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

• 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,...)

It's the latter that interests us. After the fall of civilisation, you will never be stuck behind a bus or or a Renault Clio veering from lane-to-lane as their satnav gives last minute directions. There's obvious question: why did everyone die in a way which left a fast route through the ruined city? For that to happen, everyone in the last 30s of their life would have to get off the M32, pull to the side of Stapleton Road, then die. In doing so, they leave a nice through route for drivers, albeit for those few survivors trying to push a shopping trolley down the pavement.

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.

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

1. Metrobus to Bristol International Airport connections
2. Metrobus as a P&R alternative for most residents of North Somerset and S Gloucs.
3. The Managed Motorway work on the M4/M5
4. 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.

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.

DfT: Number of cyclists on M32 still zero

If you go into a bike shop you can pick up a freebie map of where to cycle in the city —one that's actually good for walking and running too.

You can more easily get a map of where not to cycle. In any overview map of the city, it's the red roads on the cover, along with the junctions between them.

 

Which is quite a coincidence really, as those are, essentially, the locations of the Department of Transport traffic survey sites


This is why the DfT traffic survey, showing a levelling off in cycle use, has to be treated with some scepticism. Frankly, if the number cyclists on the A370 and Cumberland Basin Flyover, or Temple and Newfoundland Ways was measured at more than zero, we'd actually suspect a measurement error.

Joe Steinsky tears into the numbers, with a graph we've stolen without any attribution.



The sheer variance in that cycling graph shows its flaws —you have to worry about how meaningful it is.

Even so, it's going to be taken up by those people who find it supports their opinions. In Bristol, that's the usual anti-cycling lobby: the evening post, the evening post commenters, random twitter haters and conservative party council and mayoral candidates.

If you encounter it —don't be afraid to ask "where are the numbers of people walking or on a train?", as you aren't going to see any of them on the M32, A370 or Temple Way either.

Out of Bristol, the group people need to worry about is actually the DfT themselves. Their 2013 traffic model predicted a fall in miles cycled after 2015, the data they've published appears aligned with this, so helps congratulate their modelling team on their skills, perhaps promoting them to the DEFRA Flood Modelling project. Which is why the cycling troublemakers need to be pushing back on this, not just asking for the council to collect better data on routes such as the BBRP, suspension bridge, Create Bridge crossing (oh, wait, BRT2 killed that), Prince St Bridge (oh, wait, BRT broke that), the Chocolate Path (oh, wait, BRT2 again), but maybe the castle path, farm pub path, eastville park path, and up through Stoke Park to UWE, etc. And then advocate the DfT to include such data in their modelling of urban use. And include walking too. Because that's a legitimate form of transport and is as much at risk of neglect as the cycling.

At this point, the locals who sneer at Bristol traffic for being car-hating extremists will accuse of us discounting data we don't like, just as they themselves do with all climate change research that brings bad news, models that predict warmer winters with more floods.

For those people, know that we slagged off the survey the moment we encountered it in progress.

This is it: four people on a footbridge overlooking the M32. We faulted it at the time for being an inadequate way of measuring car traffic in a modern city. It is only this week that we discover that one of the people sitting there with a little "clicker" was waiting for cyclists and presumably getting bored at the inaction.

 

Four people sitting on a footbridge, counting cars on one single weekday in a year. And using that for the traffic statistics and future predictions of Bristol's road needs? That is not modern "data science". In fact, it's more of a practical A-level project —though even there you could do more with a camera and at-leisure replay.

Manually counting one morning in 365 just doesn't produce valid data. Was it a weekday? Which day? Was it a schoolday? Or was it half term with reduced traffic counts? Was it raining? Such experiments may have been a viable strategy in 1963, maybe even 1974 with the M32 open and three Austin Allegros an hour driving down the "Bristol Parkway" to see the shopping wonder that was 1970s Broadmead.

