Breaking: cyclists using bridge intended to be cycled over

Here is a video of someone trying to cycle from one side of the Avon to the other.

You can see at the beginning of the video that they have to  is another bridge, the cheesegrater bridge, which, since they replaced its artistic metal surface with one which works in the wet and ice, can be used year round. Or at least could be, if a lorry hadn't been driven over it, destroyed the surface and still, two months later, not been repaired.

Here's a video of someone cycling over it again


Nothing unusual there, given it has been since its inception a walking/cycling bridge

Why our coverage then? Because on December 5, 2017, Alex Ballinger, Bristol Post journalist, published an article Cyclists ignore signs asking them to dismount on a Bristol bridge but warning isn’t mandatory. Where, shockingly,

Pictures show cyclists riding over a city centre bridge and passing pedestrians

That is the most undercompelling subtitle you can imagine, but it gets filled up with

Cyclists have been photographed riding over a pedestrian bridge near Bristol city centre despite the ‘health and safety’ warning signs, but there is no way of enforcing the rule.

That's because its a cycling and walking bridge. There is no rule to enforce. The fact that the owners don't want to people to cycle over is their problem. The fact that the "cyclists cycle over the bridge" story is a recurrent on in the Post is, however, the newspaper's problem.

Here's an article from April 3, 2017, How many cyclists do you think we caught riding over a pedestrian bridge in Bristol in just five minutes?, by one Tim MacFarlan.

This is the Bridge in question. Notice how the recurrent videos of cycling over this bridge is, well, repetitive. Not a coincidence.



From the article

when it comes to a pedestrian bridge, with signs at either end ordering cyclists to dismount when crossing, you'd have thought you could relax a bit if you're on foot. 

Not so with the Valentine Bridge in Temple Quay if our experience is anything to go by.

...
This is despite the fact blue and white signs are clearly visible at both ends of the bridge saying in block capitals, 'CYCLISTS MUST DISMOUNT WHEN USING THE BRIDGE'. 

we filmed 22 cyclists crossing the bridge in both directions - and just SIX got off their bikes and walked across.

Well, it is a cycling bridge after all.

Except, guess what:

Not a single pedestrian complained to any of the cyclists, despite the fact they should only have been sharing the bridge with people on foot - wheeling their bikes if they had them.

The writer almost sounds disappointed "everyone on a walking/cycling bridge coexisted happily."

And here, May 10 2017, by Alex Ballinger, Sign urges cyclists to dismount on Bristol city centre bridge - but is it against the law to ignore it? This covers the Prince Street Bridge, but it quite clearly covers the fact that no, you can cycle where there's a "cyclists dismount" sign.

Now, that's a bit far back for some group memory, but there's search engines to find this history. And the article from October 23, 2017, These are the rules for cyclists. The clothes to wear, can you ride on pavements, and must you adhere to dismount signs?, by journalist Emma Flanagan.

Q. Do you have to adhere to dismount signs?
A. No. However, not dismounting can cause tension with pedestrians who may not be aware it is advisory.

And the article has a photo of guess, what? Valentine's Bridge.

That's the one in this video with the dismount sign next to a barrier installed without council permission. We think the barrier is designed to force people off their bike, but really its like chicanes are to Astra drivers showing off to their mates: entertainment. The challenge is "can you get round without putting a foot down". (tip: put the brakes on lightly but pedal all the way through; gives you a bit of oversteer and stops you having enter too fast).



There we go then: four articles this year on cycling over bridges with dismount signs, three covering this bridge, with the most overblown the "we counted 22 people cycling over a walking & cycling bridge and nobody minded".

The issue is no longer "why are these cyclists ignoring the signs", but "why does the local newspaper regurgitate same variants on the same story 4 times/year", especially when the story is "why do cyclists cycle over bridges designed to be cycled over?".

Some theories

1. Journalists are hard pressed to think up content, walking round Templemeads they see some people cycling over a bridge, see the dismount sign and think "that'd be something I could write up!", pushing out a story without bothering to search the archives or talk to colleagues.
2. Someone looks at the hit counts for previous articles and yells out, taps into the team whatsapp group, Slack channel or whatever "whose turn is it to do the cyclists on Valentine Bridge story this month?"
3. The bridge owners hate cyclists and every so often get in touch with the paper to say "we have a story!" And whoever writes it up doesn't bother to look through the archives. Or doesn't care.

We propose a sweepstake: when will the first 2018 article denouncing cyclists cycling over Valentine's Bridge appear in the Bristol Post?

Prize: a free cycle ride over the bridge

Rules: this competition is not open to Bristol Post staff or immediate family.

What's painful here, is not just the uninspired repetition of the same old story, a repetition which only increases prejudice and polarisation, but because we assume that the authors do have some ambition to really write compelling stories.

Yet there is an interesting one right in front of their eyes: the story about why a bridge built in the 21st century as a walking/cycling bridge has its owners trying to suppress cycling over it?

Here then, are our recommendations for the next Bristol Post journalist tasked with covering this story in April/May 2018.

1. Ask the bridge owners whether or not this was commissioned as a walking/cycling bridge?
2. Ask them why they unilaterally decided to add "cyclists dismount" signs?
3. Ask them why they unilaterally installed barriers without council permission?
4. Ask them why they get so worked up about cyclists exercising their legal right to cycle over the bridge?
5. Given the stance on cycling, do you consider that as a walking and cycling bridge, the bridge is a failure?

If the answers to Q2-4 is "because the bridge is too narrow", then ask them: what traffic modelling did they do? Was it wrong?  If so; why? If not: why was the bridge inadequate for the predicted numbers. And, if they didn't do any modelling, that's interesting too.

If the answers to Q2-4 are "because the surface is slippery when wet", ask them "was the weather of Bristol taken into account when the bridge was designed and materials specified"

Follow this with: given the surface of the first bridge was failure, why was the second crossing also designed with a surface which doesn't work in rain and ice?

A cycling bridge you cannot cycle over is not a cycling bridge: it is a failed project.

As, for Alex Ballinger and colleagues: why are you recycling this?

If you look at the comments, articles like this are clearly reinforcing the opinion of the commenters that "cyclists are lawbreakers". Maybe, but not here. This article has the defensibility of a "shocking expose, people driving on the M32 flyover". You should have been embarrassed to put your name to it

Please: write a new story on the failure of the bridge, not how Bristolians are using it as originally intended.

The Evening Post discovers the Bristol Traffic Photo Portfolio

We don't do much coverage of the Evening Post these days, primarily because we've given up reading it. Eventually you get tired of its whiningly repetitive stance against resident parking and 20 mph zones, portraying them as a war on motorists, the death of the cities, a tax on Bristolians, etc. etc. The one thing we never saw was anything praising how the yellow lines have made paveparking and "optimistic corner parking" illegal —and how this was making inner Bristol a nicer place to walk.

Because the bits of the city with RPZ markings have had their pavements restored, and are now easier to walk round with a pushchair those areas still saying "RPZ isn't needed here", such as, say, St Andrews, where the contrast between that and adjacent Montpelier is now significant.

But no, no coverage of that in Evening Post articles, something we criticised it for in the past in a post looking at the history of pavements, parking and "walking opportunities" along Richmond Road, notable for nowhere to walk but the road and being an awful road to drive up or down: cars almost touching on both sides, nowhere to pass an oncoming cyclist, let alone oncoming car. With the RPZ rollout it became not only better to walk and cycle, it became driveable.

From the sole printed press news source in the city: silence.

It's interesting to discover then, that the paper has now moved on from "20 mph will kill our city" to "pavement parking is epidemic" and "is pavement parking getting worse?" The latter is quite amusing as we've been covering this issue for coming on a decade, and the main reason we cut back on coverage was that the RPZ reduced it so much that life was boring. It was not "epidemic", it is "endemic": so widespread and ongoing it barely merits a mention.

