Don't worry Richard Eddy: there's still Colston Mini Mart

Cllr Richard Eddy is apparently refusing to visit Colston Hall, once it's no longer named after someone who'd be on trial for Crimes against Humanity were they to attempt the same business today.



Because yes, it's named after Bristol's most important slave trader, and it's something the city should recognise is an affront to the rest of the country. Naming a prestigious building after a slaver may have been considered socially acceptable in the Victorian era, but we've moved on: time for the city to. That includes the two Colston Schools, the various roads, an ugly 1970s tower block and other bloodstains round the city.

What the renaming has shown up is how controversial the topic still is: from polls in the evening post, to articles in the "foreign-interference in the UK election national press", condemning "political correctness" for this historical revisionism. Well, yes, celebrating slavery is considered "politically incorrect" these days.

It's interesting what it's thrown up through, not just the view of it as a left-wing/right-wing split, but it can also be seen as a Bristolian vs "newcomer" split, with "Bristolian, born and bred" being a code-phrase for "not from London". Well, it's easy for people to feel defensive, but really changing the name of the hall isn't an attack on Bristol, it's moving the city on. Or, as The Bristolian notes: nobody has ever cared about what happens to parts of the city that aren't associated with it rulers, be it schools across the city, the river the M32 was built over, or any bit of greenery that doesn't have the word "Clifton" in its title or address. For people who want to know a bit more about these topics, consider the Bristol Radical History group.

What about Richard Eddy? Is he going to suddenly discover that alongside the history of Bristol's elite, there's the history of Bristol's residents, from the miners of Bedminster to the striking bus drivers of 1960s St Pauls? Unlikely. Instead he's just chosen to be ever excluded from the building-formerly-known-as-Colston-Hall.

We have some good news here: Colston Mini Mart still stands strong against this wave of political correctness

People don't appreciate this, but Colston Mini Mart has an important role to play in the city. It is the nearest place to the Bristol Heart Institute where you can buy cigarettes. You don't appreciate this until you're stuck in there for a week, the same wrist band giving you a wifi password marking you out as someone the door staff won't let out. You're reduced to texting friends and family to visit, bringing up with them a double latte from Costa and a pack of silk cuts. Then you can sneak out after hours onto the balcony and have a quick cigarette while sharing anecdotes of heart bypasses. Nothing to smoke and the remains of your life may be longer, but it will be more painful.



That's what we all have to look forward too. All that we get to choose is: do we get anything from the Colston Mini Mark on the way out. Here then, Richard Eddy will be able to go out with the rest of the city.

The spectator discovers sectarian Bristol

Once every 18 months, the Spectator magazine covers Bristol with an article. This is something we residents we have on our "things to look forward to" list somewhere between "Shopping in Asda Bemmy on a Saturday" and "getting stuck on the M4 because there's a rugby match scheduled to start in Cardiff soon".

This year we are blessed with many opportunities to get stuck on the M4. We are also graced with the latest spectator article, Bristol, the European capital of green nannying and bureaucracy.

Here are the opening three paragraphs:

I am stuck behind a big yellow recycling lorry in Bristol, which this year became the UK’s first European Green Capital. It is collecting food waste from the special brown bins we have to use, and the stench is horrendous. Behind me are about another dozen cars and, sad to say, I fear that not all of them have turned off their idling engines.  

Squadrons of recycling vehicles invade every day, blocking our narrow Victorian streets and causing misery and mayhem — starting with the school run: ‘Dad! I’m going to be marked down for a “late” again!’ ‘Sorry son, but these teabags mustn’t be allowed to rot in landfill. And besides, we have our city’s green status to consider!’ 

I am not against recycling — just the extreme methodology the city has adopted. Bristol is now so over-the-top with it all that bin day involves five or more different bins collected by three separate diesel–powered lorries. And I have a theory about why these mobile compost heaps insist on working through the morning rush hour: it is all about our city’s war on the car.