Nowadays, it's a historical relic of a process, no doubt hooked up to a traffic model that considers pedestrians at a junction "a cost", values cyclists as being worthless (OK, that still holds), and considers time in a traffic jam is as cost, rather than a valued quiet texting time between the office and the hell of parental responsibilities.

If you want modern data, throw the hi-viz tops off the footbridge, use the now-rolled out ANPR camera arrays to log vehicle movements, and start to do some decent analysis of the data beyond just "how many"

1. Split by vehicle type and time of day. Do vans come in earlier or later?
2. What fraction of the traffic is in-city vs "Greater Avon" vs out of Town?
3. How many pass out the city on a different route shortly after entering it?
4. When do people commute in each direction? Is it a simple 9-5? How many are 9:30 to 4:30, vs. 08:00 to 18:30? And does that vary from direction into town?
5. Do vehicles coming into town on the M32 return the same way? Or do they take a different route? (Not as unusual as you think; from city to N. Fringe, M32 after 09:00 is fast, but for a return between 17:00 and 18:30, Filton Ave has more predictability).
6. There's apparently a rise in vans. How many are for internet-shopping deliveries vs. independent locals vs. service organisations?
7. How many people commute from Wales? By motorbike? (it's a free bridge crossing, see).
8. During school half terms, do many commuters change their driving schedule and/or route?
9. Do red cars go faster? This'd be a really interesting question to answer, something you could do today by combining the M5 ANPR dataset with one of vehicle make/model/colour. It's not enough to measure the ratio of red to other colours, you need to compensate for the fleet, to make it more "do red Mark IV Vauxhall Astras go faster than other colours"?

Ignoring the final question, which is more of social commentary than anything else, the other questions all directly define the motor vehicle use that's made of the city's road infrastructure. Information that could be used in some way, not just for better DfT modelling, but for moving traffic understanding beyond simple anecdotes.

Transport for London have a data team; they do churn through the oystercards, the C-zone stats: they do understand some of the use of the city? Not Bristol —and clearly, not the Department of Transport, who are still shaping the country's transport infrastructure based on four people and a clipboard.

[footnote: that cover is from a 4th edition A-Z. Look at its rendering of the inner-ring road and see if you spot what's changed?]

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

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

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

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

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

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

A solution for the M32?

Sorry, no picture, but an interesting possible solution to the ghastly M32 car park which stabs at the heart of Bristol. Just as the River Frome was encased in concrete to make way for the car, why not encase the M32?. Those clever Germans are way ahead again....

http://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/german-autobahn-covered-giant-public-park.html

Oh, hang on. I just woke up. This is Britain, land of half measures and transport f**k ups. Darn!!.

Brian Rogers of Kingswood: speaking the truth

We've been a bit quiet recently. The main problem: thinking of new things to say.

Everyone has this problem. Take this well thought out letter from Brian Rogers of Kingswood.

It certainly pushes our buttons:

1. affluent middle classes cycling
2. holding up important people on their way to work
3. tax-payer funded lycra clad louts
4. sanctimonious, car-hating people
5. fill up the car parks

That would be a good article: tax dodging affluent (actually, this is probably true), car hating, and driving to our favourite parking spaces. It would make a good article, and we have formally invited Brian to actually write for us. All he'd need is "in our lane", "red light jumping" and "speeding along too fast" and we'd win this week's Daily Mail "lycra lout" bingo.

Of course, the same day that George "coke" Osborne announces that air passenger duty won't be applied to people flying in and out of the city on private planes is particularly bad timing for the tax-payer funded text. Remember: those people who live in Monaco and fly in for three days a week may retain non-resident tax payer status, but they hold up the economy, and adding £30/week on the already outrageous cost of (tax free) jet fuel would force them stop flying in to the UK at all.

Brian needs to work on his timing a bit there.

Furthermore, a quick web search shows that he wrote pretty much the same letter  a year ago.

 irresponsible for the city council to pour tax payers' funds into a cycling track that is, well, just a hobby for a privileged and sanctimonious few?

