Sunday 28 October 2012

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 modmod 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 circusfree 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.

Friday 26 October 2012

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.

Monday 22 October 2012

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!


Friday 19 October 2012

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
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.

Tuesday 16 October 2012

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!

Monday 15 October 2012

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.

Sunday 14 October 2012

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.

Friday 12 October 2012

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

Thursday 11 October 2012

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!

Wednesday 10 October 2012

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

Saturday 6 October 2012

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?

Friday 5 October 2012

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

Wednesday 3 October 2012

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.

Tuesday 2 October 2012

Shocking school run photos

we must denounce the people who have a two-child tagalong to tow their children to school

 
Not only does it start to make the children think that there was an alternative to sitting in a car every morning, their parents are actually permitting the children to sit on the bicycle without putting their helmets on.

Neither of the children are wearing any hi-viz.

We are pretty confident that these kids are in the 47% who pay no tax whatsoever.

Monday 1 October 2012

The Elf Kingdom and its rains

Somerset got its name from Sommer- Sett; the land only inhabitable in Summer, In winter it flooded.

\\
little change then.