The BEP hasn't picked up on that, instead it's filled the paper with various photos of what to us look like everyday parking scenes in the bits of the city that aren't RP-Zoned. If you find it shocking, you need to go for a walk. Anyway, they had the pics up, no doubt shocking those people who don't walk further than the car they've parked on the pavement outside their home. For us, all too familiar. Very much all too familiar. In fact, one which was so familiar we recognised it as one of our own photos




This photo originally appeard in a post denouncing the car S589JDG for being parked on the specific bit of pavement where Richmond Road narrows —and in doing so, stopping cars and vans getting down the hill. That was the reason it had earned a note criticising its parking: not for paveparking, but for paveparking in a way inconsiderate of other drivers.

That photo was published in 2013, republished in an article 2015, where we used it as one of the "before/after" articles on the RPZ changes, an article which explicitly called out the BEP for its failure to cover the benefits of RPZs for pedestrians.

The photo the Evening Post printed was taken from an article criticising the Evening Post's coverage of pavement parking and RPZs.

Amusing as it is, it is still a copyright infringement.

We have a non-normative policy towards reuse of our images and videos.

The Bristolian: unlimited rights, no permission needed.

Everyone else: ask first

1. If the requester is one of: Daily Mail, Sun, Telegraph, tell them to fuck off.
2. If the requester is any other press org, we'd check with the original submitter, probably give approval with credit due us and that original submitter. (if the original author refused, that'd be passed back too)
3. Videos: Link/embed them without any restrictions (obviously), but no to use in some video remake unless its more than just some branding exercise. And again, the Daily Mail can fuck off.

Now what about publication without getting permission?

1. If it was timely news, again, no problem.
2. If it was some photo from the archives, well that's a different matter. Any failure to check there has to be be a due diligence failure or a wilful disregard of our property.

The last time this happened, we extracted a donation to the Bristol Cycling Campaign. Someone had clearly just googled for an image "car parked on zebra crossing", and copied the photo without bothering to question image licensing T&Cs.

What about now?

We see two ways forward without resorting to the legal system, DMCA copyright takedowns, etc.

Option One: a modest donation —say £250— to the Bristol Cycling Campaign. 

Easy all round, it'd make upfor publish an article denouncing cyclists for cycling over a shared use bridge designed for walking and cycling on. We'd get some good coverage of the fact that the BEP was now supporting cycling campaigners in the city.

Option two: an in depth review how the RPZ makes walking in Bristol better.

We to collaborate on an article looking at richmond road's pavement parking over time, where the van-passing incident was nearly one of the bad examples. Here we could not only provide photos from our archives, we could approach the Montpelier resident forced to walk her kids home from school down the middle of the road. She could not only cover the experience of a parent in the "before" period, but her experience now that the RPZ has been rolled out. Maybe she could even talk about the impact of the RPZ on driving round the area.

Seems a reasonable choice to us. Fund the cycling campaign after a week of denouncing cyclists for going on a bridge built for them, or get an opportunity to work on a fascinating article looking at how a inner city parental school dropoff experience has been transformed for the better by the RPZ rollout.

Personally, we'd like the article —it would be a good follow up to the previous ones, and we don't want the author of those articles to feel chastised for writing the first articles we've ever seen to criticise paveparking. We'd even help with the content.

Over to you, Team Evening Post

Bristol Post: cut and paste journalism? Share the data

There is one news outlet in the city whose coverage is insightful, cuts to the core of the city's problems and of whom every article is worth a read.

Yes, we refer to The Bristolian. Being ad-free there is no need for central-HQ agendas to be pushed; no need to try and generate click-bait content at the lowest cost per article, and so instead they can write independent content.

There is also another news outlet in the city, The Bristol Evening Post, which is part of The Trinity Group, as is the

We've been avoiding covering the Bristol Evening Post since it's "witty" Bikes and Lorries April 1 2015 article. Every link we make to a low-value web site devalues our own rating in google's PageRank algorithm, and since most of their coverage is bollocks there's no real point.

However, today it's time to link to an article, albeit through a nofollow marker: Revealed: The number of cyclists involved in crashes while undertaking other vehicles, covering the 5-6 cyclists hit a year by going to the left of cars in those little painted bits of bollocks on the road.

This turns out to be a seminal piece of work

1. Because it appears in[Cox17], Tara Cox, Revealed: Hotspots in Cambridge for accidents where cyclists undertake other vehicles, Trinity Group Cambridge News , 2017, where 4-5 cyclists are injured/year.
2. And in [Grant17] Rob Grant 2017, Dozens of cyclists have been involved in collisions while undertaking, new figures show, of the Manchester Evening news, where the collision rate is 11/year, no variance/stddev supplied
3. and [Grant17a], Rob Grant, How many Birmingham cyclists are involved in accidents while undertaking, Birmingham Mail,  2017. Here the collision rate is "an average of 8/year", again, without any variance.

As a news outlet that believe in weakly-defensible data to back up all our ill informed opinions, we are always pleased to see our press outlets following our strategy of "have an opinion, grab some meaningless statistic and then turn into an article defending our prejudices. Which as our detractors will point out, we do all too often.

But we do like to see that weakly-defensible data. Indeed, we're happy to critique the DfT's data gathering processes as a relic of the twentieth century, and suggest modern, big data alternatives.

Which is why, given the broad covering of this seminal piece of work, we'd really like to see the data.

Preferably

1. The cleaned up DfT data, either in the painfully generic CSV format, or something more efficient and with tighter typing, like Apache Avro.
2. The data science notebook used to take the data and produce the numbers which got published. A Jupyter Notebook pushed to github would be fine.

Reproducible analysis of the results of an experiment is something which is becoming a big issue in science: given the same data, can different scientists come up with the same answers. Publishing the data and the analysis code is the foundation to this.

At least this dataset is going to be small, it's not like the datasets lurking in CERN CASTOR , or worse, the feed expected to come off the Square Kilometre Array, a feed that has everyone fucking scared right now. 

So to the Evening Post, as one datascience organisation to another,: if you are going to write articles on traffic issues in the city,  even if they are copied and pasted from the same piece of tier-2 prose seen in Manchester, Birmingham and Cambridge: show us the data, or STFU.

Bristol's Parking Problem: 2016 style

There's an article up on the evening post saying for the first time in a generation, a majority of people are using either buses, bikes or walking to work instead.

This is fascinating. Too bad there is no coverage of the methodology of the survey other than it's "a survey of the commuting habits of thousands of city residents". How did they conduct this survey? A random call of Bristol numbers? Did it include s survey of the rural backwaters of S Gloucs and N Somerset? Did they look at the distances travelled to measure commute-miles, rather than just journeys? Did they ask firstbus and wessex bus lines for data, along with ANPR logs and phone company travel datasets? These are the things we need to know.

Anyway, in the list of people the paper called for an opinion, they reached for their Fax Machine contact list and got in touch with Hugh Bladon, Bristol's member of Association of British Drivers, who is always woken up from his sleep for a quote. Hugh Bladon actually lives in Weston Super Mare, a town which is still looking forward to 1974, so it's always surprising that they can contact Hugh for a quote. That's 20 miles away, a distance quoted by Google maps as 38 minutes drive from Stokes Croft on a Sunday evening. If Mr Bladon really does commute into Bristol every day, he'll be spending an hour each way, first on the A370, A38 or M5+ portway, then in stop-go mode through town to finally reach his destination. And for what? To live in Weston? That's the place where Banksy hosted his Dismaland Exhibition —and that's not a coincidence. Probably the main problem they had there was people walking round town laughing at stuff and taking selfies in front of the sea front, not realising they weren't actually at the exhibition yet. Why would anyone voluntary live there? If you have children, think of what it does to their minds? And, think what it does to your life, with 2+h a day sitting in a car.

Essentially, you can't trust the judgment of anyone who lives in WsM of their own volition. So the fact he is called on to be the ABD spokesman is a bit worrying for them: can't they find anyone else?