Mr Miserable then actually goes on to make the point that Bristol has gone from being the city of ganja and Trip-hop to one of painted road regulations, blaming "green city europe" for it. Well, he may have a point. Certainly there is a visible split between those people who were happy with "The way thing were" and the progressives,. The "way things were" brigade are still sulking over the (last) rework of The Centre, the loss of the rickety flyover, and probably even the loss of the road over College Green. Notice how roads are the key source of resentment. Similarly the progressives are full of hope that with an RPZ and 20 mph limit all those people sulking about stolen roundabouts will suddenly choose to cycle happily to work.  Well, the sulkers won't be doing that out of ideological reasons, even if their GP says they need to do it for their emergent Coronary Heart Disease and Type II Diabetes.

Ironically, both groups have lots in common: they all think Bristol being "european green city" is taking the piss, and that Metrobus is a disaster in the making. Nobody anywhere can be found to defend Metrobus except bus companies, and the engineers in WoEP who find designing continuous bike routes too boring to bother with.

Anyway, on a standard of the Spectator's usual coverage, no worse than usual, and it doesn't laugh at us rural folk who live outside the Home Counties.

What is irritating though, is the whole theme of those quoted paragraphs. He has spent a fifth of his article citing being stuck behind a bin van on the school run with the other parents as evidence for the council's "war on the car". That's it: stuck behind a bin van.

Now, nobody likes being stuck behind the rubbish or recycling lorries, but here is a key aspect of them:

they come on the same day every week

Admittedly, whether it's a brown and recycle week or a black-bins-too week is a mystery to all, but that is addressed, as everyone does, by sticking them all out on the street. Any that don't get collected can be left there for the following week. Because, as noted, they will be back exactly seven days later, except around Christmas and New Year -but there, as a gift to the parents, the council allows them to take off three weeks worth of school run, so the schedule is irrelevant.

Because bin day is so regular, you soon learn which days the lorries come out on the rat-runs between your home and school, which means remembering the 1-2 days a week when you have kick your child out of bed a bit earlier and say "we need to go to school now, get up you lazy bastard".

But no, clearly Anthony Whitehead never remembers to do this on the morning after he (hopefully) helped stick the bins out. Which implies its more a war on "lazy and forgetful parents".

Having failed to learn a useful strategy for avoiding being late one day a week "get out of the door 10 minutes early on bin day", he is instead stuck in a line of cars trying to compose his magazine article.

This is where he makes his second fatal mistake. At the moment he realised that he was blocked in, and that he wasn't going to get the child to school in time, instead of foaming off at the council or writing an article for the Spectator, he should have put the handbrake on, turned round to the child and said "get out of the car and walk from here".

Because that is the real split in the city; those who drive their kids to school and those who don't. For a parent driving their child in to suddenly say "get out and walk" is as unthinkable as anyone who works in Clifton using public transport to get there.

Yet still the council tries to force families to walk their kids to school. And it's a war that's been going on for decades

Here is a shocking video showing hordes of children forced to walk to school -even those whose parents are important and own more than one car.



Listen to their happy laughs over the birdsong! Look to how their irresponsible parents let them scoot ahead to the next junction, rather than holding them tightly by the hand on the dangerous journey from the front door to the back seat of their Euro-6 certified crossover SUV. Note the road closures from Ninetree Hill to Freemantle Square, and the later one just before Colston School -and see how they have killed off the traffic-flow-enhancing through traffic. Observe the near-complete lack of traffic apart from a white builder's van, en route to a wage-earning job, one car going up Cotham Brow and a bus.. Note specifically, the presence of RPZ paintwork in the Kingsdown and Cotham North zones are preventing any of the workers Bristol depends on from driving round in circles until they can see a free corner to park on.

All these children are being deprived of the opportunity to snapchat their friends from the back of Crossover SUVs stuck behind bin lorries! All their parents are deprived the opportunity to show off the size and ostentatiousness of their land-barges, hence provide any form of visible wealth to indicate the social status of their offspring! You can't see who is poor and who can afford a car! And long term -these children will grow up as yet unable to grasp the core tenant of Bristol: you need a car to get on.

Yes but who will think of the children? (part 1)

Say what you like about Tank Commander "Wolfie" Miles and his right-to-commute-to-work campaigners, call them "lost in time" or "selfish and missing Clifton's underlying issues" -they are good at PR.

