Hello
I'm the cyclist the driver of your van VE08NKX chose to overtake on a blind corner on Belmont Hill, Somerset, at 15:46 on 25 November.
I'm the cyclist who shouted a warning to your driver that there was an oncoming car —a warning he chose to ignore:
And I'm the cyclist who videoed your van nearly hitting the oncoming car.
That car braked to avoid a collision, incidentally, and we both waved an acknowledgement to each other of how close it had been.
I've not got in touch before; I was waiting to see how Avon and Somerset Police were going to respond to the complaint that I'd filed online with them. As the time limit for them to file a Notice of Impending Prosecution has expired and they are yet to get in touch, the answer is: nothing.
Your driver has to consider themselves lucky to have not only avoided a head-on collision with an oncoming vehicle, but to avoid any form of punishment from the police for nearly doing so. That is despite the irrefutable video evidence showing them ignoring a shouted warning and overtaking where they had no visibility. If A&S Police were to adopt the prosecute-on-video-evidence policy which the Central Midlands Police are now operating, they would now be facing a choice between prosecution to Dangerous Driving or pleading guilty to the lesser offence of Careless Driving.
As it is: no prosecution, no pleading, no penalty, no points on their license, and no insurance premium.
That fact reflects as badly on our local police as it does on your employee.
Given the police's utter inaction, you can report to your driver that this particular near-crash won't result in any prosecution.
However, you do need to consider your brand tainted. It's clear from your website that you take site safety as seriously as it needs to be —but it's also clear from the video that your staff are treating off site safety with utter disdain. This driver endangered other road users in a van with your business name and telephone number painted on three sides of the vehicle, making identifying this employer trivial. The more incidents like this, the more videos of your drivers will go online, the more that safety theme gets devalued.
Please: tell your driver that in a world of helmet cameras and dashcams —the era of "getting away" with dangerous driving is over. If they drive dangerously in their free time, it is only the lives of themselves and others and their own driving license which they endanger. When they do it in company vehicles, it is your vehicles they are also threatening, your insurance premiums they are risking, and your brand that they are destroying,
Saturday, 17 December 2016
Thursday, 1 December 2016
The Psychology of Overtaking and VE08NXK
There is surprisingly little literature available online on the topic of The Psychology of Overtaking.
One paper you can find dates from 1997, Overtaking Road-accidents: Differences in Manoeuvre as a Function of Driver Age, by Clarke et al, of Nottingham University
Without going into the details, in particular questioning whether there's enough information on the general population of drivers and overtakers to reach conclusions about age, it does contain a good introductory summary of past work.
One quote in particular stands out
Here is a classic example on Belmont Hill, N. Somerset
Although it's a sharp bend, the gradient of the hill means that you can see oncoming traffic, especially when they have their lights on in the late afternoon. Look up to the top right of the picture and you can see a car coming down the hill. Bear in mind, it is still daylight, there may be an unlit vehicle or cyclist, and they would not be visible.
The presence of the car hasn't stopped the van VE08NXK from choosing to overtake precisely at the corner, going round the bend on completely the wrong side of the road. Either they hadn't looked or they didn't care. The driver coming down the hill was distinctly unhappy.
It would be really interesting to see what the reasoning of the driver was here. We cannot but suspect that it would be a "the cyclist forced me to make a dangerous overtake" claim, when really it was a "I was unwilling to adjust my speed in any way". Maybe we shall find out, having just reported them to A&S police as part of "Grass a Driver week".
One paper you can find dates from 1997, Overtaking Road-accidents: Differences in Manoeuvre as a Function of Driver Age, by Clarke et al, of Nottingham University
Without going into the details, in particular questioning whether there's enough information on the general population of drivers and overtakers to reach conclusions about age, it does contain a good introductory summary of past work.
One quote in particular stands out
Wilson and Greensmith (1983) returned to the theme of the ‘‘inertial driver’’ in their multivariate analysis of drivers’ accident status in relation to observed driving patterns, gender and exposure. They report that accident-involved drivers drive more quickly ‘‘...and move around continually (especially overtaking) in traffic’’. The typical inertial driver differs from his high-exposure accident-free counterpart, in that he seems unwilling to change speeds in response to conditions by using gear changes, deceleration or braking.This is interesting, as it does document a common behaviour you encounter on a bike: the driver willing to endanger themselves and others rather than tap on the brakes.
Here is a classic example on Belmont Hill, N. Somerset
Although it's a sharp bend, the gradient of the hill means that you can see oncoming traffic, especially when they have their lights on in the late afternoon. Look up to the top right of the picture and you can see a car coming down the hill. Bear in mind, it is still daylight, there may be an unlit vehicle or cyclist, and they would not be visible.
The presence of the car hasn't stopped the van VE08NXK from choosing to overtake precisely at the corner, going round the bend on completely the wrong side of the road. Either they hadn't looked or they didn't care. The driver coming down the hill was distinctly unhappy.
It would be really interesting to see what the reasoning of the driver was here. We cannot but suspect that it would be a "the cyclist forced me to make a dangerous overtake" claim, when really it was a "I was unwilling to adjust my speed in any way". Maybe we shall find out, having just reported them to A&S police as part of "Grass a Driver week".
Monday, 28 November 2016
Grass a driver week: MK59USB, texting across a junction
Apparently some police forces in the country are now rolling out enforcement of driving too close to tax dodgers, maybe even section 59 ASB orders, which are interesting as there is a lower burden of proof. It doesn't impact penalties or insurance, simply threatens to take the car away.
We watch these experiments with trepidation.
Meanwhile, Bristol has a page to report incidents for their records alone.
This week we are conducting a small experiment to report a few dangerous drivers to this site, to see what happens. Expect followups if there are any results.
First, MK59USB on Tyndall's Park Road, crossing Whiteladies Road while reading their phone.
There are now pedestrian crossing lights on some of the arms of the junctions, specifically Tyndall's Park Road has a walk and ike one (a small dip in the kerb allows the bikes over); Whiteladies Road inbound also has green. These require left-turns to be restricted, which has long been a rule more ignored than observed. The council has recently done some raised corner sharpening; be interesting to see what's happening.
Where there is not any pedestrian crossing is on St Pauls Road —the Clifton Side— people run across when there is a gap, such as when vehicles heading inbound are waiting to turn right, and in that little gap between Whiteladies Road going read and TPR/St Pauls Road going green.
Which means this mercedes is about to head towards a junction where there are likely to be people sprinting across. Will they put down their phone?
No, is the answer, they keep on looking at it, going down to one-handed so they can hold the steering wheel with the other. About half way through the junction, they look up, notice the cyclist, and hold the phone down out of sight.
Interesting question: what would have happened if the tax-dodger hadn't been there?
The experiment begins, then, by filing this on the A&S police site, see how they react.
What about the full report an incident process? Too much hassle given its inevitable that nothing is going to happen. If they don't act when you go to the station with a CD of a video and a complaint, it's unlikely that they will react to a youtube URL.
We watch these experiments with trepidation.
Meanwhile, Bristol has a page to report incidents for their records alone.
This week we are conducting a small experiment to report a few dangerous drivers to this site, to see what happens. Expect followups if there are any results.
First, MK59USB on Tyndall's Park Road, crossing Whiteladies Road while reading their phone.
There are now pedestrian crossing lights on some of the arms of the junctions, specifically Tyndall's Park Road has a walk and ike one (a small dip in the kerb allows the bikes over); Whiteladies Road inbound also has green. These require left-turns to be restricted, which has long been a rule more ignored than observed. The council has recently done some raised corner sharpening; be interesting to see what's happening.
Where there is not any pedestrian crossing is on St Pauls Road —the Clifton Side— people run across when there is a gap, such as when vehicles heading inbound are waiting to turn right, and in that little gap between Whiteladies Road going read and TPR/St Pauls Road going green.
Which means this mercedes is about to head towards a junction where there are likely to be people sprinting across. Will they put down their phone?
No, is the answer, they keep on looking at it, going down to one-handed so they can hold the steering wheel with the other. About half way through the junction, they look up, notice the cyclist, and hold the phone down out of sight.
Interesting question: what would have happened if the tax-dodger hadn't been there?
The experiment begins, then, by filing this on the A&S police site, see how they react.
What about the full report an incident process? Too much hassle given its inevitable that nothing is going to happen. If they don't act when you go to the station with a CD of a video and a complaint, it's unlikely that they will react to a youtube URL.
Tuesday, 22 November 2016
Metrobus on the railwaypath? Again?
the West of England partnership, henceforth known as the Bringers of Woe, have a consultation on a transport vision for the future.
Key points
North Somerset doesn't want anyone cycling to Bristol. We knew that, but their map doesn't even show the existing Festival Way as "a strategic cycling route", let alone propose it actually continue the extra 1-2 miles to reach as Nailsea. Instead they want an uprated A38 and a few tens of millions making the M5 more dangerous by turning the hard shoulder off at peak hours. Most interestingly the A38 to go to the M5 in a new junction. It's not clear what that will do, but apparently "This corridor experiences severe congestion ". If that statements is true, then the adverts for the Junction 21 Enterprise Zone you see while wasting hours at passport checks at BRS are lies. The advert? "15 minutes to Bristol". The reality? Not a chance. Yet here we are, with North Somerset saying "good transport links" on the J21 site, yet "experiences severe congestion" in another. One of those two statements is false —and if its the advertising, someone may want to complain.
Suggest: N Somerset consider alternative transport options to sitting in a traffic jam on the M5, and be open about its issues in the J21 site.
South Bristol doesn't get a callout of its own, just coverage in Bath to Bristol corridor. There's a small problem here in that the key public transport route between the cities is the train —and central government have removed electrifying this stretch of line from their "vision". That is, not even on some random future deadline which they can postpone, it's an outright "we don't plan to do this". Which means that the one change which would have really improved carrying capacity on the line, reduced transit times and pollution from trains in the cities? Gone.
Saltford is promised a bypass.
They also discuss LRT -Tram- along "the A4 Corridor". That's an interesting term there, as it doesn't mean "Along the A4", it just means "along the Avon Valley". There are two other options there (ignoring tarmacing the river). There's the train line, and then there's the Bitton-Bath stretch of the Railway Path, the stretch which has the steam trainists practising their hobby on a weekend. Could this be time to reinstate steam trains between Bristol and Bath? Brunel would be proud —they didn't have electricity in his day, after all.
Suggest: residents of South Bristol may have transport issues of relevance too. Anyone who cycles in Bristol might want to look more closely at the LRT routing.
Avonmouth, Shirehampton and Clifton Villages
Still a vision of getting the Henbury train loop in; still a vision for some more stations. Gloucester Road to Filton and beyond and Whiteladies Road/A4018 to Cribb's causeway down as Strategic Cycling Routes. We have no idea what that means, and suspect the WoEP don't either, other than it means "no need to care about it anywhere else". Not that being a strategic cycle route will stop anyone painting out the bike lane.
Other points
Unless you are going to build a tram line down up Fishponds road, there is only one place to put anything in there: the Bristol to Bath Railway Path.
The last time the WoEP wanted to put a bus down there, there was a mass uprising of inner Bristol, with some support from outside. Doe they really think things will have got better now? Do they not realise that killing the path for the sake of a slightly faster commute to/from Emerson's Green is going to be acceptable? Not a chance.
Suggest: recognise that the traffic volume, walking and cycling, down the BBRP is higher than any tram can achieve, and doesn't cost £2.6B. Council would be better off filing plans to run trams down there into the box of "stupid ideas we will pretend we never considered".
Key points
- More people are going to live in Bristol
- More people are going to live Weston Super Mare, despite evidence to the contrary.
- More people are going to live in middle of nowhere dormitory towns near bristol, and hold unrealistic expectations about being able to commute into the city
So, they have come up with a vision. That's a sort of a value between "no idea whatsoever" and "have a clue". Interesting to read, and so derive goals not just of Bristol, but the Outer Wilderness
North Somerset doesn't want anyone cycling to Bristol. We knew that, but their map doesn't even show the existing Festival Way as "a strategic cycling route", let alone propose it actually continue the extra 1-2 miles to reach as Nailsea. Instead they want an uprated A38 and a few tens of millions making the M5 more dangerous by turning the hard shoulder off at peak hours. Most interestingly the A38 to go to the M5 in a new junction. It's not clear what that will do, but apparently "This corridor experiences severe congestion ". If that statements is true, then the adverts for the Junction 21 Enterprise Zone you see while wasting hours at passport checks at BRS are lies. The advert? "15 minutes to Bristol". The reality? Not a chance. Yet here we are, with North Somerset saying "good transport links" on the J21 site, yet "experiences severe congestion" in another. One of those two statements is false —and if its the advertising, someone may want to complain.
South Bristol doesn't get a callout of its own, just coverage in Bath to Bristol corridor. There's a small problem here in that the key public transport route between the cities is the train —and central government have removed electrifying this stretch of line from their "vision". That is, not even on some random future deadline which they can postpone, it's an outright "we don't plan to do this". Which means that the one change which would have really improved carrying capacity on the line, reduced transit times and pollution from trains in the cities? Gone.
Saltford is promised a bypass.
They also discuss LRT -Tram- along "the A4 Corridor". That's an interesting term there, as it doesn't mean "Along the A4", it just means "along the Avon Valley". There are two other options there (ignoring tarmacing the river). There's the train line, and then there's the Bitton-Bath stretch of the Railway Path, the stretch which has the steam trainists practising their hobby on a weekend. Could this be time to reinstate steam trains between Bristol and Bath? Brunel would be proud —they didn't have electricity in his day, after all.
Suggest: residents of South Bristol may have transport issues of relevance too. Anyone who cycles in Bristol might want to look more closely at the LRT routing.
Avonmouth, Shirehampton and Clifton Villages
Still a vision of getting the Henbury train loop in; still a vision for some more stations. Gloucester Road to Filton and beyond and Whiteladies Road/A4018 to Cribb's causeway down as Strategic Cycling Routes. We have no idea what that means, and suspect the WoEP don't either, other than it means "no need to care about it anywhere else". Not that being a strategic cycle route will stop anyone painting out the bike lane.
Other points
- "enhancements to the public realm". This is planner-speak for spending money on brickwork rather than functional transport systems.
