Whiteladies Road: a weekday dataset

Our last trip down Whiteladies road shows that on a weekend, yes, pedestrian shoppers did hold up through traffic. This implied that yes, the FirstBus/Showcase bus route plans to reduce pedestrian crossing options may benefit their schedules, but we were worried about the impact on us cars getting out from side roads.

This video is different as it's a visit by our expendable cyclist on a weekday morning, down the bus lane from Oakfield Road, and through the Triangle as far as University Road, where they head off. Commentary first, analysis later.

At 0:24 FH56CVV switches lanes early, but as everyone else in the RH lane who isn't turning right also goes left, they are forced to give way to the vehicles in front of them anyway.

From 0:29 to 0:40, a bike lane that even waltham forest would be proud of. Its worn-out nature hints that it's popular with larger vehicles, while the trees keep it bumpy.

At 04:40 A9VNG is in the ASL, but we suspect that it was in there when the lights change. Why the suspicion? One car in the pedestrian area and one in front in the yellow hatched "only enter when clear to exit" area stopping cross traffic from St Pauls Road and Tyndall's Park Road getting across. Incidentally, Tyndall's Park road (on the left) here is no left turn, St Paul's (on the right, into Clifton) is no right turn, so all congestion coming up from the Triangle is Whiteladies Road traffic. Note also this junction provides no time for pedestrians to cross when the traffic isn't actually allowed to drive -if only all major junctions in the city were like this, congestion would be much improved. The BBC offices are on the left, incidentally.

Following the cyclist who is commuting without helmet, body-armour or hi-viz clothing, we eventually discover what is holding up WL-road traffic, it's the "triangle" gyratory system, which our tax-dodger hits at 1:43. The underlying problem is that Whiteladies Road traffic is forced to give way to traffic coming from the right, which initially means traffic from Clifton. Further on, at 2:17 we get held up by traffic all coming into the city from the A4 or the Hotwells's Bridges and then up Jacob's Wells road.

There are four lanes here, one for parking, one turning right at the next junction, and two straight on, but that leftmost one is lost even to vans ignoring bus-lane signs, not just by the police car at 2:41 but by the taxi-rank at 2:53.

WN59UDP is held up by these taxis forcing them to wait with all the in-town traffic, so as soon as they can they cut left in front of the bicycle, through the pedestrians and up University Road -only to find that the Biffa refuse collection lorry is in the way and ignoring the important traffic being held up. Finally passing that, they can sprint up to Woodland Road, where as you recall the Evening Post was campaigning against two paid parking spaces going away, which we felt was overreacting as nobody parks their except arts students, and their tuition fee increases will eliminate that luxury.

However, today we can see that the paid parking area is also popular for parental dropoff outside Bristol Grammar School -and it actually makes for a nice, low-chaos dropoff area. Admittedly, there isn't enough of this short-stay parking right in front of the school, forcing some parents to stop in the double yellow lined areas, but the alternative would be parking on the other side of this (one-way) street, forcing the children to cross the road. Would you want your children to cross a busy road like this? Exactly. Parking on the double yellow lines outside the school entrance is the only safe place to drop your kids off and be sure they get to school alive.

Now, returning to the Whiteladies Road issue, what does the bus plan proposal change on this stretch? The Oakfield Road crossing will be moved further away from the road, so making it less useful to pedestrians trying to walk from Cotham to Clifton or bag. Plus one point. But, this makes it harder for cars to get out or over from these roads, so minus one point.

Heading in to town, the right hand turn to Clifton will be removed for all but buses. This will turn Oakfield road into the primary rat-run option, but as we've seen, the moving of the zebra crossing makes it trickier. What they aren't doing is extending the bus lane any further south, and they are leaving that toy bike lane in there. We say toy as its so half hearted that no rational cyclist will think they are welcome -what with the faded paint and tree roots, but its very presence implies that some people in the city do welcome cyclists. No, better to remove it and put a cyclists dismount sign up.

Entering the triangle is more informative. Congestion is caused here by traffic joining the road from other places (Clifton, Jacob's Wells Road), and whatever is slowing them down on their final journey. There are no pedestrian-only lights or zebra crossings to play with, so there's little that can be done to make pedestrians feel less welcome, no tricks to make the schedule more accurate.

And that's the key problem. The goals of the showcase route are faster bus journey times and a more predictable schedule. Removing and moving zebra crossings will only help with this out of hours, on weekends and midday, because on a weekday morning the problem is more fundamental: Erlang's Laws. Congestion is a result of the ingress rate of a queue being higher than the egress rate. The reason vehicles can't leave whiteladies road isn't that there are vast numbers of people struggling to turn up Cotham Hill (more on that another day), or any of the side roads, it is because the merging of multiple queues at the triangle creates a bottleneck which having one lane dedicated to bus stops and a taxi rank doesn't do much to help.