And what did he have to say? Rather than go for the survey methodology —always the first line of attack—, he accepted the findings and then blamed the council

I suppose people are getting fed up with travelling into the city. here is not enough provision for people to park, and I suppose more people are using the park and rides. I would also think George Ferguson and his 20mph scheme are frightening people who think they might get a ticket for doing maybe 23, or 24mph Those are the sort of things that drive away people.With the expanding economy, I would have thought more people would be in cars. It might also be there is not enough parking. Cycle lanes now take up a lot of tarmac where road parking used to be.

This is hilarious. We have never heard of anyone too scared to drive into the city in case they get a ticket(*).

Blaming the RPZ for removing a large amount of free-at-point-of-use commuter parking is something he should have gone for, but instead he imagines that people are scared of getting a ticket for driving at 24 mph. That's like saying people are scared of using the M4 in case they get a ticket for driving at 74 mph. They aren't, you don't.

As for the "Cycle lanes now take up a lot of tarmac where road parking used to be.". He must have a different cycle map than everyone else. The purpose of cycle lanes is to provide short stay parking. Even bus lanes are only closed to parking for 3 hours a day, 21 h a week.

But he does have a bit of a point: there isn't enough parking. Only what you want to park has changed.

Look at this video of a Bristol (not a WsM) resident cycling to the shops on a weekend.

1. There are no cycle lanes.
2. There are still people driving, not scared of getting a ticket for driving at 23 mph.
3. A lot of the people driving don't seem to looking where they are going.
4. None of the car parking space has been re-allocated to cycle lanes.
5. There are lots of bike racks,  about 8 opposite where Havana Coffee used to be, two over the road by that, then more by costa coffee and sainsbury's.
6. All of these bike racks are full.

There is nowhere to park a bicycle



Our reporter cycles down hill, avoids getting hit by the 4x4 turning from Aberdeen Road without looking, and the hatchback pulling out from the other side of the road without looking, carries on a bit, having to wait with a car in front for a driver taking their time to reverse park, then pulls over themselves to find somewhere to park. First rack: 12 bikes; no room for more. Visible across the road: two racks, four bikes, no space. They continue down to Whiteladies Road. On the far side of the road, there's space for about 30 bikes, looking fairly full. On this side of the road, 6 more racks, space for 12. Except, again, full.

One of the bikes there half of an abandoned frame, lying on its side. So the the tax dodger gets to do something nobody who drives in from WsM can get away with; they stick their own bike on top of it, lock up, and go to the shops. So we see approximately six cars worth of space allocated -all from the pavement, we note- for bicycles, which is a fraction of the space allocated to car parking. What we see in this video is, on Cotham Hill alone, 32 cars, two spaces free. For bikes, 48 spaces: all taken, albeit some with dissolving relics.

Is this an unusual event? Not really; the same situation was encountered on Gloucester road an hour earlier: one space outside Maplins, someone else queueing for it before the tax dodger had even unlocked. Because on that side of the road, there are about eight bike stands, from Zetland Road up. In contrast, if you wanted to drive there, there's more space.

Essentially, we are seeing a shift to cycling as a transport option in some parts of the city —and we aren't seeing the city adapting to that.  Hugh can complain about removal of parking, but there is significantly more space allocated to parking here than any other other form of transport.

This little stretch of Whiteladies Road is interesting, as it is what the ABD use in the videos calling the council "bonkers", showing how shops have suffered from a lack of parking and have had to shut down.



Well, our anecdata beats theirs, at least in terms of being up to date, and what it says is "Bristol does have a parking problem, but it's not just for cars".

(*) If you have —or know someone who has— stopped driving around out of fear of getting ticketed at 23 mph, please get in touch.

RPZ comes to Monty: Oh the Inhumanity!

• First they came to Kingsdown, and everyone celebrated.
• Then they came to Cotham, and nobody complained
• Then they came to Redland, and the main complaints were from people just outside the zone.
• They they came to St Pauls, and people were upset about the cost, rather than the parking
• Then they came to Clifton and the shopkeepers who wanted to drive to work were more focused on their convenience than the revenue gains on having customer parking, they paid for tanks to make their point, still lost —and now have signs up everywhere saying "30 minute parking is free, please come and shop despite all the horror stories we put out"

And now: Monty

It's fascinating to see how the Evening Post has finally managed finda an agenda they can get people even in the inner city to care about. Up till now, what the BEP wrote about was irrelevant. Like who cares about congestion in Westbury on Trym or what's happening in Stapleton.

No more. Instead they've managed to stir up horror stories and build a whole agenda which everyone wanting to be elected as a mayor is using as their core election theme.

It's almost as if the paper has found a way to stay relevant in an era of free news over the internet.


Well, unlike the Evening Post we've spent time in Montpelier and have a dataset going back years. On a road-by-road basis, such as Richmond Road.

This is what it used to look like




A road where the pavement was exclusively used for parking, yet still so tight that only the bold drove down it.

If you were, say, trying to walk your kids to school, you'd be in the same roadway, keeping a tight rein on your four year old in case they ran ahead and ended up under an oncoming van or a car pulling out from their parking space on that pavement.


It was essentially a "shared space"

Yet look now? Someone has painted double yellow lines up one entire side of it! You can now drive up this road without fearing for your paintwork!



Incredibly, you don't have to commit to that journey hoping you wont meet anyone coming the other way —as if that did happen, one of you would be reversing up a road so tight that you had to get it spot on or hear a scraping sound.

1. It is now possible to drive up and down Richmond road safely.
2. It is now possible to walk up richmond road on the pavement, and even send a small child to run ahead of you without worrying about it being run over.
3. It is now trivial to for a car and a bicycle to pass.

That is what the RPZ has brought to Montpelier: not just white lines, not just yellow lines —but pavements people can use.

Anyone who says "its destroying Montpelier" clearly has a vision of the area where nobody walked, where scenes of two drivers out their car shouting at each other as to who was going to reverse were viewed as quaint traditions.

And what does the Evening Post do? Rather than highlight how it has now become safer to walk or cycle, how it has become more convenient to drive through, they've pointed to the yellow paint that someone has thrown onto the ticket machine at (00:48). That's the machine on the pavement which was never visible before.

And while the BEP condemn the vandalism, they don' t really, they are proud to report it —and blame the mayor for making the protesters do it.

So for all this "evening post represents the people" fuss they are really fighting to preserve a time when pavements were for parking and children couldn't walk round Montpelier safely.

Why should we, the residents of the inner city care? We are just being mislead by a paper that is happy to manufacture controversy, and happy to find it in the lives of people who are unable to adapt to change. Tough.

At this point the RPZ-haters will be going "So where did the cars go, eh?" The answer there is: the council added extra parking spaces round the corner by marking St Andrews Road for echelon parking.

In this photo you can just about make out a car coming up behind the parked van blocking the view. Which highlights the issue with echelon parking: its got a higher collision rate, and is particularly bad for cyclists.

In order to make the RPZ rollout less controversial, the council chose to make cycling on St Andrews Road more hazardous.

That's something for the haters to consider.

Our letter to @BristolPost

We've just sent a letter to the evening post. We encourage others to do likewise. This was not sent to the letters@ address -it was sent to the new desk. Its in their part of the web site in which the article is printed, and we want action, not some letter a few days from now.

To: epnews@bepp.co.uk

Subject: April 1st "cyclists and lorries" article

Hello

Some people view our Bristol Traffic site as some kind of spoof.

Our contributors have twice encountered HGV/cyclists collisions in Bristol. One of our contributors lives in Bath, not far from Lansdown Hill, where a four year old girl and others were killed by an out of control HGV. When we cover such things, all notion of humor is gone. We treat the incidents as the awful events they are.

Yet your paper thinks this topic merits an April 1st story.

That is probably one of the most tasteless and insensitive stories you have ever printed.

Here is our response.

http://bristolcars.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/evening-post-not-funny-at-all.html

As we say at bottom of our article: it's not to too late to your article offline and replace it with an apology, one you can reprint tomorrow.

We even grant you the right to use any of the photographs in the above article with such an apology.

Please let us know what your plans will be

Yours,

the Bristol Traffic team.