- There's not a single mention or illustration, anywhere, of people walking other than the phrase "cycling-and-walking" where the money will be split and each group will get their half of a pavement which will now have a white line down the middle. Yet for the inner core of Bristol and Bath, walking is the primary transport option. (we have no idea what it is for W-s-M, it probably involves riding a goat).
- Page 14, or "other charging mechanisms.". That's either a parking tax, Low Emission Zone tax, or a c-zone charge.
Unless you are going to build a tram line down up Fishponds road, there is only one place to put anything in there: the Bristol to Bath Railway Path.
The last time the WoEP wanted to put a bus down there, there was a mass uprising of inner Bristol, with some support from outside. Doe they really think things will have got better now? Do they not realise that killing the path for the sake of a slightly faster commute to/from Emerson's Green is going to be acceptable? Not a chance.
Suggest: recognise that the traffic volume, walking and cycling, down the BBRP is higher than any tram can achieve, and doesn't cost £2.6B. Council would be better off filing plans to run trams down there into the box of "stupid ideas we will pretend we never considered".
Tuesday, 8 November 2016
We say dust off and nuke the car from orbit
People have coming up to us recently and been asking questions on our apparent lack of driving. The recurrent queries are
- Why haven't we seen you parking badly?
- Why haven't we seen you driving badly?
- Why haven't you driven right behind us in the fast lane of the motorway at 90 mph, flashing your lights at us?
For reasons which may be covered in a future post, the Bristol Traffic Important Car for Important People has now been officially written off; the insurers of the Important Car for Important People providing a rental car until a settlement is reached. The answers to the question are thus:
- We have —just in a Vauxhall Corsa 1.4
- We have —just in a Vauxhall Corsa 1.4
- We can't, it's a Vauxhall Corsa 1.4
Here it is in all its glory, just after stocking up on marmite at Sainsbury's Brislington.
Compared to a team member's MkII Astra 1.4L of many decades ago, the Corsa isn't that bad for luggage room, but manages to be tangibly slower. All the weight of modern safety equipment like airbags and ABS, along with power steering, electric windows and the like have made for a vehicle which struggles to break the 20 mph limit. Our urban speedo watching is now one of looking down at the mph dial as it gets into the late teens, muttering "go on Corsa, you can do it!".
What's there? Moss large quantities of it. Enough that you have to look for David Attenborough and his camera crew.
And under the moss? Water. Large quantities of water.
Compared to a team member's MkII Astra 1.4L of many decades ago, the Corsa isn't that bad for luggage room, but manages to be tangibly slower. All the weight of modern safety equipment like airbags and ABS, along with power steering, electric windows and the like have made for a vehicle which struggles to break the 20 mph limit. Our urban speedo watching is now one of looking down at the mph dial as it gets into the late teens, muttering "go on Corsa, you can do it!".
Unfortunately, free vehicle that it is, it comes with a fundamental flaw: a £500 insurance excess and undamaged bodywork. It has both wingmirrors and the alloy wheels lacking those scrapes which mark a car christened for use in urban Bristol.
It's not a matter of whether the car is going to end up with a wingmirror held up with duct tape, wheels documenting the kerb heights parked against, or graceful scrapes aquired on daily use. It's when. It even constrains parking choices: you start worrying in the night about what it will look like in the morning —that maybe you shouldn't have parked sticking out quite so much on that corner.
Accordingly, rather than await the day when the car is returned and a large bill for damage presented, the team decided to return the car early, and borrow a parent's '53 reg Peugot 307 HDi. The parent in question had a little medical incident in August, their car parked up since then. Taking it away from them should help get them used to the post-driving lifestyle, which, in Portsmouth, "city by the sea", means getting used to FirstBus coming by once an hour, except on Sundays, when it drops to "who knows"
Vehicle collected, successfully driven to Bristol. Compared to the Corsa, it's stable, and it's manual transmission and the minimal turbocharger give it a better 0-20 number —still not great for getting on the M32 from the secret Mina Road access point. With the changes there, you can't even be at 15 mph before you approach the merge point.
But it's stable, and pre-commissoned for abuse in an urban environment. All it needs is cleaning up, the parent being one of those who like to hoard things in their vehicle.
All goes well, the interior binned; time to go to the boot. Four cans of WD-40 and three de-icers seem overkill, but as a Glaswegian who used to own a Mini, the owner no doubt had picked up some habits they couldn't get rid of. That's not the issue though, the issue is what turns up once the boot contents are purged, and the layers underneath explored.
Vehicle collected, successfully driven to Bristol. Compared to the Corsa, it's stable, and it's manual transmission and the minimal turbocharger give it a better 0-20 number —still not great for getting on the M32 from the secret Mina Road access point. With the changes there, you can't even be at 15 mph before you approach the merge point.
But it's stable, and pre-commissoned for abuse in an urban environment. All it needs is cleaning up, the parent being one of those who like to hoard things in their vehicle.
All goes well, the interior binned; time to go to the boot. Four cans of WD-40 and three de-icers seem overkill, but as a Glaswegian who used to own a Mini, the owner no doubt had picked up some habits they couldn't get rid of. That's not the issue though, the issue is what turns up once the boot contents are purged, and the layers underneath explored.
What's there? Moss large quantities of it. Enough that you have to look for David Attenborough and his camera crew.
And under the moss? Water. Large quantities of water.
The entire spare wheel compartment has about 2-3 cm of water in it. This is, well, unexpected, and best accompanied with the expression "What the fuck?"
Now, Pompey is a coastal town, and it could be that there have been some high tides flooding the streets —tides covered up by the Portsmouth Tourist Board. This is unlikely, as the loss of the city to climate change is something that UKIP would be highlighting as a positive outcome of climate change.
Discounting that, and deliberate human action, the other key hypothesis has "it's been collecting water from rain". With the car unused for a few weeks (this photo was taken early October), water could easily have seeped in to the stationary car.
Except: it's been a really dry Autumn. Has it really been long enough for the spare wheel bay to fill with water and plants to start growing?
No, this car has been collecting rainwater for some time.
For anyone with ageing parents, there's always the question "when should they stop driving?" You always hope that they stop before they end up in a serious crash, maybe just a small one involving a bollard where the police suggest politely to put away the car keys.
Maybe, just maybe, the fact that you've clearly been driving around not noticing the strange slushing sound coming from the back, or the odd fusty smell. One can but hope. That or bribe the garage doing the MoT to make sure the car fails.
The wealthy in society, the Camerons, the Rees-Moggs, they look forward to inheriting the family estate, what with its greenery and lakes.
Us: we fear the family hatchback.
Now, Pompey is a coastal town, and it could be that there have been some high tides flooding the streets —tides covered up by the Portsmouth Tourist Board. This is unlikely, as the loss of the city to climate change is something that UKIP would be highlighting as a positive outcome of climate change.
Discounting that, and deliberate human action, the other key hypothesis has "it's been collecting water from rain". With the car unused for a few weeks (this photo was taken early October), water could easily have seeped in to the stationary car.
Except: it's been a really dry Autumn. Has it really been long enough for the spare wheel bay to fill with water and plants to start growing?
No, this car has been collecting rainwater for some time.
For anyone with ageing parents, there's always the question "when should they stop driving?" You always hope that they stop before they end up in a serious crash, maybe just a small one involving a bollard where the police suggest politely to put away the car keys.
Maybe, just maybe, the fact that you've clearly been driving around not noticing the strange slushing sound coming from the back, or the odd fusty smell. One can but hope. That or bribe the garage doing the MoT to make sure the car fails.
The wealthy in society, the Camerons, the Rees-Moggs, they look forward to inheriting the family estate, what with its greenery and lakes.
Us: we fear the family hatchback.
Friday, 30 September 2016
Causes of Congestion in the Greater Bristol Area: hint: not 20 mph zones
What has made congestion in and around Bristol worse —for those people driving or sitting in buses?
Some people are saying it's common sense that it's the 20 mph limits, and that common sense beats data. No: thinking beats common sense.
we can argue about whether @georgeferguson_x did things to make traffic worse;
RPZs didn't; they add more passing places to the narrow roads, and if they discourage people from driving in, could reduced traffic levels.
20 mph a factor? Not given average weekday traffic speed. (Source: Waze)
One key point is that if the average speed in a road is 2-7 mph, as Stapleton Road is enjoying, then 20 mph is an unrealised dream. It's not the problem. Question is: what's causing that delay?
The main factor is the number of people choosing to drive. Evidence of this comes from looking at the M4 heading away from Bristol, which is going at 12 mph.
By choosing an away-from-city route we can avoid blaming metrobus related roadworks or buildup from urban congestion. There's none of : cyclists, bus stop buildouts, traffic lights or 20 mph to blame rather than accept the root cause of the traffic jam is the decision of you and others to get in the car that morning..
It's people driving places. Which may be correlated with population growth, and the growth of north fringe sprawl housing and offices. North Lockleaze, or, as it pretends to be, Chiswick Village? New. Those fields north of the A4174 by Emerson's Green? Houses you get to see from the M4. That's a change: more suburban housing, more people driving around the city.
Secondary factors to motor traffic in town: junctions, buses stopping, vehicles turning right, cars parked where they shouldn't. All amplified by traffic volume: bigger queues, longer waits, more turning vehicles, more people "just parking for a minute" in a bus lane, so forcing the bus to try and pull out and increasing overall unhappiness.
Traffic lights? They have a worse (but fairer) throughput compared roundabouts; see Modeling Roundabout Traffic Flow as a Dynamic Fluid System (skip the pictures and look at the pics on P8-11, knowing that "flux" means "number of vehicles arriving per second"). Essentially, all of junctions overload, but two-lane roundabouts get the most through.However that paper assumes that you can get off the roundabout, which as we know at peak hours (Hello Bearpit! Hello St Pauls Roundabout!) doesn't hold. Furthermore by modelling traffic as an incompressible fluid, they miss out on the game-theoretic aspects of the problem, as in: why you'd pull out in front of other vehicles, even if you know it will block others.
Because one problem roundabouts and traffic lights both have is people blocking junctions, sostopping cross traffic getting through . If anyone has evidence of yellow-hash do-not-block zones ever being enforced, we'd love to see it. We lack that evidence. What we do believe is that it would reduce junction deadlocks and so boost cross traffic. Again, evidence would be good. Perhaps the council could run an experiment —like enforcing the law for a week.
Fast moving cyclists? Nope. They just go past the queues and have an average speed above cars at peak hours. This clearly upsets some people who resent the fact that they have to drive a Fiesta 1.1L up the A38. We would hate driving a Fiesta 1.1L too, even on an empty road.
Cyclists at under 12 mph? No data. They are easy to pass when there is no oncoming traffic, so as the overall traffic volume increases, get harder to pass. Having bus lanes and functional (i.e. not blocked by parked cars) bike lanes, lanes considered safe enough by cyclists that they use them would eliminate that problem. And, if parking spaces taken away for them, reduce justification for driving in.
Oncoming traffic? This is a problem in much of the inner city: there isn't space to get through down a road in the presence of oncoming vehicles. As well as traffic volumes, we have to consider whether the rise of the Urban SUV amplifies the problem. Not only does that oncoming Volvo XC 90 on the school run take up more space, the VW Touran parked alongside the Audi Q6 means that there is less open road to play with anyhow.
Roadworks? We know about those, especially: in the centre, on the M32, along the A4174, the A370 and by Cumberland Basin. Hopefully they will be transient, as in "fixed before 2020"
One thing is for inevitable: the cost of delays caused by these roadworks won't have been included in their already broken cost model.
When that Metrobus work is finished, will the problems go away? Not without some fundamental change in how people get into the city —which means that you need a compelling story from places like Yate, from Portishead, and the other dormitory towns. A railway from Portishead here is potentially compelling, because you get a direct line to Templemeads without traffic delays. It's a shame that central government beliefs (trains bad, BRT viable) and local government issues (naive optimism) have caused a focus on FirstBus as a solution.
Will Metrobus be compelling for those actually in its catchment area? We have no idea whatsoever. Which gives us something in common with the metrobus team.
Anyway, to close: for anyone saying "it's the 20 mph zones", or "its the traffic lights", we say "explain how the M4 moves at 12 mph on a weekday morning?"
Some people are saying it's common sense that it's the 20 mph limits, and that common sense beats data. No: thinking beats common sense.
we can argue about whether @georgeferguson_x did things to make traffic worse;
RPZs didn't; they add more passing places to the narrow roads, and if they discourage people from driving in, could reduced traffic levels.
20 mph a factor? Not given average weekday traffic speed. (Source: Waze)
One key point is that if the average speed in a road is 2-7 mph, as Stapleton Road is enjoying, then 20 mph is an unrealised dream. It's not the problem. Question is: what's causing that delay?
By choosing an away-from-city route we can avoid blaming metrobus related roadworks or buildup from urban congestion. There's none of : cyclists, bus stop buildouts, traffic lights or 20 mph to blame rather than accept the root cause of the traffic jam is the decision of you and others to get in the car that morning..
It's people driving places. Which may be correlated with population growth, and the growth of north fringe sprawl housing and offices. North Lockleaze, or, as it pretends to be, Chiswick Village? New. Those fields north of the A4174 by Emerson's Green? Houses you get to see from the M4. That's a change: more suburban housing, more people driving around the city.
Secondary factors to motor traffic in town: junctions, buses stopping, vehicles turning right, cars parked where they shouldn't. All amplified by traffic volume: bigger queues, longer waits, more turning vehicles, more people "just parking for a minute" in a bus lane, so forcing the bus to try and pull out and increasing overall unhappiness.
Traffic lights? They have a worse (but fairer) throughput compared roundabouts; see Modeling Roundabout Traffic Flow as a Dynamic Fluid System (skip the pictures and look at the pics on P8-11, knowing that "flux" means "number of vehicles arriving per second"). Essentially, all of junctions overload, but two-lane roundabouts get the most through.However that paper assumes that you can get off the roundabout, which as we know at peak hours (Hello Bearpit! Hello St Pauls Roundabout!) doesn't hold. Furthermore by modelling traffic as an incompressible fluid, they miss out on the game-theoretic aspects of the problem, as in: why you'd pull out in front of other vehicles, even if you know it will block others.