And do we care about mid-day firstbus schedules? No -and neither should anyone else. People using the bus at weekend and mid-day weekdays are either people who can't afford a car, people with bus passes, or people who have made some ideological decision to take a bus: passengers FirstBus can take for granted. If they want to make money, they need to get the commuter traffic, and quite frankly, changes to pedestrian crossings aren't going to do it. They may help us car commuters by reducing the number of pedestrians and cyclists, but given our dataset implies that the Whiteladies Road congestion is due to problems in the city centre, those crossing changes aren't going to help buses or our cars on whiteladies road at peak hours, which is when it matters to us as well as FirstBus.

Sorry FirstBus, but whatever datasets you have on congestion problems on Whiteladies Road, they were clearly collected by FirstBus or Council staff during their working hours, rather than during am or pm rush hours. This is the only explanation why your proposals don't just do nothing for us drivers while making pedestrians and cyclists suffer, they don't appear to help buses either.

That's the irony there. This proposal has already got the cycling campaign saying "oppose this it's anti-pedestrian and anti-cyclist", it's also anti-car, but we think it manages to be bus-neutral at the same time. That takes skill, that does.

Wilderness near UWE

We've celebrated this before: a bit of the wilderness near UWE. A river crossing. Something that forces pedestrians to turn back, and ensures that the only people who cycle through are doing it on mountain bikes. When they get to their destination they can feel pleased with themselves, and justify the extra expenditure on suspension and disc brakes.

We car drivers like it because it makes commuting by bicycle more miserable.

Which is why we have some bad news. This feature is no more. This week the builders of the housing estate behind MOD Abbey Wood dug some ditches, and as a result, the water feature has drained away.

This is part of a local anti-car conspiracy. They should be turning this path into a road for more driving options between Lockleaze and UWE and its business park, just as they did for the Old Filton Road, but instead this: wasting money on tax-dodging cyclists. Worse than that, tax-dodging student cyclists!

This site is not a spoof

Some of the cyclist groups have discovered us - CTC Forum , citycycling, and YACF, whoever they are, and have been viewing our site, apparently concluding that it is some kind of spoof, that the text is somehow satirical.

Not so. We document the transport options in an anti-car city. While some of it may appear satirical to tax-dodging cyclists, that is merely because their model of the world suffers from an invalid assumption: "bicycles are a rational form of transport for adults". This taints their entire view of the site -and of society as a whole.

If Bristol Traffic is a spoof, then, by inference, TopGear, Jeremy Clarkson, and indeed, the entire Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail newspapers, would have to be viewed as some kind of spoof journalism put together by an anti-car news media.

While we do consider the BBC to be anti-car, we do not consider the Daily Mail or Jeremy Clarkson to be fictional. Until such a time as their fictional nature can be proven, we wish to be referred to as Bristol's Pro-Car press. Of course, we are competing with the Bristol Evening Post for the honour of being the best traffic news outlet. Today we are at a disadvantage as they have discovered that Noel Edmonds drives a taxi down our bus lanes. We are very excited by this news and look forward to any photographs of Mr Edmonds learning a new career now that his TV career has collapsed.

However, the fact that we are not a spoof makes it hard to link to other sites. The Association of British Drivers, for example. We agree with their anti-bike, anti-bus lane, anti-pedestrian stance, but the entire layout of the site, including colour scheme and use of Comic Sans MS font, spells out "spoof". We are doing more research there before coming down one way or the other.

Another recent situation was a comment on our popular Fixed and Singlespeed in Bristol article, where some idiot asked for us to link to their site, despite the warning in our comments that anyone who attempts this will be ridiculed.

I found your site from a Google alert for "travel accessories". As myblog has content related to this term and some of your content, I was wondering if you'd be interested in a blogroll link exchange (I link toyour site and you link to mine).

Their web site is about cupholders. Now, how to view this?

1. It's a spoof as who in their right minds would run a web site advocating better cup holders for commuters? They have mistaken our site as some kind of spoof and want to join in.
   
2. They really are leading-edge advocates of superior in-vehicle cup-holding technology, and are trying to move up from being a bottom-tier player in google searches for cup holder by trying to get links from the planet's premier transport journalism sites -of which we are clearly one.

If situation (1) holds -they are a spoof-, we must turn them down because we are in fact serious journalists. Also, their site isn't very funny.

If situation (2) holds, they are serious, we have to turn them down for a separate reason, namely their site is shite and we understand how PageRank works.

Google does not give web pages high placement in search queries based on the number of web pages that link to you -quantity-, but based on the ranking of those pages themselves -quality. Only links from other premier web sites -such as the Bristol Blogger- matter; links from web sites that come in on page 17 for searches for cup holder do not, and by linking to them without the nofollow tag, would only devalue our own ranking, for no tangible benefit.

For people who want to know more about the problem of applying graph algorithms to internet-scale datasets can we recommend Graph Twiddling in a MapReduce World, by Jonathan Cohen, of the US National Security Agency. We are only prepared to discuss PageRank and hence web site linking with people who have read and understood this paper, as anything else would be a waste of our time.

Thank your for your co-operation. Your civil rights will be restored once The Emergency is deemed over.

Anti-car subversives -in our own city!