See? The same problem we have. There's only so much orginality you can do from one point-of-vitriol. Brian is having trouble writing the same letter once a year -you can imagine how hard it us for us.

Maybe its time for the team to retire

Occupy M32: year 40

A group of protestors are camped on college green, but apart from the "whiners corner" of the Evening Post, not having much effect.

A greater group of protesters have decided to come out in numbers and bring the city to its knees. Here they are on the M32

Their protest demonstration goes all the way up to Eastville junction.

Yet the mainstream media completely ignores this, even though these protestors include BMW and Mercedes drivers -the nearly-but-not-quite-1%, whose journeys in from the suburbs are crippled by the excessive fuel taxes the state is charging in order to keep the banks afloat.

The residents of the areas near the M32 are aware of this ongoing protest against the capitalist economy, and have been spraying signs of support against the M32 itself.

If there is one criticism, this protest has been going on for about forty years, and yet it has had little effect.

Bristol's Secret Rat-runs

We are debating providing some coverage of Bristol's secret rat-runs, to go alongside our secret parking coverage. Today, the best way to get from Ashley Hill to the M32 -Magdalene Place

It's good to see Red Driving School WVIIUEK showing a learner driver about this road, and how to correctly position themselves to take it properly.

Pharmacy Plus: proud to sponsor the Frome Valley cycle way

The new Frome Valley cycleway follows the frome from the heart of bristol up to near UWE, with the first half along that jewel of the Bristol Road system, the M32 motorway. The fast moving traffic will remind cyclists that if they weren't so poor, they too could have a proper vehicle.

Pharmacy Plus are proud to sponsor this new path. As a key member of the NHS supply chain, they recognise how important health and fitness is. The vehicle SF58PZK, which may well be associated with the company, is proudly placed in the middle of the path to remind people on foot and bicycle how much more accessible the city is if you have proper transport.

There is enough room for passing cyclists if they swerve into the road, so we think that whoever called Bristol Parking Services to report this car was small-minded and vindictive

Eastville Park: will you be my friend?

Word trickles down of a new group "Friends of Eastville Park", who are fighting back against the plans to formalise the pump trail with something in tarmac, and the development of cycle routes through the park. Why the cycling city maps say you can cycle there., and if someone or their dog gets hit by someone on a bicycle, whether the council is legally liable.

For visitors from out of town, Eastville park is the park to the east of the M32 flyover.

At least today. A large chunk of the park was given over to that flyover, with nothing but a Glasgow-style concrete picnic bench underneath as a memory of families coming down there for picnics.

We find it amusing that only now are people complaining about bits of the park being turned over to transport rather than greenery, rather than, say, 40 years ago.

More importantly, we worry that if the Friends of Eastville park have their way, they may not stop at the bicycle access. They may start asking for the bit of parkland that is known as the M32 motorway back. This would not be good. We hope, therefore, that the Friends of Eastville park are regular users of the M32 and can see the tangible benefits of it remaining in-situ. Be believe this is likely, given that they clearly don't cycle. And as nobody takes their dog for a walk on the flyover, the liability issue there isn't important.

News update

The team is being too lazy to do some serious reporting right now, but here are some news updates.

1. Crap Walking And Cycling in Waltham Forest is offline, along with all its artwork. While some people discuss why this is the case, and consider whether any of its comments about the Waltham Forest NHS or local council have, in some way, been considered libellous, we are pleased to provide the true explanation.

Waltham Forest acted as a control group in the Cycling England project. Some cities were funded to add more facilities to their city to encourage poor people to cycle. How would it be possible to determine if any increase in cycle usage was related to this work, compared to other trends like the rising cost of fuel? The answer: a control group. Waltham Forest, then, was encouraged to spend no money at all on improving walking or cycling in the city. To see whether motivational newsletters alone would suffice, Waltham Forest was funded to produce joyful "wouldn't it be better on a bicycle" leaflets and such like, things that could be stuck up at NHS hospitals that the staff and all patients would drive to -to see if this alone was sufficient. As the crapwalthamforest blog showed: it was not. With the wrapping up of the Cycling England project, Crap Walking and Cycling in Waltham Forest has been terminated. Note also that Waltham Forest itself will be terminated -however the lessons from the Waltham Forest experiment have been learned, and councils all round Britain will be encouraged to Walthamize their neighbourhoods.