Because one problem roundabouts and traffic lights both have is people blocking junctions, so
Fast moving cyclists? Nope. They just go past the queues and have an average speed above cars at peak hours. This clearly upsets some people who resent the fact that they have to drive a Fiesta 1.1L up the A38. We would hate driving a Fiesta 1.1L too, even on an empty road.
Cyclists at under 12 mph? No data. They are easy to pass when there is no oncoming traffic, so as the overall traffic volume increases, get harder to pass. Having bus lanes and functional (i.e. not blocked by parked cars) bike lanes, lanes considered safe enough by cyclists that they use them would eliminate that problem. And, if parking spaces taken away for them, reduce justification for driving in.
Oncoming traffic? This is a problem in much of the inner city: there isn't space to get through down a road in the presence of oncoming vehicles. As well as traffic volumes, we have to consider whether the rise of the Urban SUV amplifies the problem. Not only does that oncoming Volvo XC 90 on the school run take up more space, the VW Touran parked alongside the Audi Q6 means that there is less open road to play with anyhow.
Roadworks? We know about those, especially: in the centre, on the M32, along the A4174, the A370 and by Cumberland Basin. Hopefully they will be transient, as in "fixed before 2020"
One thing is for inevitable: the cost of delays caused by these roadworks won't have been included in their already broken cost model.
When that Metrobus work is finished, will the problems go away? Not without some fundamental change in how people get into the city —which means that you need a compelling story from places like Yate, from Portishead, and the other dormitory towns. A railway from Portishead here is potentially compelling, because you get a direct line to Templemeads without traffic delays. It's a shame that central government beliefs (trains bad, BRT viable) and local government issues (naive optimism) have caused a focus on FirstBus as a solution.
Will Metrobus be compelling for those actually in its catchment area? We have no idea whatsoever. Which gives us something in common with the metrobus team.
Anyway, to close: for anyone saying "it's the 20 mph zones", or "its the traffic lights", we say "explain how the M4 moves at 12 mph on a weekday morning?"
Thursday, 29 September 2016
Traffic Jams are caused by texting drivers
With the proposal to expand penalties for drivers using phones, there have been lots of claims that the number of people texting has increased. That's something always worth validating with real datasets.
Back in September 2013, we observed that one driver in three on Arley Hill was texting.
Fast forward to 2016 and what do we see?
On a single pedal-up-the-contraflow, we didn't see more than 30% texting, we'd actually consider it to be less. L008HUJ/LD08HUJ (not found in DVLA DB), CN02JKO, VN11OYA (taxi?), BG62YGA, BD65WXL, CE53GMG. Six cars out of thirty one; approximately 1 in 5. Less than before.
What you can see though is that some drivers are so engrossed in their texting that gaps are building up in the queue.
That's the BMW BD65WXL and the Zafira BG62YGA
The Zafira's MOT expired on 7th Sept: that vehicle is not legal. And look at the gap the driver has let develop.
You have to be utterly oblivious to your environment to not notice that there as was a gap of 5+ vehicle lengths in front of you. Five vehicle lengths! You don't normally get that in the city, or the motorways nearby, at least not during daylight hours. Yet she's happily looking down, oblivious to the world. And she wasn't happy when this was pointed out to her. Now, it may seem irrelevant, these drivers are all in the same queue. But anyone wanting to turn up Nugent Hill (as opposed to illegally contraflow down), is having that opportunity denied to them, so creating needless congestion. Equally seriously, once the queue gets all the way to the roundabout on Cotham Brow, it has the risk of getting someone stuck in the roundabout, so blocking cross traffic. And all because they're curious what their friends are up to on Facebook.
There we have it. If people say "why has congestion got worse?", we will respond "our data implies that while the number of people texting hasn't increased, the time those drivers spend on their phone has —so making congestion worse".
Finally, at 1:11, the driver of CA09AKF is reading a kids picture book. Now, there did appear to be a child on the back, so this could be the way of keeping a bored child happy. Except: how do you read a picture book out loud? Do you turn it over going "tree!" "fish!", or what? Because the whole point of kids picture books is that you give them to the child to stare at the pictures while you do important things like check facebook for updates. If find yourself wanting to grab the picture book from the child in the back seat and read it yourself, well, life is bleak. Make sure your phone is charged up next time.
Back in September 2013, we observed that one driver in three on Arley Hill was texting.
Fast forward to 2016 and what do we see?
On a single pedal-up-the-contraflow, we didn't see more than 30% texting, we'd actually consider it to be less. L008HUJ/LD08HUJ (not found in DVLA DB), CN02JKO, VN11OYA (taxi?), BG62YGA, BD65WXL, CE53GMG. Six cars out of thirty one; approximately 1 in 5. Less than before.
What you can see though is that some drivers are so engrossed in their texting that gaps are building up in the queue.
That's the BMW BD65WXL and the Zafira BG62YGA
The Zafira's MOT expired on 7th Sept: that vehicle is not legal. And look at the gap the driver has let develop.
You have to be utterly oblivious to your environment to not notice that there as was a gap of 5+ vehicle lengths in front of you. Five vehicle lengths! You don't normally get that in the city, or the motorways nearby, at least not during daylight hours. Yet she's happily looking down, oblivious to the world. And she wasn't happy when this was pointed out to her. Now, it may seem irrelevant, these drivers are all in the same queue. But anyone wanting to turn up Nugent Hill (as opposed to illegally contraflow down), is having that opportunity denied to them, so creating needless congestion. Equally seriously, once the queue gets all the way to the roundabout on Cotham Brow, it has the risk of getting someone stuck in the roundabout, so blocking cross traffic. And all because they're curious what their friends are up to on Facebook.
There we have it. If people say "why has congestion got worse?", we will respond "our data implies that while the number of people texting hasn't increased, the time those drivers spend on their phone has —so making congestion worse".
Finally, at 1:11, the driver of CA09AKF is reading a kids picture book. Now, there did appear to be a child on the back, so this could be the way of keeping a bored child happy. Except: how do you read a picture book out loud? Do you turn it over going "tree!" "fish!", or what? Because the whole point of kids picture books is that you give them to the child to stare at the pictures while you do important things like check facebook for updates. If find yourself wanting to grab the picture book from the child in the back seat and read it yourself, well, life is bleak. Make sure your phone is charged up next time.
Sunday, 18 September 2016
Always good to to say hello
when driving, you only really have one emotion you can share: anger, through one button for the horn and the flicker for the lights. In contrast, on a bicycle, you can have spontaneous conversations with passing cyclists —even strangers.
Here we see our instrumented tax dodger striking up a conversation with a fellow cyclist. To make it more personal, rather than shouting out anything from a distance, say "I am coming through why don' t you look before you pull out", instead they wait until they are alongside the other cyclists before starting a bit of banter with a "hello!"
Unfortunately, the other cyclist doesn't appear in the mood for idle chatter, and appears distinctly unhappy to have been surprised by the greeting. Of course, if he had actually looked before pootling out onto the roundabout, he wouldn't have been surprised —indeed, our camera-enhanced tax dodger may have missed the opportunity to make a new friend
Here we see our instrumented tax dodger striking up a conversation with a fellow cyclist. To make it more personal, rather than shouting out anything from a distance, say "I am coming through why don' t you look before you pull out", instead they wait until they are alongside the other cyclists before starting a bit of banter with a "hello!"
Unfortunately, the other cyclist doesn't appear in the mood for idle chatter, and appears distinctly unhappy to have been surprised by the greeting. Of course, if he had actually looked before pootling out onto the roundabout, he wouldn't have been surprised —indeed, our camera-enhanced tax dodger may have missed the opportunity to make a new friend
Monday, 12 September 2016
Clifton Occupied by Tax Dodging Cyclists!
We were shocked and disappointed that we were unable to drive to Clifton in our Important Car, then cross over to Somerset and enjoy a round of golf with Liam Fox MP. Why? Tax dodging cyclists in the road —out road, blocked off to us,Important Tax Paying people, handing it over to olympic medal winners and the like.
If there was one redeeming feature, it is that a lot of other people were as upset as we were to see this lycra-clad vermin —and they were standing there screaming at them for bringing the city to its knees.
We we trapped in the city. Clifton was even begrimed with a large screen showing off that the portway and Bridge Valley Road had again been stolen.
This is exactly the kind of thing people voted against George Ferguson wanted to stop, but still the city wants to let people cycle around.
It's fundamentally wrong. Look at this scene from The Promenade
Where are the revenue-bringing shoppers? Or the high-income tax band residents? Nowhere. Just one person on a bicycle who probably lives in a postcode other than BS8.
This is unacceptable!
If there is one redeeming feature, it is that Clifton Village is still not set up for more than six bicycles at any time, as their three sheffield racks were overloaded. Some of the tax dodgers even went as far as leaning their bikes against the wall of The Mall pub and trying to buy beer inside.
This is not some run-down bicycle friendly part of town where you can lean bicycles against walls; it is trying to stay upmarket. Fortunately, most of the cyclists in the area realised they were unwelcome and cycled off to other parts of the city once the event was over, leaving us nearly the only people walking round an near-empty village. The fact that village was so empty shows precisely why such cycling events must be prevented.
But how to do this? We were going to spin up our automated cyclist-hating letter generator and have it email the Bristol Post. But what did we see on the Downs?
Yes —shocking, isn't it! Our paper, the one that hates cyclists, actively trying to sell copies to cyclists!
We fear that the Evening Post has, purely in the mercenary need to sell to people under the age of sixty, has decided to start trying to ingratiating themselves with tax dodgers. They may think that will help them, but all it will do is alienate their current readership. It'll be like when all the pubs in Hotwells, including the Spring Gardens, the Pump House and the Mardyke suddenly decided they wanted to post gastropubs instead of places to get drunk in and start fights with strangers. This isn't progress: this is a sign of the decline of the city.
Lycra louts who do things like blow their noses in public
If there was one redeeming feature, it is that a lot of other people were as upset as we were to see this lycra-clad vermin —and they were standing there screaming at them for bringing the city to its knees.
We we trapped in the city. Clifton was even begrimed with a large screen showing off that the portway and Bridge Valley Road had again been stolen.
This is exactly the kind of thing people voted against George Ferguson wanted to stop, but still the city wants to let people cycle around.
It's fundamentally wrong. Look at this scene from The Promenade
Where are the revenue-bringing shoppers? Or the high-income tax band residents? Nowhere. Just one person on a bicycle who probably lives in a postcode other than BS8.
This is unacceptable!
If there is one redeeming feature, it is that Clifton Village is still not set up for more than six bicycles at any time, as their three sheffield racks were overloaded. Some of the tax dodgers even went as far as leaning their bikes against the wall of The Mall pub and trying to buy beer inside.
This is not some run-down bicycle friendly part of town where you can lean bicycles against walls; it is trying to stay upmarket. Fortunately, most of the cyclists in the area realised they were unwelcome and cycled off to other parts of the city once the event was over, leaving us nearly the only people walking round an near-empty village. The fact that village was so empty shows precisely why such cycling events must be prevented.
But how to do this? We were going to spin up our automated cyclist-hating letter generator and have it email the Bristol Post. But what did we see on the Downs?
Yes —shocking, isn't it! Our paper, the one that hates cyclists, actively trying to sell copies to cyclists!
We fear that the Evening Post has, purely in the mercenary need to sell to people under the age of sixty, has decided to start trying to ingratiating themselves with tax dodgers. They may think that will help them, but all it will do is alienate their current readership. It'll be like when all the pubs in Hotwells, including the Spring Gardens, the Pump House and the Mardyke suddenly decided they wanted to post gastropubs instead of places to get drunk in and start fights with strangers. This isn't progress: this is a sign of the decline of the city.
Monday, 5 September 2016
Gateway to Clifton: The Christchurch Mini-roundabout
Today we celebrate the Bristol School run week, now combined with the FirstBus failure week, with very unexciting documentary of the "not quite a roundabout" junction at the end of Suspension Bridge Road. If you are expecting to see anyone nearly being run over, people on phones, etc. Look elsewhere. Sorry. This video is here just to look at what transport issues Clifton has which the Clifton BID and resident groups never seem to cover.
Clifton likes to be known for its village, its Bridge and one or two of its pubs. The real Gateway to Clifton is something never discussed: a mini roundabout at the top of the village, just by the church.
To get an overview without going to Clifton, look at it in streetview and rehearse approaching the roundabout doing a right turn in a car from every road. Work out: when you should give way, when are you technically "in the roundabout and so should expect others to give way", and "is it actually possible to do all the turns legally". The answers being "no idea", "don't expect anyone to give way" and "no".
If you are cycling over the bridge, or driving near it, you have to negotiate it. It's disconcerting on a bike, especially with a child, as you cannot predict what anyone can do. It's a collection of random actions, vehicles coming in at speed, nobody knowing who to give way to —or even what side of the roundlet(*) to drive on. It's not great on a car either. There may actually be some protocol for the locals, but if so they it isn't widely known. We don't know it, certainly. What the locals and regulars do know is not to expect anyone to treat it as a roundabout —and never assume that you have the right of way.
You can see all of this in this unedited 9 minute view of the junction. Keep an eye out for the black Range Rover coming out from the left, and count how many times it does it.
This junction is fundamentally the wrong shape for a roundabout, it has two left turns, one hard, one soft, with the hard one's give way markings about 90 degrees to the roundabout itself. No visibility for anything coming off Suspension Bridge as to what vehicles coming from their right are doing —vehicles which don't often slow down, and hence won't see any cars coming from the left until they pull out. Two manoeuvres can only be executed by driving completely on the wrong side of the mini roundabout. There's one car coming the wrong up the one way street, though it does execute the junction safely. Lots of vehicles going through without pausing, including one of the cyclists coming off Clifton Down. And a couple of times cars on the roundabout have to give way to vehicles pulling on in front of them. Note the lack of tension though —regulars are forgiving of what
happens in a junction of such ambiguity.
Meanwhile that Range Rover coming off the left hand side does it five times in a row: our reporter got bored and went off while they were still doing it.
Before the video recording started the RR driver had stopped in the middle of a zebra crossing to let someone out —presumably they were now waiting for that person to return. But why were they driving round in circles given that with the RPZ roll out there's enough free parking, parking they'd have driven by? Unless they enjoy driving in circles and don't pay for diesel, the only other possibility is they had/planned to use up the 30 minute free park elsewhere. But why not just pull over with your hazard lights on? This is just a sign that some Clifton residents really are different from the rest of the city. The rest of us have mobile phones to co-ordinate dropoff and pickup operations, and to offer something more interesting to do while waiting than making right turns at this mini roundabout.