Evening Post: not funny at all

The Bristol Post has an April 1st story, Cyclists to escort all lorries through Bristol city centre in bid to reduce speed and improve safety. someone thought that was funny.

More precisely, someone thought that was funny less than eight weeks after a tipper truck killed four people in Bath —something local and awful enough that the BEP felt worth covering themselves. A truck crash in which the driver and the company chairmain have been charged for Manslaughter on. Think about that: if the police not only charge the driver with something worse than "Causing death by careless driving", but even the company owner with manslaughter, there must be evidence of a set of wilful decisions resulting in what even the police consider to be killings. Not accidents: killings.

What those decisions are, we are yet to know. Overloading the vehicle? Maybe. Driving with defective brakes? Quite possibly. Driving down a road with 6.6" signs at the entrance and a use low gear sign later on? Again, highly likely. Some papers have been claiming the width sign had been knocked down -but there are two of them, which kind of makes that statement doubtful. A wilful decision to take a shortcut seems suspiciously likely.



Yet the BEP thinks lorry safety is something worth having a laugh about.


Whoever wrote that article didn't look through their archives for keywords like "HGV and life-changing injuries"



They've certainly never heard the scream someone makes as an HGV drives over them.

On a bicycle, what's likely to kill you is an HGV.

And the Evening Post thinks this is funny enough to make a joke out of on April 1.

Anyone who rides a bike and actually pays for the evening post should reconsider their decision from now on

Anyone who looks at the web site should immediately download the Adblock plugin (Firefox, Chrome) so the evening post doesn't get that advert placement revenue.

As for the Bristol Traffic site? After this post we refuse to place any links to Bristol Post articles. Ever.

 

To the evening post, we want you to recognise that this isn't funny. Anyone cycling around the city fears the HGV, fears it coming up behind you at an ASL. Or even worse: a roundabout. If you've ever felt your bike being nudged forward by an HGV at a roundabout as the driver looks to their right, you'll know a moment of cool terror. Moving HGVs are just bad. You fears them passing, as you look to the side to see if its indicator lights are on, warning you that it's about to turn over you. And that's if you are lucky, if they do indicate.

Please pull the article and post an apology for such a tasteless story.

 

As for the author for the article: we extend the offer of a bike ride round central Bristol. The old BEP offices to templemeads should be enough to convince them never to think such an article would be funny. If that's not enough, we'll take them to Bedminster and then down Coronation Road, returning by Anchor Road to the centre, up to the Bearpit roundabout and then Newfoundland Road. If they aren't left a gibbering wreck vowing never to get on a bicycle again, maybe they will write prose so awful in future

Markov Chains: letting the evening post write for itself

A quick grep of the internet thows up a Markov Chain generator in the Python programming language.

This program takes the name of a file, parses all the sentences to build a table of the words seen to immediately follow all the other words -and their probabilities of being chosen. For example, "lycra" is followed by "lout" 80% of the time, "clad" 20% of the time.

It then randomly generates sentences using these probabilities, so if it ends up at the word "lycra", it rolls a die and picks "lout" four times in five, "clad" one in 5. Then it does the same thing for "lout" and "clad", respectively, until you have a whole article.

Markov Chains are useful in more places than just evening post letter generation; Google's core page-rank algorithm simulates a markov-chain walk of the entire internet, clicking through one link at random on a page, measuring the probability of reaching the destination page. Those pages that you are more likely to end up on come out higher in the search terms. Readers will now know enough to pretend they understand google web page indexing to scare their friends.

Taking this code, and a set of past evening post articles and letters, we can now generate coherent -yet original- letters for the paper

Example 1

by their arrogance." Mr Drummond, who was struggling to get the message. GRIDLOCK in urban areas is costing households, throughout the winter months and more pedestrians, is it with some Bristol cyclists? The other night I was met with typical cyclist arrogance. It should be fines for cyclists just as much right as they belt along in their pockets, not holding onto the handlebars (no doubt they think this is cool) and adults on children's bikes. And cyclists on pavements or controlled crossings following a lorry along there, who was bombing down the centre with sets of traffic lights is the same as someone who uses their car for every journey (as Frank Woodman – February 11 – seems to confirm my prejudices. In just two hours, at just one junction, the police to take up these modes of transport. "Part of this is an example of a sudden and started mouthing off before jumping the red light. Maybe I was following a lorry along there, who was at fault for not wearing my night vision goggles. One morning on the pavement and they fear the city's pavements. The idea for the accidents they cause. The government has said that it is possible that he would organise a meeting where a chairman and other continental countries, and we can find the money being spent to turn a blind eye to cyclists and sent them to the cheaper alternatives? Because most people of working age live busy, stressful lives, so choose convenient transport over cheap transport. SO Mayor Ferguson and, hopefully, encourage him to move on to households. Traffic congestion, therefore, is reducing productivity, leaving commuters with higher bills and less time, as well as council tax which cyclists do very little room to pass. Then, as I reached my destination cyclist

Run 2

dressed in black are the main cause of road congestion. I regularly cycle to work using use the pub's toilet. "I waited outside for her, but I could not get up on the busy road. Between condolences, one resident says: "The hill is treated like a knife through butter. It is encouraging to see," he tells me. "Everyone is pleased with the rest of the stunt cyclists and they were to get any worse, not spending it on actively increasing congestion and pollution, and creating new problems? Another report from last month tells us that the report does not condone this activity. "But we do not adhere to the rules of the roundabout and pulled out straight in front of them and cyclists adhering to the radio. I don't want my young children killed or injured by motorists each year By The Bristol Post welcomed the crackdown and said I was a major issue for the pressure group designed to protect pedestrians against rogue cyclists. He said: "I am all in favour of it. "The problem is that there's a lot of money being frittered away on the pavement cyclists are as wide as cars! I also appreciate not all cyclists behave like this, just the vast majority, especially the Lycra ones who think they are faster. 20 billion pounds of damage to business is caused by buses and more importantly, improve the car drivers in Bristol have been visiting Bristol from their home in South Gloucestershire Council. 

Run 3 -which actually seems more coherent than "Frank Woodman".

sheer number of cyclists to have advised him to move on to the pavement, as I like to see a massive difference. "I don't think there are many others all over the years? There are more motorists than cyclists, it makes perfect sense to just ban them! Why not a cycle-free day for Bristol drivers? I HAVE just read an opinion in this area, but dangerous cycling is. "Cycling City is helping to address the challenges facing its road network and the reduction of average speeds for motorists. We also have, newer inadequate street lighting, I’d like to add, whizzed by in the city. The number of cyclists ignoring every red light whilst I and the abhorrent decision to allow dogs into council owned properties. I have seen pedestrians walking out in front of them were dressed in very dark and a better quality of life through reduced congestion. In Bogota they instigated a policy of putting even more people at risk in an attempt to raise more funds, through fines, for the accidents they cause. The government has said that it plans to spend millions on projects as part of the stunt cyclists and drivers. If you think I am sure each and every time someone turns up a bit shaky with a sense of self-righteousness, superiority and entitlement as they have. Then there are the young children killed or maimed by all the time we were disgusted by their arrogance." Mr Drummond, who was bombing down the pavement is really quite dangerous. There were lights on my car just once a week ago today. Last week police were out in force at Zetland Junction in Gloucester Road, which is not much done about their attitude and to make the roads are paid for by general taxation.

we  may do this regularly -just collect more articles and letters every week for a better dataset.

Frank Woodman: bristol post's premier fake letter writer

People accuse us of being spoof, some kind of satire designed to wind people up.

Not us. No, the spoofs are people like Frank Woodman, letter writer to the Evening Post.

Fantastic coverage here, going back months. Yet clearly fictional.

How can we be so sure? Because of his wonderful inconsistencies.

December 30, It's easier to list what our city hasn't got

We lack [...] an efficient, cheap and reliable bus/ commuter system, which would encourage many more people to use it;

...

Of course, councillors, mayor and politicians will claim that the public funds are not in place to afford such facilities.

