conducting interviews with all the candidates, to see where they really stand on the issues that matter. What questions should we ask? And remember, they have to be questions that support our agenda, not some hippy-hobbist anti-motorist plot

Important Warning

Here on St Michael's hill is a sign reminding us that this particular zebra crossing is in use.
 
We are lucky that such signs aren't up elsewhere in the city!

Subversives infiltrate the B.E.P web site

Only last week, did our hero, Bob Bull, self-proclaimed prophet of the Association of British Drivers, spell out the truth about who pays for our roads.

MANY cyclists claim incorrectly that they contribute to road costs. The maths is simple: motorists' contribution more than £40 billion, road expenditure £10 billion per year.
The claim that they are zero rated along with electric cars is naive.
Do they really think the government will give up the £40 billion?
They will probably introduce road pricing which cyclists should pay. With regard to laws many cyclists remove bell and lights and those with them don't use them, it is also the law to stop at red lights but many don't obey that either.
They also ride on the pavement which is also illegal.
Bob Bull

Yet what do we see now, a response by one "Katy Boundary" of Stokes Croft:

THE Post's anti-cyclist letter writer, Bob Bull, again denounces cyclists for not being taxed. I await his denunciation of all class-A VED cars again for taking up a lane despite the fact that they pay no car tax a year.
Does he fume at being stuck behind a Toyota Prius? Does he resent having his right to park taken away by a Fiat 500 occupying a space that would otherwise be free? He should try cycling and learn to be more relaxed.
Every one of us who pays council tax in the city has paid for the roads. Given Mr Bull appears to be a resident of Portishead, it is he who has not paid to use the streets of our city.
Katy Boundary
Stokes Croft

Curiously, we have the original of the letter, which has a slightly different final paragraph:

All roads in Bristol that aren't managed by the Highways Agency are funded by Bristol City Council: every one of us who pays council tax in the city has payed for them. Given the Bob Bull appears to be a resident of Portishead, it is he who has not paid to use the streets of our city. 

Either way, this letter writer is wrong

Persecution

Someone has put a letter on the car TOB773Y saying "Please Park less Selfishly"
 
Does anyone denounce the dustbin for taking up its bit of the pavement? Or that bicycle at the bottom? So what's wrong with that car's actions?

New BRI Parking Opportunities

there's a new area to park at the BRI -they've taken away a stretch of pavement to create this expanded parking zone

In theory it's for the free bus and some "drop off only" spaces. In theory

We know that the pavement space is now a new short-term parking area for vehicles such as office team KMIIUAL

while alongside that is a new "secret" disabled parking space
 

Y726HYD  is showing us the secrets of the BRI

Bunker Bikes

A strange scene: people selling bicycles somewhere that it is not possible to drive to?




How can you have a bike shop that forces you to walk there and cycle away?
 
what is worse, they seem to fixing up old bicycles for use by the plebs of the city.

We are keeping this location a secret to discourage anyone in the audience from visiting it and shopping. Somewhere in  Hotwells is all that we shall say.

We also express our hope that the BRT2 route will "value engineer" this subversive facility away.