Finally: consider what it is like to try and cross this junction on foot. While it's not near the centre of the village, at the end of Manila Road (where the BMW drives out from the wrong direction of a one-way street), there's a primary school, some other ones nearby. And at the end of Suspension Bridge road is of course, the Bristol Suspension Bridge —one of the key tourist attractions in a city after Stokes Croft and the M4/M5 motorway interchange. As part of "beautiful suburb of Bristol, tucked away from the hubbub of city life and located just a five-minute drive away from the centre." we'd expect more. Maybe the shops sell postcards of it or something.
(*), Yes, Roundlet is a real word.
Clifton likes to be known for its village, its Bridge and one or two of its pubs. The real Gateway to Clifton is something never discussed: a mini roundabout at the top of the village, just by the church.
To get an overview without going to Clifton, look at it in streetview and rehearse approaching the roundabout doing a right turn in a car from every road. Work out: when you should give way, when are you technically "in the roundabout and so should expect others to give way", and "is it actually possible to do all the turns legally". The answers being "no idea", "don't expect anyone to give way" and "no".
If you are cycling over the bridge, or driving near it, you have to negotiate it. It's disconcerting on a bike, especially with a child, as you cannot predict what anyone can do. It's a collection of random actions, vehicles coming in at speed, nobody knowing who to give way to —or even what side of the roundlet(*) to drive on. It's not great on a car either. There may actually be some protocol for the locals, but if so they it isn't widely known. We don't know it, certainly. What the locals and regulars do know is not to expect anyone to treat it as a roundabout —and never assume that you have the right of way.
You can see all of this in this unedited 9 minute view of the junction. Keep an eye out for the black Range Rover coming out from the left, and count how many times it does it.
This junction is fundamentally the wrong shape for a roundabout, it has two left turns, one hard, one soft, with the hard one's give way markings about 90 degrees to the roundabout itself. No visibility for anything coming off Suspension Bridge as to what vehicles coming from their right are doing —vehicles which don't often slow down, and hence won't see any cars coming from the left until they pull out. Two manoeuvres can only be executed by driving completely on the wrong side of the mini roundabout. There's one car coming the wrong up the one way street, though it does execute the junction safely. Lots of vehicles going through without pausing, including one of the cyclists coming off Clifton Down. And a couple of times cars on the roundabout have to give way to vehicles pulling on in front of them. Note the lack of tension though —regulars are forgiving of what
happens in a junction of such ambiguity.
Meanwhile that Range Rover coming off the left hand side does it five times in a row: our reporter got bored and went off while they were still doing it.
Before the video recording started the RR driver had stopped in the middle of a zebra crossing to let someone out —presumably they were now waiting for that person to return. But why were they driving round in circles given that with the RPZ roll out there's enough free parking, parking they'd have driven by? Unless they enjoy driving in circles and don't pay for diesel, the only other possibility is they had/planned to use up the 30 minute free park elsewhere. But why not just pull over with your hazard lights on? This is just a sign that some Clifton residents really are different from the rest of the city. The rest of us have mobile phones to co-ordinate dropoff and pickup operations, and to offer something more interesting to do while waiting than making right turns at this mini roundabout.
Finally: consider what it is like to try and cross this junction on foot. While it's not near the centre of the village, at the end of Manila Road (where the BMW drives out from the wrong direction of a one-way street), there's a primary school, some other ones nearby. And at the end of Suspension Bridge road is of course, the Bristol Suspension Bridge —one of the key tourist attractions in a city after Stokes Croft and the M4/M5 motorway interchange. As part of "beautiful suburb of Bristol, tucked away from the hubbub of city life and located just a five-minute drive away from the centre." we'd expect more. Maybe the shops sell postcards of it or something.
(*), Yes, Roundlet is a real word.
Gateway to Clifton: The Christchurch Mini-roundabout
Today we celebrate the Bristol School run week, now combined with the FirstBus failure week, with very unexciting documentary of the "not quite a roundabout" junction at the end of Suspension Bridge Road. If you are expecting to see anyone nearly being run over, people on phones, etc. Look elsewhere. Sorry. This video is here just to look at what transport issues Clifton has which the Clifton BID and resident groups never seem to cover.
Clifton likes to be known for its village, its Bridge and one or two of its pubs. The real Gateway to Clifton is something never discussed: a mini roundabout at the top of the village, just by the church.
To get an overview without going to Clifton, look at it in streetview and rehearse approaching the roundabout doing a right turn in a car from every road. Work out: when you should give way, when are you technically "in the roundabout and so should expect others to give way", and "is it actually possible to do all the turns legally". The answers being "no idea", "don't expect anyone to give way" and "no".
If you are cycling over the bridge, or driving near it, you have to negotiate it. It's disconcerting on a bike, especially with a child, as you cannot predict what anyone can do. It's a collection of random actions, vehicles coming in at speed, nobody knowing who to give way to —or even what side of the roundlet(*) to drive on. It's not great on a car either. There may actually be some protocol for the locals, but if so they it isn't widely known. We don't know it, certainly. What the locals and regulars do know is not to expect anyone to treat it as a roundabout —and never assume that you have the right of way.
You can see all of this in this unedited 9 minute view of the junction. Keep an eye out for the black Range Rover coming out from the left, and count how many times it does it.
This junction is fundamentally the wrong shape for a roundabout, it has two left turns, one hard, one soft, with the hard one's give way markings about 90 degrees to the roundabout itself. No visibility for anything coming off Suspension Bridge as to what vehicles coming from their right are doing —vehicles which don't often slow down, and hence won't see any cars coming from the left until they pull out. Two manoeuvres can only be executed by driving completely on the wrong side of the mini roundabout. There's one car coming the wrong up the one way street, though it does execute the junction safely. Lots of vehicles going through without pausing, including one of the cyclists coming off Clifton Down. And a couple of times cars on the roundabout have to give way to vehicles pulling on in front of them. Note the lack of tension though —regulars are forgiving of what
happens in a junction of such ambiguity.
Meanwhile that Range Rover coming off the left hand side does it five times in a row: our reporter got bored and went off while they were still doing it.
Before the video recording started the RR driver had stopped in the middle of a zebra crossing to let someone out —presumably they were now waiting for that person to return. But why were they driving round in circles given that with the RPZ roll out there's enough free parking, parking they'd have driven by? Unless they enjoy driving in circles and don't pay for diesel, the only other possibility is they had/planned to use up the 30 minute free park elsewhere. But why not just pull over with your hazard lights on? This is just a sign that some Clifton residents really are different from the rest of the city. The rest of us have mobile phones to co-ordinate dropoff and pickup operations, and to offer something more interesting to do while waiting than making right turns at this mini roundabout.
Finally: consider what it is like to try and cross this junction on foot. While it's not near the centre of the village, at the end of Manila Road (where the BMW drives out from the wrong direction of a one-way street), there's a primary school, some other ones nearby. And at the end of Suspension Bridge road is of course, the Bristol Suspension Bridge —one of the key tourist attractions in a city after Stokes Croft and the M4/M5 motorway interchange. As part of "beautiful suburb of Bristol, tucked away from the hubbub of city life and located just a five-minute drive away from the centre." we'd expect more. Maybe the shops sell postcards of it or something.
(*), Yes, Roundlet is a real word.
Clifton likes to be known for its village, its Bridge and one or two of its pubs. The real Gateway to Clifton is something never discussed: a mini roundabout at the top of the village, just by the church.
To get an overview without going to Clifton, look at it in streetview and rehearse approaching the roundabout doing a right turn in a car from every road. Work out: when you should give way, when are you technically "in the roundabout and so should expect others to give way", and "is it actually possible to do all the turns legally". The answers being "no idea", "don't expect anyone to give way" and "no".
If you are cycling over the bridge, or driving near it, you have to negotiate it. It's disconcerting on a bike, especially with a child, as you cannot predict what anyone can do. It's a collection of random actions, vehicles coming in at speed, nobody knowing who to give way to —or even what side of the roundlet(*) to drive on. It's not great on a car either. There may actually be some protocol for the locals, but if so they it isn't widely known. We don't know it, certainly. What the locals and regulars do know is not to expect anyone to treat it as a roundabout —and never assume that you have the right of way.
You can see all of this in this unedited 9 minute view of the junction. Keep an eye out for the black Range Rover coming out from the left, and count how many times it does it.
This junction is fundamentally the wrong shape for a roundabout, it has two left turns, one hard, one soft, with the hard one's give way markings about 90 degrees to the roundabout itself. No visibility for anything coming off Suspension Bridge as to what vehicles coming from their right are doing —vehicles which don't often slow down, and hence won't see any cars coming from the left until they pull out. Two manoeuvres can only be executed by driving completely on the wrong side of the mini roundabout. There's one car coming the wrong up the one way street, though it does execute the junction safely. Lots of vehicles going through without pausing, including one of the cyclists coming off Clifton Down. And a couple of times cars on the roundabout have to give way to vehicles pulling on in front of them. Note the lack of tension though —regulars are forgiving of what
happens in a junction of such ambiguity.
Meanwhile that Range Rover coming off the left hand side does it five times in a row: our reporter got bored and went off while they were still doing it.
Before the video recording started the RR driver had stopped in the middle of a zebra crossing to let someone out —presumably they were now waiting for that person to return. But why were they driving round in circles given that with the RPZ roll out there's enough free parking, parking they'd have driven by? Unless they enjoy driving in circles and don't pay for diesel, the only other possibility is they had/planned to use up the 30 minute free park elsewhere. But why not just pull over with your hazard lights on? This is just a sign that some Clifton residents really are different from the rest of the city. The rest of us have mobile phones to co-ordinate dropoff and pickup operations, and to offer something more interesting to do while waiting than making right turns at this mini roundabout.
Finally: consider what it is like to try and cross this junction on foot. While it's not near the centre of the village, at the end of Manila Road (where the BMW drives out from the wrong direction of a one-way street), there's a primary school, some other ones nearby. And at the end of Suspension Bridge road is of course, the Bristol Suspension Bridge —one of the key tourist attractions in a city after Stokes Croft and the M4/M5 motorway interchange. As part of "beautiful suburb of Bristol, tucked away from the hubbub of city life and located just a five-minute drive away from the centre." we'd expect more. Maybe the shops sell postcards of it or something.
(*), Yes, Roundlet is a real word.
Tuesday, 14 June 2016
The M32 shutdown: a preview of the Zombie Apocalypse
Most films and TV series about some zombie or apocalypse or similar generally have some common visual motifs
But an empty M32? It's almost worth starting a zombie plague just for that experience they promised us: centre of town to M4 in under seven minutes.
Last weekend the M32 was shut down to put in a bridge —that is, local government funding for P+R commuters from the wealthy suburbs of S Gloucs, for students at UWE (more diverse than Bristol Uni), and the affluent staff of the North Fringe —the latter with a bias towards men in the engineering/tech career path.
A whole section of the city —less affluent, more diverse and more interesting than Clifton— breathed a sigh of relief and a lungful of air that didn't taste of second hand turbo diesel. A weekend off. Something they haven't known for decades.
For us, we got to experience something similar: being the only car on the M32.
Driving down the M32 late Sunday evening, there are signs warning of the M32 closed at the Stapleton/Muller Road junction, or, to the affluent of the city, "the IKEA roundabout", that being the sole reason they'd ever get off here.
As we prepare come off, bringing up the phone to tell us how to get to Clifton without having to make eye contact with anyone, we see the flyover "40 mph limit due to faulty barriers" section. Some of the cars come off before it, a few stay on.
The first sign of an unusual situation is that the outbound lanes are empty: there is not a single vehicle leaving the city.
The sole car in front pulls off at St Pauls, leaving an empty road ahead.
This is then: the first time that we have ever seen the M32 without traffic. Those vehicles opposite? Parked. When the Zombie Apocalypse comes, people will be required to pull over to the hard shoulder and put their hazard lights on —either as their last step of being human, or their first step as a zombie, before running up the exit and trying to eat anyone sitting in Mina Road park.
For all those people who missed it: going down an empty M32 is not so much a discovery of what those builders of "the M32 parkway" imagined the experience to be, it's actually very unnerving.
All motorways in the country are full of traffic, weekends as well as weekdays. That traffic actually provides cues. If the brake lights come on in the distance, something is up, time to start coasting down. If everything is going along at different speeds in each lane; all is probably well. And if all lanes drop to about the same speed, it's busy. Pick the lane with the best stopping distance in front and be calm.
Most importantly, the other vehicles provide speed information. Because if there is one place where you do need to keep checking your speed on the dial, it's not the 20 mph zone. It's the motorways. Once you are going at 75, the vehicle noise going up to 85 is generally the same, and from there, 85-90, 90-95, easy to pick up if you get into the fast lane to pass things, then, while speeded up, start going along with the other vehicles in there. Motorways are where you do need to keep an eye on your speed. Which is what the other cars help do.
Ignoring rain/fog/snow, when you should be making decisions based on stopping distance alone, you can generally benchmark your speed relative to other vehicles. If there are trucks going past you: either you own an original British Leyland Mini 850cc —or you should speed up. In the middle lane, going along with the Astras, the Golfs and the Zafiras: you are in the 70-80 zone, where generally most people sit. If you are in the outside lane going past those vehicles, maybe you should think about pulling in once you get past them. And if you are in the outside lane and there isn't an Audi Q7 driving so close to the back that you can see the nasal hair of the driver, you are going at less than 90 mph.
In the absence of those vehicles, you have no idea what speed you are going. Instead you are too busy looking round, going "ooh, there isn't anyone in front; where is the car right behind me, the one in the slow lane about to swing past the HGV? And why isn't there someone sitting in my driver-side blind spot?". It's fundamentally unnatural —like nothing you have ever trained for. We ended up spinning up the motor to 40 mph and trying to cherish this odd event for as long as we can.
Like Halley's Comet: We shall never see it again in our lifetime.
- A city partially destroyed.
- Wild animals reclaiming the land. (example: 12 monkeys)
- One or two survivors pushing shopping trollies. (Denzel Washington: The book of Eli)
- Wide empty roads where the main protagonist can drive round fast.( Will Smith: I am Legend; the Walking Dead,...)