They would, of course, prefer to spend our money on more bus lanes, cycle lanes, 

See? he's actually contradicting himself in the same letter. "we don't have a cheap and reliable bus service because the council would rather spend money on bus lanes". That's like saying we don't have a motorway from Bristol to London because the DfT keeps putting money into the M4. Whoever made up this letter completely forgot to proof-read it before emailing it to their colleagues saying "stick this in where there's some space, we need some more online traffic"

Xmas must have been quiet altogether, forcing a new one to be knocked up the following day

December 31,  Bikes and buses must not delay city's traffic

Cyclists and buses must not be allowed to cause further delays to car commuters and vehicles, servicing businesses.

And again, two weeks later, the business model of advert-funded pages depending on high web traffic calls to the letter team

January 16, Convenience of cars outweighs the costs.

why do motorists absorb these costs rather than switch to the cheaper alternatives? Because most people of working age live busy, stressful lives, so choose convenient transport over cheap transport.

January 15,  Figures on congestion are a wake-up call

Cyclists and buses must not be allowed to cause further delays to car commuters and vehicles, servicing businesses.

See that? On Jan 16 "Mr Woodman" is arguing that people don't use things like buses and bicycles because they are less convenient than driving. And the day before, that congestion is making driving worse.


This is a bubble of inconsistency which we must admire and praise. You cannot complain on one day that congestion is making it impossible to drive round town, and then the next that people don't use alternatives because driving round town is easier.

Its as if someone says "we don't have any controversial cycling stories right now", and someone else goes "let's make up a letter -who is going to be Frank Woodman today?" -before agreeing on "let's print an old Frank Woodman letter, nobody will notice"

Say what you like about Bristol Traffic, but

1. we are at least consistent!
2. we print new content every time

Evening Post Letters

A copy of a letter submitted to the evening post hits our inbox: we wonder if it will ever see the light of their letters page.

When the new Bristol Post was launched it was accompanied by bus adverts showing a smiling driver giving a surprised cyclist a bunch of flowers.

It has been some months and I'm yet to see any flowers.

What I have seen is Councillor Richard Eddy trying to shape the city's transport policy based on the secondhand anecdotes of a friend. Please could the councillor remind his friend that in Amsterdam, vehicles drive on the other side of the road --and he should look both ways when crossing the road and the adjacent cycle paths. Then try walking round Westminster and decide which city centre treats pedestrians worse.

I've now also seen a letter of complaint from Robert J Trott of Keynsham -a letter which includes the tired old anecdote that cyclists never pay for the roads. In fact Bristol's urban streets are funded by council tax -so I believe that the £2200 I pay annually on my band-F house I have the right to walk, cycle and drive around the city.

By his own reasoning, Robert,  a resident of South Gloucestershire, does not have such rights. However, I forgive him and will let him use our city streets. What I would like though is some respect for the policies which we, the people of the city have chosen.

Please can he recognise that we did not deliberately choose these policies to annoy him but as an attempt to make the city itself a better place to live, work and indeed, visit.

Still, awaiting my bunch of flowers,

S.A.

Editorial: Bristol Traffic is not Anti-Bristol-Post

Another day, another batch of tweets and comments confidently claiming that Bristol Traffic is in fact anti Bristol Post.

In fact, some of our staff peruse the web site -and at least one person has actually bought a copy.

We too consider ourselves part of the local press.

So why are we accused of being anti-Evening Post?

We think it's partly because we we dare to acknowledge that in order to gain advertising revenue and retail sales, the Evening Post needs to generate local controversy stories. Anything against the local council -now the local mayor- is good, along with anything "anti-progress", such as campaigners against : Ashton Gate being turned into a supermarket, the Bristol Rovers ground becoming a supermarket, the South Link Road turning South Bristol into a traffic jam. But there aren't enough of those stories, and when there is a lull in the "Ferguson wants to make parking in bus lanes a crime" story, the post has to fall back to anti-cycling articles to generate interest.

We think it's partly because sometimes we use it as a source to identify "mad local campaigner of the week" stories which are printed unquestioningly in it, like the person campaigning against a traffic light that is the sole cause of traffic jams Whiteladies Road. Our defensible datasets do have the misfortune of showing up such people as ill-informed idiots without enough foundational knowledge of how queues work to be allowed near traffic planning.

There are two types of Bristol Post article. There are those written by human beings, which can be interesting and balanced.

Then there are those that are machine generated by taking a set of prewritten sentences, selecting a proper subset of this and then printing them in a random order. These are the articles we are against, because we can create them ourselves and gets boring after a while. And being so repetitive, they even destroy the value of our Evening Post Bingo Cards.

The problem with the human-written articles is that they are so petty they actually cause your brain cells to commit suicide, its like reading a Thomas the Tank Engine novel to a three year old for the seventeenth time. Not only that, they are so out of date, as we showed about their "shocking" discovery that some parking bays near the university were going to be turned into bike buildouts.

And as their number of editorial staff dwindle to a number that can be counted on one hand, they end up having to actually use stories from us and other sites leading to a lag where you can read about Arley Hill texting on our site, or wait a week and get the evening post stance. Why go to the BEP to read about Colston Hill's bike lane improvements, when Wheels On A Bike covered it three weeks earlier.

Frankly, we can't be bothered to read either kind of article these days:, be they machine generated, or human generated off borrowed online content. They are beyond salvation.

Reminder: We are a data driven organisation that understands how things work

Some people -mistakenly consider us to be some kind of spoof, whereas in fact we are a documentary that has built up a weakly-defensible dataset of the city's transport issues.We also include topics like queue theory, game theory and the like to analyse that data.

This is why we despair when the legacy mass media publish articles that lack both real data and the fundamental understanding behind it

Now, Queue theory, Erlang's core concept: A queue happens when the egress rate of a channel is lower than the ingress rate.

In less technical terms "you get a queue if less things are leaving something than entering". It doesn't matter how big a bucket is, if more watering is pouring into it than is leaving from a hole in the bottom -eventually it will overflow

In evening post commenter terms "there's no point making something two lanes wide if it has to go down to one lane wide a bit further on". The bottleneck is the one-lane bit wide, not the two lane stretch.

We know this is hard to grasp, which is why people are still complaining about the Portway bus lane. Evening Post Commenters: the bottlenecks are the narrow bits beyond the suspension bridge and Anchor Road -removing the bus lane will not increase your journey time by car at all.

Alternatively: it is futile to remove a bus lane in the name of congestion, if there's a single-lane road later on. You are wasting your life on something that will not deliver the benefits you expect. You may argue against this using the term "common sense" -but that is why building things from bridges to computer networks rely on people called "engineers" trained in something called "mathematics". Common sense doesn't cut it when you actually want something to work.

The Evening Post reporters need to pick this up too.

As today there is an article, Traffic lights on Blackboy Hill 'are cause of the congestion'.

A BRISTOL campaigner claims a set of traffic lights at a busy junction cause more congestion than they solve – and should be ripped out.
Simon Brookes, who led a campaign for the removal of a controversial bus lane in Westbury Road, is now calling for the removal of the lights at the top of Blackboy Hill.

We aren't sure what "campaigner" means here. Presumably it means "someone who doesn't understand queue theory but likes to get their face in the regional press"

He conducted a survey and claims that the lights held up lots of buses.

Mr Brookes carried out another survey yesterday between 9am and 10am. He said he witnessed 89 changes of the lights and during that time, only two buses went through on green. But the number of buses going uphill and held up on a red was 26.

We are surprised that Mr Brooks has now started caring about buses. Because if you are trying to get bus lanes removed on the approach to Whiteladies Road, suddenly caring about their performance in Whiteladies Road itself seems somewhat hypocritical -unless you are simply pretending to care.

Furthermore, if you are going to do a survey on congestion -why do it outside the rush hour. Do it at 08:30 at peak commute and school runs. Doing it after 9am is like saying the M32 doesn't get congested because you drove up it on a sunday morning.

Bad data, failure to root cause analysis and then pretending to care about public transport. We don't do any of these.