They've realise that demanding the right to park outside the estate agent where you work, where you can charge a premium of thousands of pounds for any form of guaranteed parking, makes you look hypocritical. So instead they've found a commuter group that they can call on: school teachers.

The best one yet is how the introduction of an RPZ will force a teacher in Colston Primary School to resign as she'll have nowhere near to park after 45 minutes driving from Bath.

We've covered Colston Primary before, showing our datasets go back years, and can so place things in a historical context. We also know that the school is already in the CM zone, so can do before and after footage. So over today past the traffic jam chaos that was the st michael's hill school run jam, and what do we see -and how does it compare with the equivalent photos from 2009.

Before: Parked cars provide exciting things for small children too look at





After: empty crossing with good visibility



Before: congested dropoff zone outside the school, with the only place for parents to pull over the keep clear zone

:

After: emptiness. Those parents do doing dropoff can do it without going on the yellow lines -and so risk earning a ticket.
 

This carries on up the hill -where you can see the small kid scootering up and down while waiting for a parent with a push chair to catch up.





Finally, rotate pi radians  from the first photo -that's 180 degrees to people that stopped doing maths at 16 and don't understand data science- and what do you see behind the pleasant park with a play area where the younger brothers and sister of the colston primary age kids are playing on their scooters?

A train station.



Colston's Primary is three minutes walk from the Severn Beach line, which has a regular service to and from Templemeads -it takes 12 minutes, costs 1 pound 60 or thereabouts return, and hooks in to the trains to bath. If you do make the choice to live in Bath and commute into Bristol, this school is one of the few places where you can actually do it by train conveniently.

Whereas the parents with they schoolkids? They get a no-worry area where they can walk their kids to school, without fearing for the kids running ahead, without having to cross roads with zero visibility -roads congested with cars driving round in circles waiting for a space freed up by a resident.

This gives them a low stress stretch of the journey, which lasts until they get to the No-RPZ areas, such as Montpelier




That's why we think this sob-story is just that: something dredged up by tank command to make a point, but which doesn't hold up to scrutiny

1. Colston's primary is served by both a train system 3-5 minutes walk away
2. It's 15 minutes walk from the central bus station, where buses go to bath
3. The primary users of the school -the families nearby- benefit, where they are walking, driving or cycling their kids there.
4. There's nowhere that says it is compulsory for schoolteachers to live in bath

Central Bath has been nothing but RPZ for ages -anyone who lives in Cotham and who works in Bath isn't going to find any free parking except out past Victoria Park or other places more than half an hour's walk from the centre.

If the teacher lives in central Bath, she's going to have an RPZ permit on her own car. If she lives out of the core, well, she'd be just as inconvenienced teaching at a school in Bath as she would be in Bristol, so doesn't make a defensible case for the Tooting Clifton Popular Front.

Anti-RPZ myth: an RPZ makes the school run harder

With years of data, Bristol Traffic can go back in time and look at problems before the RPZ was rolled out -and compare it with today. This is why when people say "RPZ makes school runs worse", we have to say "you are joking, right?"

The RPZ will make the school run easier, whether it is by car, foot or even bicycle.
Here are some reference points as to the existing problem.

Cotham Road, where the sole drop-off point free on a weekday was a bus-only area where you would sporadically get ticketed.



Parents who drove had no option to park anywhere else -as there wasn't anywhere else. Ticketing was
always a risk -and with only room for four cars, contention with other parents. When the buses turned up -they'd double park, selfishly, not only blocking you in, but creating traffic jams inconveniencing other school runners.

T
Colston Primary School, where the only parking spaces were on the corners -where your car could get scratched by push chairs.


There was that and the yellow "keep free" area. As everyone knows, the keep free area means "keep free for parents", but now the council has a CCTV car doing drivebys, you can't use them for that.

That was before. Now look at exactly the same corner, now that the RPZ has been rolled out


So much space for dropoff and pickup, that those parents who walk or cycle don't give you a hard time for driving to school.