But an empty M32? It's almost worth starting a zombie plague just for that experience they promised us: centre of town to M4 in under seven minutes.
Last weekend the M32 was shut down to put in a bridge —that is, local government funding for P+R commuters from the wealthy suburbs of S Gloucs, for students at UWE (more diverse than Bristol Uni), and the affluent staff of the North Fringe —the latter with a bias towards men in the engineering/tech career path.
A whole section of the city —less affluent, more diverse and more interesting than Clifton— breathed a sigh of relief and a lungful of air that didn't taste of second hand turbo diesel. A weekend off. Something they haven't known for decades.
For us, we got to experience something similar: being the only car on the M32.
Driving down the M32 late Sunday evening, there are signs warning of the M32 closed at the Stapleton/Muller Road junction, or, to the affluent of the city, "the IKEA roundabout", that being the sole reason they'd ever get off here.
As we prepare come off, bringing up the phone to tell us how to get to Clifton without having to make eye contact with anyone, we see the flyover "40 mph limit due to faulty barriers" section. Some of the cars come off before it, a few stay on.
The first sign of an unusual situation is that the outbound lanes are empty: there is not a single vehicle leaving the city.
The sole car in front pulls off at St Pauls, leaving an empty road ahead.
This is then: the first time that we have ever seen the M32 without traffic. Those vehicles opposite? Parked. When the Zombie Apocalypse comes, people will be required to pull over to the hard shoulder and put their hazard lights on —either as their last step of being human, or their first step as a zombie, before running up the exit and trying to eat anyone sitting in Mina Road park.
For all those people who missed it: going down an empty M32 is not so much a discovery of what those builders of "the M32 parkway" imagined the experience to be, it's actually very unnerving.
All motorways in the country are full of traffic, weekends as well as weekdays. That traffic actually provides cues. If the brake lights come on in the distance, something is up, time to start coasting down. If everything is going along at different speeds in each lane; all is probably well. And if all lanes drop to about the same speed, it's busy. Pick the lane with the best stopping distance in front and be calm.
Most importantly, the other vehicles provide speed information. Because if there is one place where you do need to keep checking your speed on the dial, it's not the 20 mph zone. It's the motorways. Once you are going at 75, the vehicle noise going up to 85 is generally the same, and from there, 85-90, 90-95, easy to pick up if you get into the fast lane to pass things, then, while speeded up, start going along with the other vehicles in there. Motorways are where you do need to keep an eye on your speed. Which is what the other cars help do.
Ignoring rain/fog/snow, when you should be making decisions based on stopping distance alone, you can generally benchmark your speed relative to other vehicles. If there are trucks going past you: either you own an original British Leyland Mini 850cc —or you should speed up. In the middle lane, going along with the Astras, the Golfs and the Zafiras: you are in the 70-80 zone, where generally most people sit. If you are in the outside lane going past those vehicles, maybe you should think about pulling in once you get past them. And if you are in the outside lane and there isn't an Audi Q7 driving so close to the back that you can see the nasal hair of the driver, you are going at less than 90 mph.
In the absence of those vehicles, you have no idea what speed you are going. Instead you are too busy looking round, going "ooh, there isn't anyone in front; where is the car right behind me, the one in the slow lane about to swing past the HGV? And why isn't there someone sitting in my driver-side blind spot?". It's fundamentally unnatural —like nothing you have ever trained for. We ended up spinning up the motor to 40 mph and trying to cherish this odd event for as long as we can.
Like Halley's Comet: We shall never see it again in our lifetime.
Monday, 13 June 2016
FirstBus: don't make it a class thing: the M32 commuters would never forgive you
A PR group funded by FirstBus and other bus companies have just published a "Dodgy Dossier" on why their buses suck.
The Bristol "dead" post went for it, but chose to blame 20 MPH and RPZ zones, that is "max speed between queues" and "limit on number of vehicles that can park for free in the inner city".
In doing so they made a couple of mistakes
One: In their claim "bristol is the slowest" they forgot to say "except Reading, which the graph clearly shows is slower"
This is one of those things that the less mathematically inclined (i.e. the Brexit leadership) get wrong all the time. Smaller numbers mean "less", bigger numbers mean "more". According to the shiny graphs this PR agency made up, it takes longer to get round Reading. What's worse: you're in Reading.
Two: They missed the key scapegoats of the bus companies: the cyclists.
This issue has been picked up, along with the brazen attempt by a media relations group to appear vaguely independent.
As for the congestion, well, looking at this video from RedVee of the Centre, you can't blame the cycling infrastructure —none— for the multiple lanes of stationary traffic
.
What's causing this? The combination of (a) too many people trying to drive and (b) The Centre being ripped up for Metrobus. Does the bus marketing document note that? complain that "bus passengers are being held up by the millions being spent in the city for bus passengers?". No: they pick on the noisy ones who make lots of noise but don't get dedicated lanes down the M32.
And how do they do that: by calling out the cylists in London of being "wealthy" white men
What is less well-known, is how relatively affluent cyclists in London are compared with bus passengers. Transport for London describes the London cyclist as typically white, under 40, male with medium to high household income. [Further] A report by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s Transport & Health Group (LSHTM) in 2011 describes cycling in London as disproportionately an activity of white, affluent men. Only 1.5% of those living in households earning under £15,000 cycled compared with 2.2% of those living in households earning over £35,000’.
This is something the cyclist campaigners have torn into for being bogus —but we aren't here to argue that. What we are concerned about is that they are using "benefits wealthy white men" as an argument against a transport option.
For if we were to make a list of transport-related work going on in the city which would appear to disproportionally benefit the wealthy it comes down to: anything which makes it easier to get between the more well off parts of the region and their places of working, shopping and leisure.
Specifically
- Metrobus to Bristol International Airport connections
- Metrobus as a P&R alternative for most residents of North Somerset and S Gloucs.
- The Managed Motorway work on the M4/M5
- Bristol mainline train electrification
And. let's be honest: the entire M32. The people living down alongside the Frome River weren't wishing they had a flyover at bedroom window height: they believed the same bollocks that politicians always say "yes you will suffer, but it will be better in the long term", and so a motorway went in to aid the people from Clifton to head to London; to help the people who moved out of the city to live in the rural wastelands past the ring road and their ghettos of boredom around Emerson's Green. And the inner ring road work started, thankfully never completed: But notice which parts of the city came out worse. Not the bits with money.
We say to FirstBus —who also own FGW railway line—: don't make your war on cyclists a class one. Because that will call into question a lot of the infrastructure you are having built for you by local and national governments.
Saturday, 4 June 2016
There is nothing erotic about a naked man on a Brompton
Being as the Bristol Traffic HQ is an open air drinking establishment in Stokes Croft (the wall on Turbo Island), we are used to the sight of nudity.
Even so, our encounter with the Bristol Naked Bike Ride was such that we had to delete our videos for the sake of humanity.
If you find yourself getting excited about the sight of a naked man on a Brompton, well, based on the participants of the local naked bike ride, you've got a bit of an obsession with folding bicycles that you should either get looked at, or at least get in touch with Brompton for a printed catalog.
Can we also observe that this image exposes the lie that "cycling is good for your health". Do these people look healthy? We think not. And as for the claim that Brooks saddles are comfy? There's nothing to say there except look at the expression on some of these people's faces.
For next year's ride, we propose having a review board deciding in advance who gets to ride. We will volunteer our services —provided nobody sends their nude selfies with them wearing nothing but hi-viz and a helmet. You know who you are.
Even so, our encounter with the Bristol Naked Bike Ride was such that we had to delete our videos for the sake of humanity.
If you find yourself getting excited about the sight of a naked man on a Brompton, well, based on the participants of the local naked bike ride, you've got a bit of an obsession with folding bicycles that you should either get looked at, or at least get in touch with Brompton for a printed catalog.
Can we also observe that this image exposes the lie that "cycling is good for your health". Do these people look healthy? We think not. And as for the claim that Brooks saddles are comfy? There's nothing to say there except look at the expression on some of these people's faces.
For next year's ride, we propose having a review board deciding in advance who gets to ride. We will volunteer our services —provided nobody sends their nude selfies with them wearing nothing but hi-viz and a helmet. You know who you are.
Friday, 13 May 2016
Rejoice: we have a new mayor!
So: we have a new mayor.
What's interesting about the results is the sheer number of people who turned out to vote -and the proportion of those voters who came out to vote out George. Given one of the aims of the mayoral program was to "increase engagement in local government", it has certainly met that goal, one way or another.
A lot of the city are clearly glad to see the back of GF. The big question is: which specific policies got people voting him out -or whether it was his general style of working: Unitarian decisions and dismissal of dissent- which got to people.
Marvin may end up following the Labour Party line -but that party does have a local organisation and many councillors -so there is a structure for propagating the issues and desires of part of the electorate up to the mayor's office.
He's promised to focus on those parts of the city which felt left behind, and address problems such as housing. Given the need to be seen to immediately fulfilling those promises, to deliver, expect work to start there. But given the lead time for such work, expect them to look for some low-hanging fruit elsewhere.
RPZ and 20 zones are in an interesting place here. They have proved controversial, especially the way the RPZs were rolled out. But at the same time, a lot of people in the zones are happy with the idea, albeit not the details: charges, times, disabled access. Tuning those is a simple way to be seen to be listening, without risking upsetting those in the core who are happy with them.
20 mph is also under threat. As with RPZ, the CAPEX is done: the signs and the paint. MR was not elected on a pro-speed platform and, with a large electorate within the inner city air quality "management" area, may be reluctant to upset those who see the benefit. Maybe he even recognises that trying to blame 20 mph for the city's transport woes is ridiculous. At the same time: the anti GF voters view it as part of the "war on motorists", and they will expect something in exchange for their vote.
The often cited proposal "make it purely round schools, hospitals and residential roads" will resurface, even if it misses out that most roads have residents, a continually jittering limit its actually harder to comply with, and that children walk and cycle to school on main roads too. Oh, and any changes to signage means more capital spending.
One tactic the mayor may try here is a discreet rollback of enforcement, though with the PCC being independent, that'll take negotiation.
The other pet peeve of the anti GF voters is all that money spent on cycling. Good news for them there: he didn't spend much. If you compare what Boris did in London over the last four years —the embankment, the bridges, Elephant and Castle— what Bristol got for their money is laughable. What is there? a segregated path that stops half way down Baldwin street and the continuing fiasco of that path near Bemmy.
The money, the effort, the time -and the road space- has gone into Metrobus, not bicycles. It's hard to see what worse MR could do here, short of taking away more space for BRT. We know someone still has their eye on the BBRP —fortunately the people of Easton love it enough to keep the buses out: if it was just the cyclists, it'd look like the M32, the centre and the Festival way do: roadworks for BRT.
Metrobus itself? Marvin supports it. Anyway, given how far it has gone, the current BRT fiasco routes may be considered too late to kill. All future work could be put on hold until it's seen how well it works out in budget as well a use. It would also have be on how well the Elf kingdom of Somerset and the Dwarf Mines of S. Gloucs step up to their bit. About what FirstBus and Wessex Bus deliver. And about whether well a transport authority spanning the CUBA region can kick FirstBus into the 21zt century: contactless payment for all journeys, tickets interchangeable with Wessex bus. It's even about FBus having buses waiting at Templemeads and Parkway for GWR trains from London.
Let's wait and see.
What's interesting about the results is the sheer number of people who turned out to vote -and the proportion of those voters who came out to vote out George. Given one of the aims of the mayoral program was to "increase engagement in local government", it has certainly met that goal, one way or another.
A lot of the city are clearly glad to see the back of GF. The big question is: which specific policies got people voting him out -or whether it was his general style of working: Unitarian decisions and dismissal of dissent- which got to people.
Marvin may end up following the Labour Party line -but that party does have a local organisation and many councillors -so there is a structure for propagating the issues and desires of part of the electorate up to the mayor's office.
He's promised to focus on those parts of the city which felt left behind, and address problems such as housing. Given the need to be seen to immediately fulfilling those promises, to deliver, expect work to start there. But given the lead time for such work, expect them to look for some low-hanging fruit elsewhere.
RPZ and 20 zones are in an interesting place here. They have proved controversial, especially the way the RPZs were rolled out. But at the same time, a lot of people in the zones are happy with the idea, albeit not the details: charges, times, disabled access. Tuning those is a simple way to be seen to be listening, without risking upsetting those in the core who are happy with them.
20 mph is also under threat. As with RPZ, the CAPEX is done: the signs and the paint. MR was not elected on a pro-speed platform and, with a large electorate within the inner city air quality "management" area, may be reluctant to upset those who see the benefit. Maybe he even recognises that trying to blame 20 mph for the city's transport woes is ridiculous. At the same time: the anti GF voters view it as part of the "war on motorists", and they will expect something in exchange for their vote.
The often cited proposal "make it purely round schools, hospitals and residential roads" will resurface, even if it misses out that most roads have residents, a continually jittering limit its actually harder to comply with, and that children walk and cycle to school on main roads too. Oh, and any changes to signage means more capital spending.
One tactic the mayor may try here is a discreet rollback of enforcement, though with the PCC being independent, that'll take negotiation.
The other pet peeve of the anti GF voters is all that money spent on cycling. Good news for them there: he didn't spend much. If you compare what Boris did in London over the last four years —the embankment, the bridges, Elephant and Castle— what Bristol got for their money is laughable. What is there? a segregated path that stops half way down Baldwin street and the continuing fiasco of that path near Bemmy.
The money, the effort, the time -and the road space- has gone into Metrobus, not bicycles. It's hard to see what worse MR could do here, short of taking away more space for BRT. We know someone still has their eye on the BBRP —fortunately the people of Easton love it enough to keep the buses out: if it was just the cyclists, it'd look like the M32, the centre and the Festival way do: roadworks for BRT.
Metrobus itself? Marvin supports it. Anyway, given how far it has gone, the current BRT fiasco routes may be considered too late to kill. All future work could be put on hold until it's seen how well it works out in budget as well a use. It would also have be on how well the Elf kingdom of Somerset and the Dwarf Mines of S. Gloucs step up to their bit. About what FirstBus and Wessex Bus deliver. And about whether well a transport authority spanning the CUBA region can kick FirstBus into the 21zt century: contactless payment for all journeys, tickets interchangeable with Wessex bus. It's even about FBus having buses waiting at Templemeads and Parkway for GWR trains from London.