Mind you, Mr Brooks' pretence to care about buses doesn't make it through the article:

He will also be calling for a cycle lane to be removed from Westbury Park, where it meets with North Road.
He said the lane was not used by cyclists and simply added to traffic congestion.
Mr Brookes also wants to see the removal of the remaining stretch of bus lane from Westbury Park.

Sorry, but the congestion has other causes. It may seem frustrating to be stuck in a car watching bike lanes and bus lanes that are empty most of the time, but that is because they are working. The buses are not being held up until they merge with the cars on Whiteladies road; the bicycles not held up at all, mostly.



Here then is our dataset: a video from  "wheels on the bike" counting the entire set of vehicles on Whiteladies Road, from the top to the triangle, in 1:45.




Most of Whiteladies road is one lane wide. That is the bottleneck -the carrying capacity of the road. Arguing about bus lanes  up the hill or even switching times of traffic lights is irrelevant when there is a lane traffic jam from Park Row and Park Street stretching all the way up to the Downs.

This is why appearing on papers demanding for things to be removed because they "cause congestion" is dangerous. Someone may one day see this video and say "maybe there are other issues". We know that -it's the surburbanites driving into town. Simon Brookes should recognise this, and keep his mouth shut.

Not participating in the daily mail survelliance infrastructure

The Bristol Traffic Project is, as we have repeatedly declared, a community-sourced police state, using the datacentre infrastructure of our strategic partners Google. Google have published some of their datacentre photographs, for people to look at while reading about how google use atomic clocks to implement causal consistency between locations. The reason that Google's "Spanner" system does this is to ensure that all their computers round the world have a consistent view of "when" they are.

The Bristol Evening Post, with whom we no longer have any strategic relationship, hasn't needed atomic clocks to implement a global-scale consistency model; indeed their articles do not usually implement causal consistency; the notion that actions (e.g burning carbon fuels) have side effects that happen afterwards (climate change). Nor are they eventually Consistent: at no point in the future will the various articles and newspapers of the daily mail portfolio ever make coherent sense.

This is not news; it is not important. Except now, anyone logging in to the thisisbristol web site to add a balanced comment about how Cllr Gollop is going back on his word of being an anti-cycling councillor and now pandering to the lycra-criminals is, if they use a gmail.com email address, asked to sign in with their "google ID".

And when you do that, what rights does Google say the thisisbristol web site -hence the Evening Post and the rest of the Daily Mail portfolio say that they want to have to your account:

TINReg is requesting permission to:

•     Manage your tasks
•     View your email address
•     View basic information about your account
•     Manage your contacts
•     Know who you are on Google

What does that mean? It means the Daily Mail/this-is- set of web sites want to:

Manage your tasks
Have the ability to read and update your todo list in google calendar.

View your email address
See your email address

View basic information about your account
See what your claimed gender and age is.

Manage your contacts
see below

Know who you are on Google
See who you say you are

It's that "Manage your contacts" one that worries us. Because Gmail builds up a list of contacts automatically, based who sends you email and who you email yourself, the google contact list is really "a list of who you communicate with".

That's a really interesting piece of information. Know that and they can start comparing your contacts list with the other people who comment on the paper.  And because they have the contacts list of those commenters, the site could even find common contacts between two commenters  -even in the case where the two commenters do not know each other directly. That is, in graph-theory terms, one degree of separation. Before long they'll have built up a graph of the communications between people in the city, which is pretty valuable stuff. Facebook have that to an extent, but only between people who explicitly declare each other as friends. Even so, that subset of links was enough for Facebook to show that there is usually a four-hop connection between any two people in the US: four degrees of separation. 

If the entire portfolio of the Daily Mail web sites start collecting your email address and those of all you talk to, they stand a good chance of building up a map of who talks to who amongst all people who log in and comment in any of their web sites.

We don't trust the organisation. It's not that we don't agree with their political objectives: the imprisonment of subversives, the stance they take against lycra-criminals, 20 mph speed limits and other potential criminals. It's just that we don't see why they need to go behind our backs and build up a graph of everyone who comments on the paper to achieve those goals. It's the people who don't read the Daily Mail, the Mail on Sunday, the Evening Post, and their other regional counterparts that we need to worry about.

This is what Bristol Traffic is: a police state run by volunteers! There is no need for the DM sites to spy on us -not when we report the anti-motoring activities that the city is up to.

Subversives infiltrate the B.E.P web site

Only last week, did our hero, Bob Bull, self-proclaimed prophet of the Association of British Drivers, spell out the truth about who pays for our roads.

MANY cyclists claim incorrectly that they contribute to road costs. The maths is simple: motorists' contribution more than £40 billion, road expenditure £10 billion per year.
The claim that they are zero rated along with electric cars is naive.
Do they really think the government will give up the £40 billion?
They will probably introduce road pricing which cyclists should pay. With regard to laws many cyclists remove bell and lights and those with them don't use them, it is also the law to stop at red lights but many don't obey that either.
They also ride on the pavement which is also illegal.
Bob Bull

Yet what do we see now, a response by one "Katy Boundary" of Stokes Croft:

THE Post's anti-cyclist letter writer, Bob Bull, again denounces cyclists for not being taxed. I await his denunciation of all class-A VED cars again for taking up a lane despite the fact that they pay no car tax a year.
Does he fume at being stuck behind a Toyota Prius? Does he resent having his right to park taken away by a Fiat 500 occupying a space that would otherwise be free? He should try cycling and learn to be more relaxed.
Every one of us who pays council tax in the city has paid for the roads. Given Mr Bull appears to be a resident of Portishead, it is he who has not paid to use the streets of our city.
Katy Boundary
Stokes Croft

Curiously, we have the original of the letter, which has a slightly different final paragraph:

All roads in Bristol that aren't managed by the Highways Agency are funded by Bristol City Council: every one of us who pays council tax in the city has payed for them. Given the Bob Bull appears to be a resident of Portishead, it is he who has not paid to use the streets of our city. 

Either way, this letter writer is wrong

Not the "moment of madness" defence again

The Former Bristol Evening Post has an article about someone disqualified from driving, caught by the police's ANPR camera in an unmarked car and then going for a sprint round Hanham, nearly hitting an oncoming cyclist and then crashing into bollards.

IT "was a moment of madness"

Some observations

1. There's nothing wrong with nearly hitting an oncoming cyclist, in fact is a common and necessary operation in our cities.
2. Bollards are the cause of many of the accidents in our cities.
3. ANPR camera recognition hooked up to insurance and registration checkers are another example of the surveillance and nanny state at work. That's a bit like those in house baby-intercoms, for anyone  wondering what a "surveillance nanny state is".

Our key observation is this though: that moment of madness defence is getting ever  more boring. 

If you look at its origin, being caught in engaging in consensual sex in a public place -and who doesn't do that from time to time?- what it really means is "it is unfortunate that this particular time  I was caught by a police force who consider what I was doing to be illegal". The probability of being caught with your kit off in public is surprisingly low, based on our experiments, so the M-o-M defence is pretty weak there. We say:  own up and say 'so what?'.

Which is precisely what the driver should have done here. Disqualified, no insurance, unregistered car, driving badly: so what?

As it is the judged has recognised the "moment of madness" defence is wearing thin:

 "This was more than a moment of madness. It was six or seven minutes of extremely bad driving. It's pure luck you didn't injure or kill someone."

Again, six to seven minutes of extremely bad driving where it pure luck you didn't injure or kill someone? That's the school run summarised in a single sentence.

Evening Post bingo: the phrases

The next step in our Evening Post Bingo project is determining which phrases are the most frequent phrases that appear in the sentences.

Here they are, all phrases of three or more words that appear more than once in our set of articles. Abbreviations such as "I'm" have been expanded to I am.

With these results the bingo card generation is trivial -just strip out some duplicates -lots of "I am sure" and then turn the rest into cards for people to play with. Rather than do that ourselves, the readers are instructed to pick five of these, and, when they see the next Evening Post article on cycling, play Bingo!

The first person to win all of their chosen phrases and declare this in the article's comments gets fifteen minutes free parking in the Stokes Croft cycle lane! Outside Ritas!