In the mornings, the RPZ restrictions only kick in at 09:00. As residents leave, their spaces where historically taken up by commuters. As that no longer happens, that frees up spaces for parents to park.
When coupled with the fact that there is now parking near their houses, even people who live in the city without a driveway can take their kids to school and get home again. Nobody should have any excuse for not driving their children to school




In the afternoons, those spaces are still there for pickup. Yes, the zone is still live, but you get 15 minutes of free parking (soon to be 30). No doubt somebody will say "only 15 minutes of parking before you get a ticket" -but you never even used to get that 15 minutes, as there was never anywhere to park where you weren't at risk of ticketing. And look at how much space there is -you don't have to worry about not finding a space.

As well as the extra parking spaces, morning and night, here are some other benefits

1. A reduction in commuter traffic will reduce congestion during peak am school run times.
2. The bicyclists can keep out the way when you are in a rush.
3. No double parked parents by other schools you need to get past en route to your children's.
4.  

Together, this should reduce journey times and parental stress, reducing redland-mum incidents,  where a "redland mum" is defined as: anyone who is prepared to kill or inure anyone else in the city if the alternative is to drop their kids off at school late.

Again, then, the fact that the RPZ will improve life for residents trying to drive round the city -here the essential school run- that it is leading us to suspect that the anti-RPZ campaigners are in fact cyclists who are trying to keep driving round the city so miserable that people will want to cycle instead.

We will resist the tyranny of the bike lobby! We need to embrace the Resident Parking Zones for what they really are: Resident Driving Zones.

Colston School declares more war on parents

No sooner had we issued a call for more low-quality pictures than one reaches our inbox from "M", showing how Colston's Primary School is persecuting parents.

It's bad enough they have bicycle parking in the playground, now they have a large sign in front of the keep clear zone.

Welcome to Colston's Primary School

Around our school please drive safely

DROP THE 'DROP OFF' HABIT

The yellow lines protect our children. Stay off them!

Irresponsible parking endangers our

children's lives and is reported to the police.

Ignoring the fact that when you push your child out the door while keeping the engine on in neutral and not even bothering to put the handbrake on isn't technically parking -just unloading -it is needless persecution.

We look back fondly on how it used to be, when small children could get views of motor cars that they could aspire to own in later years.

It was only back in 2008 that we started documenting our city, and today we must mourn the many parking spaces removed for build-outs and bike parking -and now, even School Keep Clear zones are taken from us.

Montpelier: is our work done?

Youtube referred us to this (nonembeddable) video of an eight year old doing the school run by bicycle from York Road to Colston Primary School.

01:32 P232YEU. Seen them.
03:46 Eagle Coaches coach waiting in the bus lane. Seen them.
04:45 Family walking across the road. Seen them too.

When even independent videos include content that we already have on our web site, we can conclude that our attempts to build a mass-surveillance infrastructure out of google's datacentre facilities and community contributions are successful. At least for Montpelier, Stokes Croft, Cheltenham Road and bits nearby.

Does this mean it is time to retire: Our work is done? Maybe. But first, time to visit some other parts of the city.

Welcome to Clifton Week at Bristol Traffic!

the luxury school run

We are sent an email by "Mike" showing the proper way to get the kids to school, here with a stretch limo outside Colstons Primary School on, what, Cotham Grove

The submitter of this photograph seems a bit, well, unhappy about the incident, and we can see why: a vehicle like this can take up the entire school keep clear area, so stopping other parents doing their dropoffs.

However, people need to recognise the hard truth: taking the kids to school in the family 4x4 is, well, common. Twenty-five years ago, yes, most kids walked to school and those that got driven were taken there in the mini metro, but times have moved on. From the metro, to the VW polo, then the VW Golf becomes car #2, now it's one of the little Audi or BMWs, while family car #1 has grown up from an estate to something with more status. Nothing has more status than a stretch limo -which CN55PZS clearly is.

Jealousy, that's what the other parents are suffering from.

Stretch Limo school runs: you saw it here first!

Colston Primary School

We drove round to Colston School to see how it is adapting to the new build-out regime. Looks like they make it easier to turn into the school parking zone. Note, sadly, that someone on a bicycle has nearly missed a pedestrian forced into the road by the large number of schoolkids choosing to walk!