Let's wait and see.
Monday, 2 May 2016
Where is our election coverage?
People come up to us and ask questions. Usually we like them to say "would you like some more beer?", rather than the more frequent question, "Are you aware of the national speed limit in this country, sir?".
Most recently, people have been asking: "where is your electoral coverage?"
Well, we've been primarily leaving it to other reporting outlets, specifically the Bristolian and Bristol 24/7. If people are putting effort in to analyse voting records, do interviews and organise hustings, that's enough.
A more relevant question people ask us is: who should we vote for?
As the people printing the ballots, we can say "you can't vote for UKIP on our photocopies as he falls off the end". Which is ironic as the spherical model of the earth is one of those sciency-things that UKIP candidates argue about, along with Climate Change and Newton's Laws of Motion (especially the bit that says the kinetic energy in a collision goes up with the square of the velocity).
Instead you get to make your mind up, noting that as Tony Dyer is the only one ever to have bought team members (including the late Chris Hutt) beer, he's got a head start.
What we recommend is you, the voter, place the following items in the order you feel is most important.
[ ] Right to speed at 35+ mph through the inner city
[ ] Right to park where you want in the city
[ ] Fundamental issues in society
The Fundamental issues in society box can include: education; housing; the central-government imposed austerity program and the fact that it will get worse; how and why so few people brought up in Bristol are in science and engineering jobs in north fringe technical companies, Bristol's Air Quality Management Area and other environmental issues; Firstbus & Metrobus. All the things that matter to those people who don't recognise that the choice between 20 mph and 30 mph is the most important issue facing the city today.
Then choose a politician that appears to prioritise issues in an order closest to your own. That's your first vote.
For the second vote you decide who you don't want in: Marvin or George —and vote for the other. Clear?
Most recently, people have been asking: "where is your electoral coverage?"
Well, we've been primarily leaving it to other reporting outlets, specifically the Bristolian and Bristol 24/7. If people are putting effort in to analyse voting records, do interviews and organise hustings, that's enough.
A more relevant question people ask us is: who should we vote for?
As the people printing the ballots, we can say "you can't vote for UKIP on our photocopies as he falls off the end". Which is ironic as the spherical model of the earth is one of those sciency-things that UKIP candidates argue about, along with Climate Change and Newton's Laws of Motion (especially the bit that says the kinetic energy in a collision goes up with the square of the velocity).
Instead you get to make your mind up, noting that as Tony Dyer is the only one ever to have bought team members (including the late Chris Hutt) beer, he's got a head start.
What we recommend is you, the voter, place the following items in the order you feel is most important.
[ ] Right to speed at 35+ mph through the inner city
[ ] Right to park where you want in the city
[ ] Fundamental issues in society
The Fundamental issues in society box can include: education; housing; the central-government imposed austerity program and the fact that it will get worse; how and why so few people brought up in Bristol are in science and engineering jobs in north fringe technical companies, Bristol's Air Quality Management Area and other environmental issues; Firstbus & Metrobus. All the things that matter to those people who don't recognise that the choice between 20 mph and 30 mph is the most important issue facing the city today.
Then choose a politician that appears to prioritise issues in an order closest to your own. That's your first vote.
For the second vote you decide who you don't want in: Marvin or George —and vote for the other. Clear?
Saturday, 9 April 2016
The M32 picnic area
A known subversive, "Analogue Andy", has been praising the Frome Valley cycle route, saying it joins up communities where the M32 divides them.
Well, if the valley cycle route is of social benefit, it is purely because of the infrastructure improvements the M32 added
Look at this
An all-year, all-weather, family picnic area.
Not even the bearpit benches offer such a sheltered area to take the whole family, park near IKEA, then walk over here to enjoy the afternoon.
We would love to see any photos people have of this area in its heyday, when there were, presumably, many families, laughing kids playing, happy parents bringing flasks of tea from their Austin Morris cars to drink here.
Sadly, even this photo is a relic: the benches have been converted into a skateboard park. The right to have a picnic under the M32 has forever been stolen. Well, unless you have a tartan rug in your Austin Morris.
Well, if the valley cycle route is of social benefit, it is purely because of the infrastructure improvements the M32 added
Look at this
An all-year, all-weather, family picnic area.
Not even the bearpit benches offer such a sheltered area to take the whole family, park near IKEA, then walk over here to enjoy the afternoon.
We would love to see any photos people have of this area in its heyday, when there were, presumably, many families, laughing kids playing, happy parents bringing flasks of tea from their Austin Morris cars to drink here.
Sadly, even this photo is a relic: the benches have been converted into a skateboard park. The right to have a picnic under the M32 has forever been stolen. Well, unless you have a tartan rug in your Austin Morris.
Thursday, 10 March 2016
CS11, the London Ringway and Hampstead
People paying attention to videos may note that more than one of our contributors have London accents. One actually has a South London accent, which is pretty shocking, but they've lived in the city long enough for it to no longer be something to apologise for. Another one of our team has a north-west london accent, the kind you'd get growing up in Camden and Brent. Their dark secret is even worse than having lived south of the Thames. They first went to school in Hampstead. (For locals, that little one opposite the tube station, under the everyman cinema, the one that still believes in hymns and things).
Eventually their parents saw the error of their ways and moved into West Hampstead, making their children walk to nearby ecoles. Under the gentle hand that was the Inner London Education Authority, swimming was taught at the nearest council pool: in primary school you got a coach. Come secondary school, they'd worked out a better solution: the kids were given the money to get the tube during lunch; if they made it to the swimming lesson they'd get the money to go home. This presented the children with two choices: take a tube from Kilburn to Swiss Cottage, or walk to the pool eating the bag of chips you'd just bought with the fare. Tough decision.
What was never considered was cycling from the school to the pool. Because that would involve negotiating the Swiss Cottage gyratory, a multilane mess which you had to cross to get to the pool or library, getting there along Finchley Road, the "A41" coming down off the M1 by way of Staples Corner and the North Circular. It was tube or foot.
In London: the tube is the mass form of transport for anyone near a station. It's why what zone you are in is a marker of house prices, "They can afford to live in Zone 2!"; distance from tube station advertised because it makes such a difference on your daily commute. Off-street parking? Maybe for those few houses that have it —but it's not useful for commuting anyway. Not only is there nowhere to park, and congestion fees to worry about —it's significantly slower than the tube.
Driving to work, at least if you work in Central London, is a minority form of commuting. That's even if you have a fancy job in the city: it's not that likely to have a parking space.
This is perhaps a reason for the volume of taxis in London, they're an exclusive form of travel for people who don't have parking spaces but can afford to sit in traffic jams. By outsourcing the sitting behind the wheel swearing to people from Essex, you can check emails on your phone, only at the cost of many pounds per journey.
The rise of cycling in London, then, is arguably a consequence of dissatisfaction with an overcrowded, expensive and unreliable tube, recognition that the bus service was worse, driving even more stupid and getting in a taxi a transport for the wealthy people with time on their hands.
Nowadays central London has a massive proportion of cycle commuters, those who are happy with a city worse to cycle in than Bristol, those who have learned all the back ways which are mostly survivable. When the new embankment and bridge segregated routes open, central London will show the rest of the UK cities how far they are behind, even Bristol, so proud of itself, can't do a pedestrian crossing of the Bearpit in less than a year, the Templemeads to Bemmy path is missing-considered-deceased, BRT2 has stolen bits of path and parkland, and then there's the centre and Baldwin Street. London is leading in both vision and execution. Which, when you consider the wanker in charge of it, quite saying something.
What London is doing is setting a baseline for the rest of Britain, for cycling and even, with Crossrail, what you can do for public transport. Bristol now needs to step up, making it pleasant to cycle across the city centre without you having to rehearse in your head a safe route and factoring in you won't have a clue what to do by The Centre, and that Templemeads hates cycling.
London needs to step up by moving out of the centre, to make it survivable to get in to the city, to make walking and cycling an option for people who live outside Zone 1. For a hint of the difficulties here, look at Vole O'Speed's coverage of Brent. As visitors to Brent with the "Love Bristol, Go Brent" campaign, we can assure people that he's actually upbeat about the prospects for cycling in Brent.
And Hampstead? With its primary school off a traffic jam of taxis? What hope does it have?
In CS11, it has the chance of a safe route to cycle from Swiss Cottage to the city centre, a feed in route for everyone in north west London. If you can get by bike to Swiss Cottage, you can carry on to your destination know that you'll be alive when you get there. Instead of having to text your loved ones "I'm at work, I'm fine!", you'd be able to text them "I'm on CS11, I'll live today!".
Except of course, the residents of St John's Wood don't want it, as it will make driving to Hampstead harder. And they are leading Britain's Backlash.
The comments are absolutely worth reading. Take this one from "Craig", resident of Hampstead village for nine year.
He is complaining that a cycle lane a mile away will devaluation the properties in Hampstead. That's an area where they are asking for £1.7M for a a flat, £3M for a house. So Craig, nine year resident, is worried that the resale value of his house will drop, by, what? a thousand pounds? Ten thousand? Because really it'd have to be a couple of hundred thousand pounds worth of devaluation.
And here's the irony. The sole reason that he has his £3.5M house is because in the 1970s, people fought to stop it having a motorway over it.
If the GLC had got its way then, the quaint little houses of Craig and others would be in the shadow on a par with London's Westway, a faint miasma of NOx and diesel particles infiltrating the house, adding extra flavour to the coffees their Nescafe-coffee pod cafe macchiatos, creating more traffic on every single road, and generally making the area even less pleasant to live in —as if having it full of people like Craig wasn't bad enough.
That was what London dodged: The ringway over Hampstead. Instead they got the status quo, which, with the vast cross-london school run, the emergence of diesel as the fuel of choice, killing those kids from NOx and lack of exercise. And yet these people don't want change —they expect to be able to drive round the city. First the school dropoff then on to the underground parking at Waitrose John Barnes, on to the gym for your spin class, up the road to pick up the children (Walk to school! Have them use public transport! Never!), then nip down to central london for a play or two, parking at westminster being outrageous, but well, so's the mortgage on a little Hampstead mews house, as is theatre tickets, what's another £30 on the evening —why, it's the amount of tip the au-pair would expect, isn't it?
Apparently there's a demonstration of support for the proposal on Friday, March 11. Us: we'd be more tempted to head to the anti demonstration to see who it is arguing against them —because they sound like the Donald Trump supporter of transport.
To close then, one last opposition comment: we can't have cycle paths in our cities because we have road, not canals.
If CS11 gets stopped, it'll because of people like this.
Eventually their parents saw the error of their ways and moved into West Hampstead, making their children walk to nearby ecoles. Under the gentle hand that was the Inner London Education Authority, swimming was taught at the nearest council pool: in primary school you got a coach. Come secondary school, they'd worked out a better solution: the kids were given the money to get the tube during lunch; if they made it to the swimming lesson they'd get the money to go home. This presented the children with two choices: take a tube from Kilburn to Swiss Cottage, or walk to the pool eating the bag of chips you'd just bought with the fare. Tough decision.
What was never considered was cycling from the school to the pool. Because that would involve negotiating the Swiss Cottage gyratory, a multilane mess which you had to cross to get to the pool or library, getting there along Finchley Road, the "A41" coming down off the M1 by way of Staples Corner and the North Circular. It was tube or foot.
In London: the tube is the mass form of transport for anyone near a station. It's why what zone you are in is a marker of house prices, "They can afford to live in Zone 2!"; distance from tube station advertised because it makes such a difference on your daily commute. Off-street parking? Maybe for those few houses that have it —but it's not useful for commuting anyway. Not only is there nowhere to park, and congestion fees to worry about —it's significantly slower than the tube.
Driving to work, at least if you work in Central London, is a minority form of commuting. That's even if you have a fancy job in the city: it's not that likely to have a parking space.
This is perhaps a reason for the volume of taxis in London, they're an exclusive form of travel for people who don't have parking spaces but can afford to sit in traffic jams. By outsourcing the sitting behind the wheel swearing to people from Essex, you can check emails on your phone, only at the cost of many pounds per journey.
The rise of cycling in London, then, is arguably a consequence of dissatisfaction with an overcrowded, expensive and unreliable tube, recognition that the bus service was worse, driving even more stupid and getting in a taxi a transport for the wealthy people with time on their hands.
Nowadays central London has a massive proportion of cycle commuters, those who are happy with a city worse to cycle in than Bristol, those who have learned all the back ways which are mostly survivable. When the new embankment and bridge segregated routes open, central London will show the rest of the UK cities how far they are behind, even Bristol, so proud of itself, can't do a pedestrian crossing of the Bearpit in less than a year, the Templemeads to Bemmy path is missing-considered-deceased, BRT2 has stolen bits of path and parkland, and then there's the centre and Baldwin Street. London is leading in both vision and execution. Which, when you consider the wanker in charge of it, quite saying something.
What London is doing is setting a baseline for the rest of Britain, for cycling and even, with Crossrail, what you can do for public transport. Bristol now needs to step up, making it pleasant to cycle across the city centre without you having to rehearse in your head a safe route and factoring in you won't have a clue what to do by The Centre, and that Templemeads hates cycling.
London needs to step up by moving out of the centre, to make it survivable to get in to the city, to make walking and cycling an option for people who live outside Zone 1. For a hint of the difficulties here, look at Vole O'Speed's coverage of Brent. As visitors to Brent with the "Love Bristol, Go Brent" campaign, we can assure people that he's actually upbeat about the prospects for cycling in Brent.
And Hampstead? With its primary school off a traffic jam of taxis? What hope does it have?
In CS11, it has the chance of a safe route to cycle from Swiss Cottage to the city centre, a feed in route for everyone in north west London. If you can get by bike to Swiss Cottage, you can carry on to your destination know that you'll be alive when you get there. Instead of having to text your loved ones "I'm at work, I'm fine!", you'd be able to text them "I'm on CS11, I'll live today!".
Except of course, the residents of St John's Wood don't want it, as it will make driving to Hampstead harder. And they are leading Britain's Backlash.
The comments are absolutely worth reading. Take this one from "Craig", resident of Hampstead village for nine year.