"on the pavement", 12
"in the city", 7
"the number of", 7
"a lot of", 6
"i am sure", 5
"the pavement and", 5
"number of cyclists", 5
"needs to be", 5
"cyclists in the", 5
"cyclists and pedestrians", 5
"the fact that", 4
"it's illegal to ride", 4
"it is about", 4
"cyclists in the city", 4
"the cycling city", 4
"of the road", 4
"it's illegal to", 4
"of cyclists in", 4
"to be a", 4
"the way of", 4
"through red lights", 4
"in the way", 4
"bristol city council", 4
"it is illegal", 4
"illegal to ride", 4
"the highway code", 3
"has been a", 3
"said it was", 3
"i have been", 3
"with no lights", 3
"all the time", 3
"break the law", 3
"cycling city project", 3
"i have seen", 3
"the rules of the", 3
"the rules of", 3
"first cycling city", 3
"and i am sure", 3
"said: it is", 3
"to cycle on", 3
"part of the", 3
"blind and partially sighted", 3
"even if it", 3
"to have a", 3
"on the pavement and", 3
"the city centre", 3
"between cyclists and", 3
"out of the", 3
"cyclists in bristol", 3
"a good thing", 3
"the number of cyclists", 3
"cyclists should be", 3
"the city council", 3
"on the pavement -", 3
"8 million pounds", 3
"rules of the", 3
"and partially sighted", 3
"cycle on the", 3
"red lights and", 3
"the pavement -", 3
"in the way of", 3
"on the road", 3
"one of these", 3
"blind and partially", 3
"and i am", 3
"to cycle on the", 3

Generated EP article of the day

Fresh from our article factory, comes another one

"It got to the point where we were too afraid to go out. Also, they will congregate in groups to have a natter and in doing so, they take up half or more of the path. THERE has been a lot of banter on these pages between cyclists and drivers. The young, the old, the infirm, the family and pets must all be socially cleansed so that cycling hobbyists can come first. Great emphasis on safety there chaps. Only 15 were caught today, as opposed to the 44 who were spoken to at the same time last week. They stick their fingers up and adopt such a bullying manner with people who challenge them. 8 million pounds was spent on cycling infrastructure, such as 13 miles of off-road cycle tracks including the Festival Way to Ashton Court and a route from the centre to Bristol's northern fringe through St Werburgh's and Lockleaze. I only wish this was the case but it happens on a daily basis. Just as a start, when can we have registration plates on bicycles, so these morons can be identified and prosecuted. "

If there's one fault of the system it is that we need more hand-written articles. We've only got 500 sentences right now, and they tend to get a bit repetitive. Given the Evening Post suffers from the same problem -repetitiveness- we are starting to suspect something even more profound.

1. Has the Daily Mail Group, at some point in the recent past, replaced all their journalists in the Bristol Evening Post with a hundred lines of Python code that can generate new articles based on the entire past archives of the paper?

2. How can we determine if this is or is not the case? The standard "turing test" does not apply, because the BEP article portfolio has always been so limited. What else can we do to determine the secret of how Evening Post articles get generated?

Introducing the Evening Post Article Factory!

When introducing our automated bingo card generator, we mentioned that an ultimate goal was to generate whole articles. This actually turns out easier than expected. Rather than use stochastic Markov Chain modelling to predict the follow-on words from an initially n-tuple of corpus-extracted words, we can just use the sentences extracted from the evening post articles and pick some in a random order, initially making sure not to repeat any. This works so well that we cannot even believe it ourselves:

"There are more motorists than cyclists, it makes perfect sense to just ban them. Dark clothing, no lights and certainly no sense but, incredibly, he shouted at me as if I was at fault for not wearing my night vision goggles. As soon as I moved here I started having issues with cyclists, she told the Evening Post. We all aspire to live in attractive, liveable cities where it is safe to get around by foot and by bike, and so we need to encourage people to take up these modes of transport. There were also a couple of pedestrian crossings where cyclists just didn't stop. How about spending some money on the poor down-trodden motorist. But a bit of tolerance might help matters a little. I don't think there are any particular blackspots in the city for riding on the pavement - the whole city is a blackspot. Motorists don't pay enough attention towards cyclists and they seem to forget that we are very vulnerable. If Bristol is the first cycling city then there needs to be more education out there. "

Even though there's been no attempt at finding some coherence between individual sentences, it turns out not to matter. Look at this one. You could get this as a letter in the evening post without even bothering to do any proof-reading:

"Do all this and we can all be friends. Cyclists going on the pavement is really quite dangerous. ). Cyclists shouldn't expect respect from motorists if they can't even be bothered to wait for the lights to go green before launching themselves forward. I have yet to hear of a cyclist that rides according to the law. It's illegal to ride without a helmet and high visibility clothes. The lad was without lights or reflective clothing, and clearly also a responsible adult to look after him. Not so much hug a hoodie but cuddle a cyclist perhaps. And what would have ensued had he collided with me. Whatever happened to the old 'Be safe, be seen' advertising campaign. "

And again.

'Cyclists should observe the highway code just as motorists do. I have yet to hear of a cyclist that rides according to the law. If a driver hit him off his bike they would no doubt get charged with driving with undue care and attention. Concerned residents made their points to MPs from across the region at a meeting of the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB). Cyclists need to realise that the road is for motorists and cyclists and the pavement is for pedestrians. I realise not all cyclists behave like this, just the vast majority, especially the Lycra ones who think they are as wide as cars. There desperately needs to be something shown on TV perhaps to illustrate these dangers. Bristol cyclists still running red lights. I personally think a Cyclist free week would be far more beneficial. We are working with the police to try and overcome this problem. '

This is transformational. We can use the past works of the Evening Post article and letter writers to actually render themselves obsolete. It takes 17 milliseconds to generate one of these articles on a four year old laptop, which means that five million articles can be pushed out every single day. The evening post web site could be set up to generate one every time a visitor hit "reload" on the anti-cycling page. Then, once the comment generator was hooked up to generate comments from the collected comment articles, we could go on to simulate an entire Evening Post comment argument. Finally, the same code could be hooked up the Ashton Value stadium dataset and the whole town green/football stadium battle could be fought to the death between two competing servers. Like skynet only more provincial.

To close, then, with a fifteen sentence article:

"That is very dangerous because you expect to be able to cross safely without watching out. 20 billion pounds of damage to business is caused by traffic jams and cyclists are the main cause. The old Bristol to Bath railway track, Leigh Woods, the Avon Walkway and Ashton Court estate have all been badly scarred by cycling louts as they trash pedestrian paths making them fit only for cyclists, or gouge cycle tracks through the woodland for their hobby. Sometimes this has been where small children are present or when people are walking their dogs. Bodywork repair costs a lot these days. Every single one I see cuts through red lights like a knife through butter. They give me the impression that it is only them on the track and seem blissfully unaware of the fact that there are other 'freelance' cyclists and pedestrians who have just as much right as they have. Mr Drummond said the police seemed to turn a blind eye to cyclists on the pavements, too. It's illegal to ride without a helmet and high visibility clothes. Then, as I reached my destination another cyclist ignored the rules of the roundabout and pulled out straight in front of me. If something isn't done soon, I am afraid there is going to be a terrible, terrible accident. I do think that I will get hit at some point, especially if the number of cyclists in the city keeps increasing. We won't be coming again. I have nothing against cyclists and if I could see properly I would be one, but I would like to think I would be a considerate cyclist. "

Bristol will never be the same again

Evening Post bingo: the keywords

Last week we introduced Evening Post Bingo.

In a comment, someone called Downfader announced that they had the same idea -presumably from our initial proposal the week before- and had produced some cards.

Well, we appreciate the artwork, but note that Downfader's effort shows both selection bias in the form of the writer, and doesn't scale to working with other newspapers or article types.

Being a data-centric company, along with strategic partners like Google and Facebook, we have designed a system that will scale. The process is straightforward -use the articles on the evening post web site which we have already covered as the source of our content -and have machines to the heavy lifting for us.This will not only aid other regions, but apply just as well to the Ashton Gate and Bristol Mayor discussions.