Anyone who follows this blog will know that we think pedestrians and schoolkids should be banned, and as for bicycles, well, their owners should be made to pay an annual tax, and even then not allowed to ride their bike on roads or pavements, but only on a small bit of path where a bus runs alongside it, a path where they are required to wear helmets and hi-visibility clothing.

As such, we follow the party line of the Association of British Drivers and the Daily Mail, as well as its local sibling paper, the Evening Post.

It comes as a shock to discover, then, that none of these prestigious organisations have picked up on a growing scandal in our midst - a small group of subversives who are actively trying to make things worse for car drivers in the city -by giving bicycles to people who cannot afford them!

These people, the Bristol Bike Project, are being quite open about it. From their bunker somewhere in Stokes Croft, they are fixing up old bicycles, and giving them away. They are even begging for anyone in the city who has an unused bicycle rusting away to bring it down, to donate it, and they will fix it up or use it for parts to fix up the others.

What is most shocking is that people in this city have really been doing this! We can understand why fellow citizens would have a bike rusting away, after all, once you grow up you don't need it, but to give the bikes away, so they can be used? Do these people not realise that by their generosity cars, taxis and buses will be held up, while pedestrians are endangered?

We couldn't believe this was true, so snuck down on the pretence of being there to donate some parts -in reality we'd just stolen them from a bike outside, so ensuring there would be at least one less bike in our way today, then while the project team were distracted, we took some photographs with our hidden micro-camera.

Look, a whole production line of machines, waiting to be built up and in the way of tax-payers! Apparently they've built up sixty already, to refugees, asylum-seekers, big-issue vendors and other non-tax payers -out there, getting in our way. And there are more on the way. After positive press in some bike site, and Bristol Indymedia, more have been coming in.

And not just adult bikes, kid bikes too! So children will be getting in our way!

Are these subversives satisfied? No they are not! They are still asking for more bikes! for more spare parts! From tyres to brakes! Adult bikes and kid bikes!

This is a scandal -yet the mainstream press haven't picked up on it, not even the socialist papers like the Independent, that will probably praise its goody-goody-ness.

It must be stopped. But what to do? The solution is simple.

Nobody should even think of donating old bikes or old bike parts to the team down on city road -the team whose email address is thebristolbikeproject at gmail.com. To do that would be madness, it would only encourage more people to get out on their bikes and get the way of decent, tax-paying, daily-mail readers like us.

Well, there goes Chrysler

I owned a Dodge minivan for a year. That was in the US, at a time when fuel was $1.60/U.S. Gallon, about 30p/Litre, so with a vehicle that did 27 mpg long-haul, was much cheaper than running a small car was or is in the UK.

It was convenient for those long journeys. Automatic 4 speed engine, cruise control, oodles of luggage room in the vast back. And in a country with big drive-in/reverse-out parking bays everywhere, the fact there was no rear window visibility was fairly unimportant.

However, I don't miss it, and I am not surprised by Chrysler's departure.

• It was a barge, refused to corner, and had a stopping distance measured in kilometres. Why? Too much metal.
• It was mindnumbingly cheesy inside. Want pockets in the door to keep things? That would be in the premium model. For something so big, it was very inefficient in its space usage. Compare with EU vehicles like the Renault Megane, that has pockets in its pockets.
• Depreciated really badly over that year. Even though it was cheap to buy second hand, it was hard to sell later on, which made the cost of ownership pretty harsh.
  

One of the weird things about it was that one of its "features" was, apparently, the ability to detect you'd been driving for 10 minutes with the indicator on, and apparently the car would beep loudly to tell you this. This says a lot about their target market: people who drive round with the indicator on.

Even in the US, this vehicle sucked. Which is why Chrysler have filed for Chapter 11 Bankrupcy today. Their target market abandoned the minivan the myth of the SUV, the belief that you were safer in a prone-to-flipping 4x4 truck-like monster, and then, come the 2007-2008 oil and financial problems, stopped buying cars altogether. Oops.

Some people think this site is anti-car, and that we don't like car drivers. That's up to the individual contributors,. When I see someone driving a Dodge/Chrysler minivan round Bristol, I don't just think "oh look, these people are bravely trying to fit a vehicle designed for US suburbs around a city and streets that is way out of its design specification." No, I feel sorry for them. Because they have to drive round in a Dodge Caravan.

[Photo: Hell's Canyon, between Oregon and Idaho]

Bristol *is* anti-car

There have been lots of arguments in the letters page of the legacy-local-press over whether Bristol is anti-car or not. that argument can go all day, without data to back it up. We in Bristol Traffic aim to provide that data, and here have proof that Bristol Council is pursuing anti-car policies.

Here is Lockleaze. As you can see, there is no pavement on this side of the road. This means that cars are forced to park on muddy grass growing right next to kerb.

Some are even forced to park in the middle of this muddy area instead, as there is nowhere else for them to park their car

This gets the car and the driver all dirty. And it is all the fault of the council. If they would only provide nice pavements to park on, this situation would not arise. Furthermore, it is discriminatory. Clifton: pavements to park on. Montpelier: pavements to park on. Kingsdown: pavements to park on. Lockleaze: mud. Need we say more?