He is complaining that a cycle lane a mile away will devaluation the properties in Hampstead. That's an area where they are asking for £1.7M for a a flat, £3M for a house. So Craig, nine year resident, is worried that the resale value of his house will drop, by, what? a thousand pounds? Ten thousand? Because really it'd have to be a couple of hundred thousand pounds worth of devaluation.
And here's the irony. The sole reason that he has his £3.5M house is because in the 1970s, people fought to stop it having a motorway over it.
If the GLC had got its way then, the quaint little houses of Craig and others would be in the shadow on a par with London's Westway, a faint miasma of NOx and diesel particles infiltrating the house, adding extra flavour to the coffees their Nescafe-coffee pod cafe macchiatos, creating more traffic on every single road, and generally making the area even less pleasant to live in —as if having it full of people like Craig wasn't bad enough.
That was what London dodged: The ringway over Hampstead. Instead they got the status quo, which, with the vast cross-london school run, the emergence of diesel as the fuel of choice, killing those kids from NOx and lack of exercise. And yet these people don't want change —they expect to be able to drive round the city. First the school dropoff then on to the underground parking at Waitrose John Barnes, on to the gym for your spin class, up the road to pick up the children (Walk to school! Have them use public transport! Never!), then nip down to central london for a play or two, parking at westminster being outrageous, but well, so's the mortgage on a little Hampstead mews house, as is theatre tickets, what's another £30 on the evening —why, it's the amount of tip the au-pair would expect, isn't it?
Apparently there's a demonstration of support for the proposal on Friday, March 11. Us: we'd be more tempted to head to the anti demonstration to see who it is arguing against them —because they sound like the Donald Trump supporter of transport.
To close then, one last opposition comment: we can't have cycle paths in our cities because we have road, not canals.
If CS11 gets stopped, it'll because of people like this.
Monday, 7 March 2016
Bristol Drivers: always giving cyclists a hand
There are always complaints in the cycling community (all eight of them) about some war-on-cyclists taking place in Bristol. We know that's untrue: the war being conducted in Bristol is by cyclists, against Motorists!
Innocent motorists, we may add —law abiding, invariably polite and considerate.
Here we one such example, a BMW driver going out of their way to give the cyclist a helping hand up the road
See how they swerved to make sure they were able to help the cyclist? See how they carefully reached out and gently tried to assist the cyclist? Admittedly, they were try to help the cyclist fall over and injure themselves —but they were still trying to do their bit for a cycling city.
We've said before, that Bristol is split between those who like cycling and those who, well, hate it.
We suspect the driver of BMW MX64JWU may have been one of the people in the survey who expressed negative opinions about cycling. We may also suspect they aren't in favour of 20 mph limits.
Well, we always value those prepared to stand up for their principals, or here, lean out the window and try to push someone over for those same principals. We feel this driver should be congratulated with the publicity their action deserves. Does anyone know who they are?
Location: Horfield/Lockleaze border, Wordsworth Road.; that bit which the #24 bus covers.
Video from Dave Edmonds. See the BCyC facebook posting.
Innocent motorists, we may add —law abiding, invariably polite and considerate.
Here we one such example, a BMW driver going out of their way to give the cyclist a helping hand up the road
See how they swerved to make sure they were able to help the cyclist? See how they carefully reached out and gently tried to assist the cyclist? Admittedly, they were try to help the cyclist fall over and injure themselves —but they were still trying to do their bit for a cycling city.
We've said before, that Bristol is split between those who like cycling and those who, well, hate it.
We suspect the driver of BMW MX64JWU may have been one of the people in the survey who expressed negative opinions about cycling. We may also suspect they aren't in favour of 20 mph limits.
Well, we always value those prepared to stand up for their principals, or here, lean out the window and try to push someone over for those same principals. We feel this driver should be congratulated with the publicity their action deserves. Does anyone know who they are?
Location: Horfield/Lockleaze border, Wordsworth Road.; that bit which the #24 bus covers.
Video from Dave Edmonds. See the BCyC facebook posting.
Tuesday, 1 March 2016
Where does Bristol's pollution come from?
20 mph is looking like one of the big manufactured controversy issues of the election. Not, say, library closures, or the sale of the Avonmouth ports and apparent abandonment of Avonmouth. No, 20 mph limits, along with parking restrictions. Who says the electorate isn't worrying about city wide issues?
One of the pro-speeding campaign claims is "20 mph causes pollution".
Bristol has a pollution problem. It has an Air Quality Management Area which covers the centre, and also follows the A38 and M32 out of town. And apparently even the council admits it is killing people.
Where is that pollution coming from? Well, for NOx, the nitrogen oxides which VW tried to cover up, it's coming from Diesel cars. Bristol's NOx problem would be significantly reduced if everyone driving diesel today switched to petrol. Not hybrid or electric: petrol would be a start, especially modern cars that turn off the engine when stopped. And with gearing such that they can cruise at 20 mph nicely.
What is that ratio of petrol:diesel in the city?
We have no data, though the council's ANPR camera arrays will have that information if they could sit down and analyse it. Otherwise, it's that same self-selecting short term surveys which we are always so disparaging of. Here's ours
This was taken by a tax dodger cycling up the shared use pavement on Bridge Valley Road. While most shared use pavements are technically, "bollocks", this one is worth using. The speed of the cyclist (4-6 mph) is at a significant different from that of the motor vehicles, so you will only get passed by everything. The speed limit here is 30 mph, its off the portway and cumberland basin flyover, drivers may not have seen a bicycle that morning and forgotten they exist. And there's almost never anyone walking. If there's a fault: pavement surface quality and sweeping; the usual.
Going up the hill on a bike, you can see the motor vehicles come in waves; a queue heading west from the cumberland basin builds up until there's a right turn light, then they set off. You get a minute or two of quiet, 30s of traffic, then repeated until you reach the top. The video shows one of the groups of cars and vans.
Let's look at engine type, confirming on the MOT checker site whenever the registration number was readable and it wasn't immediately obvious
One of the pro-speeding campaign claims is "20 mph causes pollution".
Bristol has a pollution problem. It has an Air Quality Management Area which covers the centre, and also follows the A38 and M32 out of town. And apparently even the council admits it is killing people.
Where is that pollution coming from? Well, for NOx, the nitrogen oxides which VW tried to cover up, it's coming from Diesel cars. Bristol's NOx problem would be significantly reduced if everyone driving diesel today switched to petrol. Not hybrid or electric: petrol would be a start, especially modern cars that turn off the engine when stopped. And with gearing such that they can cruise at 20 mph nicely.
What is that ratio of petrol:diesel in the city?
We have no data, though the council's ANPR camera arrays will have that information if they could sit down and analyse it. Otherwise, it's that same self-selecting short term surveys which we are always so disparaging of. Here's ours
This was taken by a tax dodger cycling up the shared use pavement on Bridge Valley Road. While most shared use pavements are technically, "bollocks", this one is worth using. The speed of the cyclist (4-6 mph) is at a significant different from that of the motor vehicles, so you will only get passed by everything. The speed limit here is 30 mph, its off the portway and cumberland basin flyover, drivers may not have seen a bicycle that morning and forgotten they exist. And there's almost never anyone walking. If there's a fault: pavement surface quality and sweeping; the usual.
Going up the hill on a bike, you can see the motor vehicles come in waves; a queue heading west from the cumberland basin builds up until there's a right turn light, then they set off. You get a minute or two of quiet, 30s of traffic, then repeated until you reach the top. The video shows one of the groups of cars and vans.
Let's look at engine type, confirming on the MOT checker site whenever the registration number was readable and it wasn't immediately obvious
- white (VW?) van. Diesel
- white van. Diesel
- BMW 330d. Diesel. Passed MoT on Feb 22, 97K miles.
- VW Passat. Only available in EURO-test-rigged diesel models. 100K miles on 16/11/15
- Audi A6. Diesel
- LGV. Diesel
- Ice cream van. Diesel with dodgy fan belt.
- white van. Diesel. 84K miles
- Peugeot 308 Diesel. (Passed MoT on second attempt feb 17; 78K miles)
- Mercedes SLK230K, petrol. 50K miles after 15 years of use.
- Ice cream van. Diesel
11 vehicles; only one petrol engined. That's a ratio of 10:1.
As stated, this is a self-selected dataset, but even so, it didn't involve a cyclist going up and down the hill repeatedly until a group came by that were nearly all diesel. It was just the outlier. If one more petrol car had got through the ratio would have dropped to 5:1, awful, but not as bad.
We don't have any real datasets of the petrol/diesel ratio, and this being an out of rush hour measurement may show bias towards working vehicles over commuters (unless a lot of people go to work on an ice cream van, that is). But it does point a lot of the blame at our NOx problem at Herr Doctor Diesel and his inventions.
This also means the mercedes owner has something to be smug about, as well as having a vehicle still worth more than the Peugeot or the Passat: every mile they've driven has chucked out a fraction of the pollution of the other vehicles, as well as only doing a quarter as many miles/year as the others. Too bad their wingmirrors cost so much to replace.
Wednesday, 17 February 2016
Costing out a 21st century police state
There's been lots of interesting coverage of the new Snooper's charter, with light blue touchpaper having a good summary of the fundamental civil liberties issues.
But we haven't seen much in the way of "how would an ISP implement this?"
Which means its up to us, implementers of a PCSO-state adjacent to the Bearpit, to look at how to build this. As proof we know what we are talking about, here is our 8TB JBOD storage infrastructure (running xubuntu server 14) with a Top of Rack (ToR) switch consisting of a netgear base station flashed to DD-WRT. Sticker some recruitment from "Google reliability engineering"
The new bill requires ISPs to store an "Internet Connection Record (ICR)" of every connection, and allow government access to it on demand.
How would an ISP implement such a system?
First: What is an "Internet Connection Record (ICR)"? The bill has made up something which doesn't really exist and then told ISPs to maintain it.
It is probably a record recording: the originating IP address/port of a TCP connection, the destination IP/port, and the duration of the connection. "probably", because it uses the term "event"
The GCHQ/Bristol university "Problem Book (redacted)" appears to cover this very problem in the "five alive" dataset of IP/IP communications (p70), with every communication record being a list of records of (start-time/8, source-IP/4, source port/2, dest-IP/4, dest port/2, protocol/2. [data size]/8). Using the byte size estimated in the /N values, that's 30 bytes per communication; with the move to IPv6 driven by mobile phones, you'd need 16 bytes per source and dest address, or 56 bytes/record. That's for every HTTP request, skype call, bittorrent block share, PS4 game setup. If they include DNS records, it's for every nslookup command issued.
That's a lot of data in a world of phones and home network connections.
How to store all of this?
We see a number of strategies
The "fuck off Theresa" strategy
Here your ISP implements "for security reasons" an isolated system which collects ICRs, but for which the only way to retrieve them is a 1970s-era punched card reader you have to actually walk to. If HMG asks for something, you say "next wednesday? Come on by. Bring your query on a prepared punched card and we'll have the printer ready for the output. Oh, and we'll bill you for the ink"
The problem here is on P135: "The Secretary of State may make regulations imposing specified obligations on 20 relevant operators, or relevant operators of a specified description.', which includes "obligations to provide facilities or services of a specified description;". You could offer "the fuck off then" system, and they'd say "no, we want this". The ISP would not get a choice in the matter.
The TalkTalk fiasco
A Linux server running MySQL with a front end of an unpatched PHP web application accessible on the open internet over an unencrypted HTTP connection.
MySQL does have the lowest cost/TB of storage out there, and while a single mysql server doesn't grow, you can scale via sharding; storing the mass surveillance records of a few tens of of thousands of users.
Limitations
1. Doesn't handle the "list me everyone who used twitter between 9 and 9:30 query" without going through every single database and then aggregating the results, so pushing out a database query (SELECT * FROM icr WHERE icr.endpoint="twitter.com" AND icr.time>21:00 and icr.time < 21:30), somehow merging them all.
2. Being people utterly out of their depth, that same web UI will be accessible from your customer billing form. That'll be a massive security disaster, unless the people breaking are a group like Anonymous, where it's more likely to be a contribution "; DROP * from USERS" or an attack on public targets (SELECT * FROM icr WHERE user="Theresa May")
The outsourced consultancy disaster
The design here is less a design than a process. Go to a global/national software consultancy (e.g. Capita). Give them lots of money. Wait. Eventually get some software that doesn't work very well, designed to run on very expensive hardware.
This is essentially how major government projects like Universal Credit and any NHS-wide computer systems turn out. The problem here is the "ocean boiling grand vision" along with an inability to adjust features to meet unrealistic deadlines, along with consultants who are too excited by the cash to point out the project is doomed. Oh, and politicians who stand up in parliament announce changes in plans and then keep pretending the project is on schedule.
With this strategy we'd have a police state that came in late and didn't work very well. But: we'd pay for it either via taxes or ISPs, and it will be expensive
Bring it to the Borg
The cloud approach. All ICRs are Netflow records grabbed off the Cisco switches and buffered locally. Regularly they are pushed up to google cloud storage in bulk HTTPS PUT operations, so storing all your data in google's server farms. We'd duplicate it across sites for Disaster Recovery ("DR") , and host it in the zero-CO2 datacentres ("DCs") to help meet the COP21 commitments which Osborne is trying to pretend weren't made.
Those initial datasets could be converted to more compressed format, with some summary data pushed into the google BigTable database. Queries against the dataset "find everyone who used twitter and facebook yesterday" would be Google BigQuery queries.
This architecture would work, provided whoever wrote the capture, upload and query code knew what they were doing. Google would handle datacentre ops, bill your ISP or HMG by the petabyte of data stored and for the CPU load of the import/cleanup phase and the query execution.
This is the one we'd build. No upfront hardware CAPEX; operational costs O(records)+O(queries). As you get 1TB of free processing month, initial dev costs are relatively low too.
Would the government allow it? Unlikely. Google's nearest datacentres are in Ireland and Finland; all the data would be moved out of the UK and under the jurisdiction of others.
It's notable, however, that Amazon have a special datacentre in the US for Amazon GovCloud, which is is where federal agencies can keep data and run code. We aren't aware of a UK equivalent. They could do this, though presumably after discussing tax arrangements.