2. An M4-A4174 link route isn't going to get funded, as noted by the BBC, "Hopes for M4 link to Avon Ring Road dashed".

We have some bad news for whoever in the BBC wrote that last article, with phrases like  "Hopes for an M4 link to the Avon Ring Road near Bristol have been dashed for at least another four years" and "it could have an important impact on the Bristol and Bath Science Park".

Dear BBC provinical reporting team: there is an M4 link the Avon Ring Road; it is called "the M32". Please consult a map of Bristol before writing an article next time. There is also an option of getting to it from the M4/M5 junction and down the A38, and while a bit longer, it avoids the kingswood to M32 traffic jams caused by people trying to drive round the ring road from Bath to the North Fringe.

The article should in fact be titled: "Hopes for yet another  M4 link to the Avon Ring Road dashed". It could then raise the fact that Chris Skidmore, the Conservative MP for Kingswood, doesn't understand the theory of induced demand any more than the head of North Somerset council. Specifically it isn't enough to add a new link road for today's demand; the new link road will encourage more traffic, more driving in, more people living out of Bristol and commuting by car to the North Fringe area. It would have been better to admit this and rather than push for a single extra link road, push for a new link road to be added every five years, so as to keep up with planned demand.

Walthamize the planet -and have a nice day!

More biggerer and betterer.

Bristol is often referred to by many ex Londoners as being like a "little London". While we can appreciate the comparison we at Bristol Traffic know that with the proper building of new bigger wider roads to allow more cars into the city it won't be long before Bristol becomes bigger and better than London. Better because we won't leave our motorways unfinished on the outskirts of the city. Ours will penetrate right into the heart of the city centre creating a vibrant city environment that everywhere else in the world could only dream of. After all we already know that car drivers are the only people who ever spend money in cities and allowing anyone else to get in their way is a sure way to help businesses lose trade.

We have a good start already in the M32 but there's more work to be done if our vision of the future is to come to fruition.

Here as a reminder of why the plan must be seen through is a short film by a young man highlighting where London failed to match up to our vision.

Glasgow

Only last week were were criticising Bristol's town planners for a lack of vision in the 1970s, for a failure to regenerate the neglected inner city by building enough motorways through its core. We only have the M32. One city in Britain has had the vision, and stuck to it, turning their neglected victorian era housing and under-utilised parkland into motorways, so that wherever you walk round the city, you can hear the background hum of high speed motorway traffic. With this motorway through the heart of the city, we believe it is possible to drive from the M32 to the scottish highlands without having to stop for a red light or pedestrians.

Yes, we are talking about Glasgow, and unlike the Copenhagen Cycle Chic team, who think it is a nice place to cycle, as is Aberdeen, we know that Glasgow is our kind of city, as documented by our allies, At War With The Motorist, on their trip to Glasgow, premier city in Scotland.

We like best that the integrated advertisting on the phone-viewer brings up an advert for Robbie's Driving School, who will teach you how to drive round either city, Bristol or Glasgow, in Style.

Congratulations Glasgow, and come on Bristol, get your act together! How else can you solve this city's traffic problems?

The Friday Quiz - Who are the Sleepers?

It's over, of course, the Cold War. But the legacy remains.

This map is a Soviet rendition of Bristol. Before the Glorious Cumberland Basin intersection was built. Note the existing railway route through the docks and the city. Note that, with a little thought and investment, this infrastructure could have provided an efficient and sustainable rapid transit system, linking southern and central Bristol with Temple Meads. The Soviets knew this, and documented it.

Which is why, in 1969, Bristol City Council decided they had to foil the CCCP, and came up with their own Glorious Five Year Plan for the docks. Just look at what we're missing...