While the sentence/phrase extraction process is underway, here is the initial output -the entire list of words in the Evening Post cycling article corpus, sorted by frequency. Everything is in lower case, so the 124 instances of "i" really translate to "I", and presumably indicate that an opinion is about to appear.

Cleanup is incomplete, apostrophes aren't being stripped of the ends of works, singular and plurals aren't being merged. Keeping the apostrophes in provides extra information, as it usually implies some kind of wittiness from the writer, like 'sui-cyclists' and 'supervision'. This actually makes us feel sorry for these letter writers, as their humour is clearly limited. Once our automated-evening-post-article-generator is completed they can entertain their friends with their humour, rather than inflict it on the rest of us.

For the reader's enjoyment then, the initial output of the Bristol Traffic mine-the-evening post Bingo card and Letter Generating system:-

the, 420
to, 267
and, 228
a, 222
of, 166
cyclists, 135
in, 127
i, 124
on, 107
is, 89
for, 78
they, 77
that, 75
it, 74
as, 71
are, 68
have, 64
cycling, 61
be, 60
was, 53
with, 53
we, 51
not, 50
who, 49
bristol, 49
but, 48
this, 47
city, 46
by, 46
at, 42
all, 42
road, 40
or, 38
lights, 36
there, 35
people, 34
pedestrians, 34
he, 34
has, 32
from, 32
their, 31
do, 29
cycle, 29
were, 29
would, 28
cyclist, 28
been, 27
one, 27
more, 27
if, 26
out, 26
should, 26
them, 25
about, 25
-, 24
so, 24
you, 24
me, 23
just, 23
pavement, 23
way, 22
my, 20
said, 20
an, 20
some, 19
time, 19
car, 18
council, 18
motorists, 18
police, 18
said:, 18
get, 18
these, 18
no, 17
when, 17
can, 17
ride, 17
will, 17
had, 16
bike, 15
think, 15
pounds, 15
very, 15
see, 15
illegal, 15
could, 15
how, 14
law, 14
say, 14
where, 14
many, 14
number, 14
also, 14
need, 14
dangerous, 14
like, 14
every, 13
pavements, 13
down, 13
than, 13
only, 13
traffic, 13
through, 13
up, 13
red, 13
other, 13
new, 12
same, 12
week, 12
last, 12
our, 12
it's, 12
mr, 11
project, 11
make, 11
right, 11
going, 11
being, 11
his, 11
use, 11
which, 11
even, 10
then, 10
good, 10
seen, 10
cars, 10
any, 10
pay, 10
without, 10
am, 10
us, 10
another, 9
years, 9
million, 9
take, 9
sure, 9
between, 9
around, 9
children, 9
what, 9
don't, 9
safety, 9
money, 9
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go, 9
tax, 9
must, 8
over, 8
drummond, 8
bikes, 8
still, 8
blind, 8
come, 8
using, 8
feel, 8
him, 8
towards, 8
hit, 8
centre, 8
group, 8
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i'm, 7
old, 7
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laws, 7
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helmet, 7
your, 7
her, 7
lot, 7
everyone, 7
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spent, 7
run, 7
safer, 7
something, 7
she, 7
off, 7
street, 6
campaign, 6
travel, 6
safe, 6
too, 6
target, 6
against, 6
yet, 6
post, 6
says, 6
change, 6
may, 6
year, 6
enough, 6
across, 6
those, 6
drivers, 6
past, 6
needs, 6
that's, 6
done, 6
fine, 6
bristol's, 6
often, 6
users, 6
ago, 6
young, 6
few, 6
high, 6
light, 6
doing, 6
fact, 6
riding, 6
respect, 6
because, 6
transport, 6
under, 5
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want, 5
after, 5
break, 5
each, 5
gloucester, 5
rogers, 5
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much, 5
couple, 5
night, 5
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st, 5
half, 5
now, 5
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thing, 5
11, 5
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city's, 5
public, 5
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eye, 5
two, 5
coming, 5
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its, 5
evening, 5
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issue, 5
part, 5
paths, 5
8, 5
please, 5
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back, 5
into, 5
day, 5
why, 5
problem, 5
know, 5
does, 5
stay, 5
own, 5
three, 5
partially, 5
whether, 5
education, 5
accidents, 5
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path, 4
work, 4
keep, 4
turn, 4
fit, 4
little, 4
manner, 4
stop, 4
considerate, 4
bad, 4
protect, 4
near, 4
left, 4
possible, 4
cooper, 4
sighted, 4
such, 4
maybe, 4
realise, 4
crossings, 4
anyone, 4
black, 4
morning, 4
outside, 4
period, 4
dangers, 4
myself, 4
driver, 4
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start, 4
trying, 4
again, 4
small, 4
pass, 4
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22, 4
might, 4
someone, 4
insurance, 4
really, 4
officers, 4
chairman, 4
idiots, 4
both, 4
point, 4
else, 4
themselves, 4
once, 4
others, 4
danger, 4
majority, 4
move, 4
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south, 4
gear, 4
let's, 4
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well, 4
add, 4
avoid, 4
pressure, 4
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roads, 4
authority, 4
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friends, 4
understand, 4
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i'd, 3
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wrong, 3
regularly, 3
driving, 3
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free, 3
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responsible, 3
regular, 3
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result, 3
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months, 3
support, 3
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15, 3
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wheels, 3
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situation, 3
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legal, 3
rush, 3
wife, 3
rogue, 3
mps, 3
large, 3
streets, 3
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experience, 3
action, 3
sustrans, 3
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sense, 3
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compulsory, 3
help, 3
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15am, 3
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7, 3
highway, 3
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bishopston, 3
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proper, 3
home, 3
obey, 3
count, 3
wish, 3
limited, 2
aim, 2
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hospital, 2
call, 2
aware, 2
adult, 2
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green, 2
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better, 2
tourist, 2
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days, 2
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top, 2
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matter, 2
mine, 2
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14, 2
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tolerance, 2
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here, 2
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catch, 2
rnib, 2
motorist, 2
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lorry, 2
evidence, 2
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boy, 2
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law-abiding, 2
country's, 2
visit, 2
today, 2
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spot, 2
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man, 2
werburgh's, 2
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10, 2
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3000, 2
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reflective, 2
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4, 2
read, 2
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749, 2
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24, 2
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essential, 2
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per, 2
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anything, 2
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boys, 2
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2008, 2
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33000, 2
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jon, 2
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five, 2
walkway, 2
martin, 2
operation, 2
leader, 2
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letters, 2
registration, 2
biggest, 2
gain, 2
squeeze, 2
incredibly, 2
rule, 2
raining, 1
sleek, 1
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woods, 1
hate, 1
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teaching, 1
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risk, 1
regional, 1
car-free, 1
vast, 1
tickets, 1
amenities/green, 1
wednesday, 1
enforce, 1
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convenience, 1
'solution', 1
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force, 1
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phones, 1
horn, 1
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pace, 1
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spokesman, 1
bonuses, 1
absolute, 1
better-spent, 1
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protection, 1
kids, 1
daughter, 1
jams, 1
oxford, 1
study, 1
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julie, 1
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spoke, 1
army, 1
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crossbar, 1
warm, 1
menaced, 1
hurl, 1
90, 1
ward, 1
94, 1
join, 1
cuddle, 1
ms, 1
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horfield, 1
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russell, 1
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sachs', 1
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144, 1
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26, 1
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cheltenham, 1
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mood, 1
confirm, 1
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knife, 1
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seconds, 1
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throw, 1
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hey, 1
low, 1
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october, 1
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twerp, 1
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shelter, 1
annes, 1
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month, 1
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tv, 1
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colossal, 1
zero, 1
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section, 1
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pick, 1
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injure, 1
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6, 1
megaphone, 1
door, 1
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owners, 1
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doom, 1
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bpa2011@live, 1
minutes, 1
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49, 1
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