This school has special parent parking zones on both sides of the road, enabling dropoff for parents heading in either direction, such as those in WX02KMY and VN09WOX.

Apparently some legal process will eventually mean these zones will be enforced, but until then, if you pay your road tax: use the spaces

Schoolkid build-outs for Colston Primary School

This area round Colston Primary school has a double role. It's commuter parking par-excellence, and its somewhere for parents to drive their kids to school, either here or Cotham School slightly up the hill. Anyone doing the school-run there knows that Cotham Park North is the turnoff to take.

Yet now, we see buildouts going in, buildouts with bollards planned. This is the price of having the city's Councillor for Walking the locally elected representative.

There was a perfectly good "switch off your engines while waiting" sign up by the school-keep-clear dropoff zone, and now what? More lines, more signs, more bollards

For the parents, the one redeeming feature is that the final draft resident parking zones are up, and this road is in it. If there is only one resident parked here on a Saturday, we can assume that if commuters cannot park here on a weekday, there will be plenty of space for short-stay dropoffs.

Indeed, we suspect the anti-schoolrun developments at Colston's are primarily to push all those parents in favour of resident parking, to split the drivers up into residents, commuters and school-runners, so stop us unifying against an anti car council.

Resisting change at Colston School

This is Cotham Park Grove from the South, some cars making it a bit tight to enter and exit the junction.

Here is the road during term time, some cars are quite clearly parked right over the corner. While this makes it tricky for parents with push chairs to pull out, it does at least ensure that on the road itself there are never two lanes of traffic at a time, a vehicle is either exiting or entering the system. The school-keep-clear zone provides a pull-over point, while the zebra zig zags are good for coaches.

So what? People ask. Ahh, this is where the power struggle between those in the council traffic planning department, where those few engineers who are still fighting against the anti-car elected councillors, are managing to represent the interests of us car drivers against those parents who dare to walk to school.

Those parents have been complaining that the council should act on this, and they are doing so, but managing to do this in a way that still retains benefits for parents coming in by car

• The school will have their school-keep-clear zone made enforcable
• There will be some disabled parking across from this
• The corners will be double yellow lined to mean "no parking"
• A bit of redland grove will have double yellow lines to mean "drop your kids off here"

Those last two points are the most interesting. A stretch of redland grove will be double yellow lined to say "no commuters, just parents". Which is handy, though of course if the railway line was less expensive to take an adult and a child up from Monty to Redland, perhaps less needed. But the corners will also be double-yellowed, to discourage commuters and parents from using it.

Here, from an attempt to provide a safe route to school, the plan fails. We have evidence from Clifton and Cotham that says "all double yellow lines do by schools is provide a guaranteed place for parents to park", while it doesn't encourage driving to school, it certainly doesn't discourage it. Any parent that turns up hoping to use the two car lengths of allocated space on Redland Grove is going to have a problem when they turn up and discover two other parents there. What are they going to do? That's right, they will use the other allocated spaces -the corners. These will have the same markings "yellow lines" on them, and so will be equally legitimate. Until those once-a-term days when Bristol Parking Services turn up, and you have to argue your case.

If, by some miracle of consideration these corners aren't occupied by parents, and are in fact kept free, the parents who walk are left with a problem. whereas historically the road was narrowed by parked cars, making it one lane wide, is entrance will be two vehicles wide, making it harder to cross safely. This will discourage them from walking, so stop them getting in the way of tax-paying parents.

We dropped a note to Cllr Neil Harrison, who is one of those safe-walk-to-school subversives we are keeping an eye on, to make sure he wasn't planning to surprise us.

Did the engineers look at having some build-outs on the corner instead, with enough bollards to keep cars off them? This would keep the road one vehicle wide at the junction, yet offer good visibillity to parents trying to get across.

With yellow lines, except on the two days a term when they are
enforced, they are going to be a parents-only parking area.

His reply was informative

We did talk about this, but his view was that it would create dangerous traffic tailbacks around the corner. 