This vision of Utopia never happened.

Bristol Traffic asks - was the Council infiltrated by a fifth column? We know that Cycling City took another 40 years to complete. There must have been sleepers...

Memory Lane

When the M32 was built it was known as the Parkway.

Probably because the authorities of the time thought it would be nice to call a four-lane highway after the type of land it was built through.

Remnants of this era linger on despite the upgrading to "M32", and downgrading to 30mph in part, and the installation of a central bus lane.

What concerns us though, is the sign "Parkway Subways", here in City Road.

The Parkway has been known as the M32 for over twenty years, and Subways has only been selling sandwiches in this country for about 10 years, so who put this sign up?

We have a sneaking suspicion that  Bristol Cycling City was planned when the Parkway was built, and has been waiting, like a Cold War mole, for the time to strike. Further proof is here in the Old Market sign which is for pedestrians and cyclists. Although if you do go there these days, you'll need to watch out for the busses.

It's either that, or Subways have had a secret presence here on UK soil since the 1960s.

The Once and Future Bearpit

We've been getting more traffic recently, some from people who again, fall for the malicious lie that we are some kind of satire. The photographs are all genuine, the commentary pretty much lifted from Bristol Evening Post comments sections as is. Not fiction. The reason we are critical of cyclists is not just because of our affiliation with the Daily Mail group, but because ofcom requires it as part of their balance-in-reporting scheme. Every time someone in the Guardian or Independent pens a short article praising walking or cycling, Bristol Traffic or BBC local news is required to produce an in depth posting or TV/radio broadcast showing the truth.

The other source of recent traffic is people searching for "Bear Pit Bristol" or "Bristol Bearpit", for which of course we are one of the highest ranking results. Why so many visitors? A sudden urge to spend a quiet hour enjoying the peace of this urban idyll between buses? No: the Stokes Croft Street Fest. Our reporter "quercus" descended into the pit itself, for a bit of giant chess while listening to the bands -none of whose music is yet available on ABD-approved driving CDs.

Some people may denounce us for encouraging some kind of people-walking-around event, but they miss the point. Any event which celebrates Stokes Croft brings customers to Ritas and Stix takeaways, so benefiting us all.

But it's more profound that that. These people, by making the bearpit a place to visit, have reintroduced a whole new generation to the original bearpit goals: a roundabout for the whole family to enjoy!

We've been a bit critical in the past of people who talk about attractive pedestrian walkways, underpasses, and roundabouts people to visit, but that's because today's uses of the Bearpit, Lawrence Hill roundabout and other inner city parkland areas haven't lived up to the vision.




Remember the mid 1970s, when the M32 Parkway was open? Dad could drive down from Filton, park the beige Austin Allegro at Castle Park -when it was proper parking, not this green stuff, put his driving cap and gloves in the glove compartment -that's what it was for- and you could go into Broadmead to stare in wonder at the shops. Yet mum and dad would keep you away from the centre of the 'mead, and go back to the shops they saw at the end of the M32. Mum and the kids would go into Allied Carpets to see if any new plush green nylon rugs had come in, dad would go to the sex shop a bit further down to get one of his magazines. And where would the family meet up afterwards? That's right: The bearpit!

We could get together, eat and drink our wimpy takeaways, dad would flick through his purchase in its paper bag, mum look at the carpet brochures. Everyone would gather there, the giant-chess game had a queue of people waiting to play, whole families would have picnics.

What killed it? Progress. The Broadmead planners took Allied Carpets away. The Internet took the sex magazine shop customers away. The chess pieces vanished one by one. The Austin Allegro vanished; the Austin Metro and Morris Ital never gained quite the same cachet. Bristol City Council turned Castle Park into green space, and started charging too much to park in the Galleries car park. Opec and central government made the journey down the M32 costly. This is why the bearpit died: it became too hard, too expensive to pop down from Filton for a quick hour in the bearpit, especially once the important shops were gone. Nothing has brought them back.

