Bristol's Balloon Problem

Sometimes the congestion in the city is so bad that people take to the air, but if you try that in a helicopter you soon discover that not only is the cost of fuel excessive, everyone on the ground assumes that there's trouble on the ground and comes out watch. You could create a riot just by hovering over Bedminster on a Saturday night.

What else then? Obviously: balloons.

But here there's still heating bills to run up, and the fact they tend to only go west to east.

This is why inbound commuters from the west of the city use them in the mornings -maybe even to Bath- but other mechanisms are needed to get home. We propose allowing ballonists to get towed by the trains from Bath to Bristol, but we think some of the bridges may cause problems. Experiments are required.

Incidentally, this post-RPZ photo of Cotham Road shows some consequences of the actions. The bus- only parking area is now only used by buses; school-run parents have many free parking spaces, and, interestingly, bike/car conflict is reduces, as now the bicycles can get to one side of the road. Admittedly, there are a couple of build outs and the odd car for them to swerve round, but it is actually easier to drive along -at least until you get to Cotham Brow. For everyone but the commuters who wanted to park here, it's better.

Which causes us to worry about these Clifton proposals to add more parking "For traffic calming". We don't want calmed traffic. We want to drive round fast without bicycles in our way. Yes, we'd like more parking, but it shouldn't be at the expense of slowing us down, or providing short-stay parking areas marked in yellow lines.

We'll be looking at "the Clifton proposals" more next week.

Pull up! Pull up!

What should we see this morning but a hot air balloon apparently doing an unscheduled landing somewhere in Horfield, just by the gas towers. There is some parkland there, we think.

We hope they landed safely. We'd also like some pics that anyone has of that time one had to land on the railway line at the Arches -something straight of Thomas the Tank Engine there.

Balloon Fiesta Parking on Bower Ashton Terrace

Here is WF06SNU at the junction of Ashton Road and Bower Ashton Terrace on Thursday evening. The owner could be a local resident, or someone going to the Bristol City FC grounds, or maybe someone visiting the Balloon Fiesta in nearby Ashton Court. Although at first glance this seems to be an excellent parking location with the rocky pseudo-bollards on guard, cars parked here without care may still be in danger.

This car, for example, could still be at risk from unobservant pedestrians dirtying the paintwork whilst attempting to squeeze past. Such pedestrians are likely to include families with buggies and with children made excitable by seeing a floating Churchill dog and eating candy-floss and burgers.

By choosing a slightly different parking angle, the pavement here would be completely blocked, ensuring excitable children would be forced to use the road, leaving WF06SNU safe from candy floss and burger grease.

(trivia: we've seen this build-out before; clearly a secret Ashton Gate parking area. This time, credit to reporter "WB" for letting us know about this secret spot for a car)

Congested Airspace

At least when the air is full of ballons, it isn't that noisy -though when one is right overhead with the burners on it can be a bit unexpected.

Emergency Parking

This was caught on the way to school this morning: a vehicle doing some emergency parking on the downs.

Vehicle access to the downs is always a bit controversial; they ban bikes, let the zoo is allowed to take over a large area on summer weekends and charge a fee for parking on it.

Here we see something that should be allowed to use the downs as a parking area, as the alternative -Redland- could be fairly destructive all round.

I wonder how scary it was for the passengers...