You see that? The traffic engineer is doing his best for us, the car drivers. If they had added any form of build out, the effect would have been exactly the same as if there were parked cars on the corner, which is what you see every single weekday. Buildouts would not create any more tailbacks than normal, yet they would take away two or more parking spaces away from us commuters and parents.

We thank this anonymous engineer, and close the posting with a photo to show that we know he was making things up when he said that build-outs would create tailbacks, but that the councillors don't. 

Can we close by saying that given the parents are off school, we do have an opportunity to keep the plans as they are. Email alan.berridge at bristol.gov.uk on the subject of the consultation 09TM013/ACB/WH, to make your views known (cc: Neil.Harrison at bristol.gov.uk ). Remember, you have until September 8th, and some walking parents may discover the plans before then, so its important to push for parking spaces over build outs.

Update 15:30 august 28, Neil H now says

Consultation done now at request of parents Travel Action Group, all of whom are walkers and cyclists. They want to try to get works done by start of year. They devised the planned works thenselves. Build outs now planned too. Some reason why single yellows not suitable - can't remember.

Back to School

Bristol City Council appear to be re-educating their white van drivers and delivery supply chain.

By sending them back to school.

They appear to have reserved some parking spaces for them!

More Hill work

This is why fixed speed bikes are still a rarity in the city: its hilly, and after a while you seem to end up with small children attached to bits of your bicycle.

This particular cyclist is doing the school run from Montpelier to Cotham by way of Nugent Hill, and claims to be breaking the proposed 20 mph speed limit in the process.

We will reassure this cyclist that the proposed zones will not affect his journey time. Nugent Hill is not in any proposed 20 mph speed zone. Furthermore, looking at the photograph's metadata in the appropriate image editor shows that this photograph was taken on a Panasonic camera with a 100 ISO "film", F3.3 and a 1/50 shutter speed, yet the image of the bicycle is not blurred. We estimate the uphill speed to be below 12 mph, possibly below 8 mph, and therefore well within range. Please work on you and your children's hill climbing ability before claiming that you will break the speed limits on the way to school.

Colston's Primary School

The scooter/bike park is closed, leaving only the school dropoff zones on both sides of the road leading to the entrance. Yet they are empty? Strange.

There are some parents, walking around. A few are waiting at the corner to find out who has parked their Audi TT right on the corner, so making it harder for push chairs to get across.

But look, there is room to get the small child in the push chair across, and he seems really excited to be that close to a car. Small kids love cars -right up there with Bob the Builder and The Shiny Show as valuable role models.

Rather than complaining about the car DG57NSV, these parents need to recognise their effective position in society. By choosing to push their kids to school, to walk or to scoot, they are clearly people with time on their hands. They are clearly not people rushing off to a prestigious job, or they'd be driving past and pushing their kids out on the zebra crossing without even slowing down.

Instead they are walking round the city, enjoying the sunny day, probably heading to someone's house for a coffee and some chit chat. They are not going to contribute to the economy, either by engaging in productive labour or active consumption. They aren't even going to bring petrol revenue to central government by driving. They are non-participants in the economic well-being and growth of the city. As such, its right to prioritise them less than car drivers, who clearly are important, busy, in a rush and when not working hard, paying central government a hefty amount per mile for the right to park where they like in this city.

Pedestrians should give way to cars at all times, and stop complaining.

Colston School: parents not getting the message

Here we have some mothers pushing kids home from Colston's school, the one that has now forbidden bikes and scooters.

Clearly the purpose of the banning was to make it easier for the school run by car, yet here we see two families recklessly blocking Richmond Road to passing cars. How much more selfish can they get?

Cycle City Bristol: the school effort

Colston's Primary School is one of the schools to be proud of when it comes to cycle parking. There is a little courtyard for kids to drop off their scooters and bikes, one that is inside the playground -yet separated by a low wall- so that kids can scoot or cycle in to school, leave their transport safely and have a nice day at school while their parents walk on to work or back home. Lots of parents even help push their sprogs up the hill from Montpelier, which is a wonderful effort.

Except not this term.

As the sign says "please do not bring them to school"

There is no longer any parking facility in the school, so the kids have been told to stop cycling in.

Bristol: a cycling city