This is why we celebrate the Stokes Croft Streetfest, why we got the Allegro out for a special trip back into town!

The Bearpit is Dead! Long Live the Bearpit!

Muller Roadworks and Road Safety

The ongoing theft of a bit of Muller Road from cars continues. One side effect is that it forces National and Europcar van rentals to park their vans up on the pavement, else this stretch isn't wide enough for two lanes of traffic.

Looking the other way, we can see that Siemens are busy fixing this new -and utterly unwarranted- crossing up, one which apparently has a detector for approaching bikes, and so schedules them with green.

Some people may think that having the signalling van park BF07NYA so as to prevent bicycle access from the path onto the road is a sign of Institutionalised Motorism in the traffic planning world, one where only the safety and convenience of drivers and their passengers are considered, and that parking your van close to where your work is is more important than anything else. Those people -and having seen Crap Cycling and Walking in Waltham Forest we know who they are- are misguided.

Out of sight behind the van, just past where the right turn is, a large lorry has been parked for a week. So what you say? Look at the back of it. Not only is the road-side corner bent, by its rear tyre is the remains of the body coloured bumper of a car that must have clipped it at speed, damaging the car and possibly injuring the passengers.
Muller Road joins the M32; you can come off it having driven from London, Birmingham or other places at 70-80 mph the whole way. When you get into the city you are still slowly adjusting to urban features like red lights, speed limits and pedestrians and cyclists getting in the way. While Portsmouth is dealing with this by needlessly lowering the speed limits on the M275, we believe the correct approach in Bristol is to keep the speed limits high and roads just off the motorway clear of pedestrians, cycles -and parked cars. That way, you can slowly adjust to being in town, encountering one feature at a time. First red lights, then lower limits, finally the other clutter of anti-car city streets.

Vehicles parking on Muller Road must park up on the pavement or behind the bike lane -not to prevent damage to their vehicles, but to help those drivers who are still driving "motorway style" to adjust slowly to the city streets. The driver who crashed into this car was probably just doing 40-50 late at night, expecting a fast empty journey home, then suddenly this white van with reflective bits appears out of nowhere, parked on the road. If it had not been for the trees preventing this vehicle from parking on the pavement, this collision could have been avoided.

A dream that was the bearpit

Following on our coverage of the stolen inner-city ring road, we are pleased to bring the city a photo of what it used to be like, when the ICRR was coming together, when the M32-Parkway was not yet built, without its trees and lovely views of the countryside, but the James Barton Roundabout had been built, with the Bearpit in its heyday -when people would pop out to it for a quick picnic after shopping in Broadmead. It was our answer to the M6 Lancaster Forton services and Portsmouth's Tricorn Shopping centre.



Look at this picture. Lots of -presumably free- parking, no cyclists, no congestion. Now compare it with now: traffic jams, expensive parking, and -apart from this road- cyclists. Even on this stretch, they've added more pedestrian crossings. What happens? The cars get held up. Coincidence? We think not.

The Shortest Cycle Lane in the Universe?

I reckon the Bristol to Bath railway path must be the longest cycle lane around here, a glorious traffic-free 14 miles to Bath (despite having a ring road built through it and recent attempts by First Group and the previous administration of Bristol City Council to turn it into a glorified bus lane). It was the first facility that Sustrans - then cyclebag - built and something that we can all be proud of. It's famous the world over, you know!. Well, here's another first that the cycling city can be proud of. Tucked away along Newfoundland Road and nestling quietly beside the M32 is possibly the shortest cycle lane anywhere. Not having my tape with me, I paced it at about 3 metres - my trusty steed added for scale. At either end is car parking, so it can be regarded as a separate lane, unlike the other side of the road which does have a cycle lane, punctuated by occasional bits of red asphalt, but is actually a lot longer.

We'd better give it some kind of protected status, just in case the powers that be want to run a bus route along it. So there you have it, the shortest cycle lane in the known universe. Unless, of course, you know better....