[BTW, if someone went this way, as costs are directly proportional to the number of records, you could hurt the telcos and government costs by generating as many records as you can. If every UDP packet kept a sender and destination, you could run something on all willing participant's machines to create costs. Even at pennies per gigabyte, you can ramp up the bills if you leave this code running flat out overnight. Just a thought]
Kafkaesque
The fallback design would be to use the open source Big Data stack; "Hadoop and Friends"
The netflow call records would be streamed into Apache Kafka streams, which would then store the data in Hadoop HDFS, or perhaps feed them through some initial streaming system for cleanup (storm, spark).
Summary information would go into a column database. Normally the checklist item would be HBase, but given this is a government project, the NSA implemented Accumulo would win out.
Assuming there's a way to submit remote queries, those queries need to be secured. We'd come to some arrangement with the government to say "here are the kerberos credentials you need" on a USB stick, restrict access to SPNEGO-authenticated callers over HTTPS and rely on the NSA having no back doors in Accumulo that they aren't willing to tell GCHQ about.
Cost: upfront CAPEX of the datacentre, operational costs: site, power, staff, cooling. ideally you'd host it somewhere with cool air and low cost zero-carbon power, which points us up a Scotland and NE england. Land, power and people are affordable, and before long you could have something on a par with Facebook Prineville, though not, notably, NSA Utah.
Being open source software, you don't actually have to pay anyone for it —if you take on the support costs yourselves. It's unlikely telcos will want to do this, so that needs to be covered too. Once you have enough Petabytes of data, the costs of this system is still likely to be less than with google or amazon.
Otherwise: software development costs atop this layer may be steep, especially if you don't have experience in this.
In fact: all of the strategies have software development costs, a cost which is the same for every telco, all implementing roughly the same application.
Which would leave the government to be in a very good position to walk up to all of them and say "we can provide the software for you —just run these servers with our code". That way they get to run precisely the software they want —and hook it up directly to their central systems in a way which they knows will work.
They could even say "we'll host your servers somewhere and provide the software". That would give the government direct access to the nominally independent telco-hosted datasets, when they were all really in the same big room, running the same application.
There you have it then: four real ways. Two disasters, two viable: one where you hand off the operational issues to Google or amazon in exchange for lots of cash, the other home-built on the open source Big Data stack for more upfront capital costs but lower long term storage & compute costs. And relying on GCHQ to provide the software layer.
The only one that would scale, technically and financially, without giving the Google or Amazon the data, would be Hadoop+Accumulo, with code the telcos probably aren't up to writing themselves.
How much would this cost?
Hardware: Facebook-based open compute servers.
These are never publicly quoted, as you have be shopping for $1M+ before the design starts to make sense; at that point you get off the web site and onto the phone.
Looking at the Penguin Computing icebreaker storage servers, holding 30 3.5" HDDs in a 2U system. with ~44 "rack units" of capacity in a normal rack, you get 22/per rack (we're leaving space for Top of Rack switches) == 660 disks.
With 4TB HDDs, you get 2.6 petabytes in a single rack. Heavy bastard with serious power budget, but compact enough that you can fit one in various telco sites, doing the initial storage/preprocess there before uploading to central facilities in off-peak times.
A 4TB HDD costs $115 from Amazon US; let's assume $75 for the OEM. You'd be paying $50K for those 550 disks. That's all. Servers, let's assume $1.5K for each chassis(*), 33K, so $82,500 per rack, excluding networking. Let's round that up to $100K.
We'd end up with a system whose pure hardware costs, the CAPEX, come in at $100K per 2.5 PB of storage. For 1MB USD you've got 25 PB. At, say, 60 bytes per record (==56 + 4), we'd get 426e9 records per rack. That's what's technically known as "a fuck of a lot of data". More subtly, if you look at the cost per record, in cents, its $0.000000234375. That's "a police state too cheap to meter" (**)
Which is what we are getting here. The big change isn't "the terrorists are using phones", or even "surveillance is getting harder than ever". It's "with the right technologies, we can record everything the population does for next to nothing"
Welcome to the future: privacy is over.
(*) Chassis costs depends very much on RAM and CPU; put in intel Xeon parts and lots of RAM and you'd be paying $8K/node, plus more in the leccy bill. That's what you'd expect to pay for the more compute-centric nodes, rather than the cold data storage, which is what we've costed out.
(**) These numbers seem to come in too low. Either there's a major underestimate of something, or the author should have used a spreadsheet rather than the calculator on their phone.
But we haven't seen much in the way of "how would an ISP implement this?"
Which means its up to us, implementers of a PCSO-state adjacent to the Bearpit, to look at how to build this. As proof we know what we are talking about, here is our 8TB JBOD storage infrastructure (running xubuntu server 14) with a Top of Rack (ToR) switch consisting of a netgear base station flashed to DD-WRT. Sticker some recruitment from "Google reliability engineering"
The new bill requires ISPs to store an "Internet Connection Record (ICR)" of every connection, and allow government access to it on demand.
How would an ISP implement such a system?
First: What is an "Internet Connection Record (ICR)"? The bill has made up something which doesn't really exist and then told ISPs to maintain it.
It is probably a record recording: the originating IP address/port of a TCP connection, the destination IP/port, and the duration of the connection. "probably", because it uses the term "event"
7(9) In this Part “relevant communications data” means communications data which may be used to identify, or assist in identifying, any of the following—
(a) the sender or recipient of a communication (whether or not a person), (b) the time or duration of a communication, 35 (c) the type, method or pattern, or fact, of communication, (d) the telecommunication system (or any part of it) from, to or through which, or by means of which, a communication is or may be transmitted, (e) the location of any such system, or 40 (f) the internet protocol address, or other identifier, of any apparatus to which a communication is transmitted for the purpose of obtaining access to, or running, a computer file or computer program. In this subsection “identifier” means an identifier used to facilitate the transmission of a communication.
The GCHQ/Bristol university "Problem Book (redacted)" appears to cover this very problem in the "five alive" dataset of IP/IP communications (p70), with every communication record being a list of records of (start-time/8, source-IP/4, source port/2, dest-IP/4, dest port/2, protocol/2. [data size]/8). Using the byte size estimated in the /N values, that's 30 bytes per communication; with the move to IPv6 driven by mobile phones, you'd need 16 bytes per source and dest address, or 56 bytes/record. That's for every HTTP request, skype call, bittorrent block share, PS4 game setup. If they include DNS records, it's for every nslookup command issued.
That's a lot of data in a world of phones and home network connections.
How to store all of this?
We see a number of strategies
The "fuck off Theresa" strategy
Here your ISP implements "for security reasons" an isolated system which collects ICRs, but for which the only way to retrieve them is a 1970s-era punched card reader you have to actually walk to. If HMG asks for something, you say "next wednesday? Come on by. Bring your query on a prepared punched card and we'll have the printer ready for the output. Oh, and we'll bill you for the ink"
The problem here is on P135: "The Secretary of State may make regulations imposing specified obligations on 20 relevant operators, or relevant operators of a specified description.', which includes "obligations to provide facilities or services of a specified description;". You could offer "the fuck off then" system, and they'd say "no, we want this". The ISP would not get a choice in the matter.
The TalkTalk fiasco
A Linux server running MySQL with a front end of an unpatched PHP web application accessible on the open internet over an unencrypted HTTP connection.
MySQL does have the lowest cost/TB of storage out there, and while a single mysql server doesn't grow, you can scale via sharding; storing the mass surveillance records of a few tens of of thousands of users.
Limitations
1. Doesn't handle the "list me everyone who used twitter between 9 and 9:30 query" without going through every single database and then aggregating the results, so pushing out a database query (SELECT * FROM icr WHERE icr.endpoint="twitter.com" AND icr.time>21:00 and icr.time < 21:30), somehow merging them all.
2. Being people utterly out of their depth, that same web UI will be accessible from your customer billing form. That'll be a massive security disaster, unless the people breaking are a group like Anonymous, where it's more likely to be a contribution "; DROP * from USERS" or an attack on public targets (SELECT * FROM icr WHERE user="Theresa May")
The outsourced consultancy disaster
The design here is less a design than a process. Go to a global/national software consultancy (e.g. Capita). Give them lots of money. Wait. Eventually get some software that doesn't work very well, designed to run on very expensive hardware.
This is essentially how major government projects like Universal Credit and any NHS-wide computer systems turn out. The problem here is the "ocean boiling grand vision" along with an inability to adjust features to meet unrealistic deadlines, along with consultants who are too excited by the cash to point out the project is doomed. Oh, and politicians who stand up in parliament announce changes in plans and then keep pretending the project is on schedule.
With this strategy we'd have a police state that came in late and didn't work very well. But: we'd pay for it either via taxes or ISPs, and it will be expensive
Bring it to the Borg
The cloud approach. All ICRs are Netflow records grabbed off the Cisco switches and buffered locally. Regularly they are pushed up to google cloud storage in bulk HTTPS PUT operations, so storing all your data in google's server farms. We'd duplicate it across sites for Disaster Recovery ("DR") , and host it in the zero-CO2 datacentres ("DCs") to help meet the COP21 commitments which Osborne is trying to pretend weren't made.
Those initial datasets could be converted to more compressed format, with some summary data pushed into the google BigTable database. Queries against the dataset "find everyone who used twitter and facebook yesterday" would be Google BigQuery queries.
This architecture would work, provided whoever wrote the capture, upload and query code knew what they were doing. Google would handle datacentre ops, bill your ISP or HMG by the petabyte of data stored and for the CPU load of the import/cleanup phase and the query execution.
This is the one we'd build. No upfront hardware CAPEX; operational costs O(records)+O(queries). As you get 1TB of free processing month, initial dev costs are relatively low too.
Would the government allow it? Unlikely. Google's nearest datacentres are in Ireland and Finland; all the data would be moved out of the UK and under the jurisdiction of others.
It's notable, however, that Amazon have a special datacentre in the US for Amazon GovCloud, which is is where federal agencies can keep data and run code. We aren't aware of a UK equivalent. They could do this, though presumably after discussing tax arrangements.
[BTW, if someone went this way, as costs are directly proportional to the number of records, you could hurt the telcos and government costs by generating as many records as you can. If every UDP packet kept a sender and destination, you could run something on all willing participant's machines to create costs. Even at pennies per gigabyte, you can ramp up the bills if you leave this code running flat out overnight. Just a thought]
Kafkaesque
The fallback design would be to use the open source Big Data stack; "Hadoop and Friends"
The netflow call records would be streamed into Apache Kafka streams, which would then store the data in Hadoop HDFS, or perhaps feed them through some initial streaming system for cleanup (storm, spark).
Summary information would go into a column database. Normally the checklist item would be HBase, but given this is a government project, the NSA implemented Accumulo would win out.
Assuming there's a way to submit remote queries, those queries need to be secured. We'd come to some arrangement with the government to say "here are the kerberos credentials you need" on a USB stick, restrict access to SPNEGO-authenticated callers over HTTPS and rely on the NSA having no back doors in Accumulo that they aren't willing to tell GCHQ about.
Cost: upfront CAPEX of the datacentre, operational costs: site, power, staff, cooling. ideally you'd host it somewhere with cool air and low cost zero-carbon power, which points us up a Scotland and NE england. Land, power and people are affordable, and before long you could have something on a par with Facebook Prineville, though not, notably, NSA Utah.
Being open source software, you don't actually have to pay anyone for it —if you take on the support costs yourselves. It's unlikely telcos will want to do this, so that needs to be covered too. Once you have enough Petabytes of data, the costs of this system is still likely to be less than with google or amazon.
Otherwise: software development costs atop this layer may be steep, especially if you don't have experience in this.
In fact: all of the strategies have software development costs, a cost which is the same for every telco, all implementing roughly the same application.
Which would leave the government to be in a very good position to walk up to all of them and say "we can provide the software for you —just run these servers with our code". That way they get to run precisely the software they want —and hook it up directly to their central systems in a way which they knows will work.
They could even say "we'll host your servers somewhere and provide the software". That would give the government direct access to the nominally independent telco-hosted datasets, when they were all really in the same big room, running the same application.
There you have it then: four real ways. Two disasters, two viable: one where you hand off the operational issues to Google or amazon in exchange for lots of cash, the other home-built on the open source Big Data stack for more upfront capital costs but lower long term storage & compute costs. And relying on GCHQ to provide the software layer.
The only one that would scale, technically and financially, without giving the Google or Amazon the data, would be Hadoop+Accumulo, with code the telcos probably aren't up to writing themselves.
How much would this cost?
Hardware: Facebook-based open compute servers.
These are never publicly quoted, as you have be shopping for $1M+ before the design starts to make sense; at that point you get off the web site and onto the phone.
Looking at the Penguin Computing icebreaker storage servers, holding 30 3.5" HDDs in a 2U system. with ~44 "rack units" of capacity in a normal rack, you get 22/per rack (we're leaving space for Top of Rack switches) == 660 disks.
With 4TB HDDs, you get 2.6 petabytes in a single rack. Heavy bastard with serious power budget, but compact enough that you can fit one in various telco sites, doing the initial storage/preprocess there before uploading to central facilities in off-peak times.
A 4TB HDD costs $115 from Amazon US; let's assume $75 for the OEM. You'd be paying $50K for those 550 disks. That's all. Servers, let's assume $1.5K for each chassis(*), 33K, so $82,500 per rack, excluding networking. Let's round that up to $100K.
We'd end up with a system whose pure hardware costs, the CAPEX, come in at $100K per 2.5 PB of storage. For 1MB USD you've got 25 PB. At, say, 60 bytes per record (==56 + 4), we'd get 426e9 records per rack. That's what's technically known as "a fuck of a lot of data". More subtly, if you look at the cost per record, in cents, its $0.000000234375. That's "a police state too cheap to meter" (**)
Which is what we are getting here. The big change isn't "the terrorists are using phones", or even "surveillance is getting harder than ever". It's "with the right technologies, we can record everything the population does for next to nothing"
Welcome to the future: privacy is over.
(*) Chassis costs depends very much on RAM and CPU; put in intel Xeon parts and lots of RAM and you'd be paying $8K/node, plus more in the leccy bill. That's what you'd expect to pay for the more compute-centric nodes, rather than the cold data storage, which is what we've costed out.
(**) These numbers seem to come in too low. Either there's a major underestimate of something, or the author should have used a spreadsheet rather than the calculator on their phone.
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