Helmets, hi-viz and tax for pedestrians.

In amongst the various ePetitions for making parking outside someone's house illegal, and for the many cyclist ones, making cyclist pay for the road, we are the only organisation to campaign for pedestrians to be better equipped for our cities. Cutting and pasting from someone else's proposal, we have one of our own.

In our petition., we say

Other road users have to pass tests to prove they are competent to operate a vehicle on the public highway. Pedestrians however are at the most risk and from any age they can walk around without any training, they are often wearing ipods and flout the rules of the roads e.g not stopping at traffic lights and crossing the road. I propose that all pedestrians must undertake training and be insured before riding on the road to protect themselves and others. They should wear hi-viz clothing and have helmets for their own safety

Some people will think we are taking the piss or something but not so: it's for their own safety.

Look at this scene from the Stokes Croft/Ashley Road junction.

A pedestrian crossing the road nearly gets hit by a taxi waiting for the lights to change in the middle of their road -past the ASL and not blocking it, we note. This taxi that manages to turn in front of the oncoming traffic by putting their foot down as soon as the lights go red & orange -and were it not for the pedestrian, would be on their way safely sprinting down the 20mph road to east Bristol.

Look at that pedestrian

1. Dark clothing, hard to spot: no hi-viz anywhere
2. No helmet.
3. No insurance/tax disk.
4. Probably no third party liability for damage caused to the front of cars.
5. Moving really slowly.

The taxi driver narrowly manages to avoid running them over as he accelerates down Ashley Road, and has to sound his horn to make them move faster. The tax-dodger seems a bit upset by this.

Stop this menace to our roads!

Everyone should sign our petition now! We have three signatures already!

Bank holiday bumper (to bumper) quiz.

Stuck in a 4x4 deadlock down a country lane in Cornwall and lacking the reversing skills to escape? Waiting at a train station for a train that has vanished from the timetable without a trace? Sitting in a lay-by with a derailleur that has decided to collapse into your rear spokes miles from shelter in the glorious English summer?

Why not pass the time with the Bristol Traffic bank holiday quiz. Answers on a postcard to the usual address.

1. When is a school not a school?
2. When is a car not a car? ( Clue: BMW SN9BMX is giving you a hint in the photos below. )

2. How many traffic lights and pedestrian crossings can you have the luxury of waiting at if you are arriving at Bristol's new shopping centre Cabot Circus on foot? (Extra points if you know how many pedestrian footbridges there used to be before the new layout.)

3. How many glass covered bridges to guide you swiftly from the new car park if you arrive at Cabot Circus by car?

4. True or False. All you need for safe cyling is separate cycle paths. Cycle paths that are separated from motor traffic by a barrier are guaranteed to keep cyclists 100% safe from cars.
5. While you're at it see if you can identify what this symbol is for in the picture puzzle below
Bonus question - Spot the irony in the logo pictured below, seen on the recent e-flyer promoting the "Cycling City Freewheel", Sunday 30th August 2009, Ladies Mile, The Downs, Bristol. Clue


Quiz brought to you by Newlyn Junior and Infants School, Penzance and St Phillip's Causeway, Bristol.

Sustrans route 4 open again

Woodland road, full of walkers and bicycles

Because the roadworks are gone, the cyclists dismount signs gone, the path open. Now students can walk or cycle all the way to the university, which is on the other side of Tyndall's Park Avenue

Some people -and we know who you are- will bemoan the lack of safe crossing facilities on a busy road leading to Clifton. Given the traffic lights at the junction of Tyndall's Park Avenue and Whiteladies road, 200 metres to the right of these pictures, lack a pedestrian crossing period -and that for a route used by taxpayers as well as students- there is no reason to add any safety facilities to this crossing.


Students are young, fit and fast. On the person with luggage is going to be at risk.

Over in London, Boris wants to shave six seconds off every green man crossing. This is to reduce congestion and increase traffic flow, possibly handling the consequences of his rollback of the western congestion zone and the big-car premium tax. The official walking speed is now 1.2 metres/second. Anyone going slower that is either a tourist or someone elderly or unfit.

Over in New York, campaigners are pushing for longer crossing times, to help the elderly, advocating a speed of 0.75 metres/second.


But that is the US, with privatised health care. In Britain, with the NHS, the old, the frail and the unfit are often a net cost to society -they cost in health and pensions, and bring in little tax. Having a crossing policy that penalises the slow with death reduces the long term costs to the state, and so saves money.

University Approach

Starting to collect some data on the university. A key finding is that walking is the primary way students get to university, something they do despite the effort the city goes to run them over. This is the Tyndall's Park Road/Woodland road junction.

Up until about 1992 this was open to cars, making Woodland road a high speed alternative to Whiteladies Road. It certainly made cycling down T-Park-Road trickier as cars were prone to pulling out in front of you while you came down at speed. Then the junction got closed of for a year or so while a storm drain was constructed underneath the city -car access never came back. Instead we got a road that is intermittently available to pedestrians and bikes. Currently the roadworks are being anti-bicycle. Cyclists dismount, the sign says. These signs are a stock requirement of all roadwork sites in Bristol, as the alternative would be thought and effort. If they could have a sign "pedestrians go away" they would use them too.

With the roadworks and the scaffolding truck, its a kind of edgy junction. You can get half way out and with no visibility, have to assume that when a car goes uphil (to the right in this picture), its safe to pull out. We are fortunate all students are fit as you need to be able to sprint across.

We are also grateful that most cars in Bristol don't deliberately set out to run over pedestrians and bicycles in their way. Here a car graciously slows down to avoid hitting a bicycle head on.

Where are the students going? To their 9am lectures. Where are they coming from? The halls of residence, other side of the Downs. This junction is not only part of Sustrans national network route 4, it is the primary by-foot commute for a few thousand students. Clearly it is not felt necessary to provide safe road crossings here. Further up the hill, there is a zebra crossing, but that will be replaced at considerable expense by a light controlled crossing so that buses can regain priority over pedestrians.

Crossing Markings

The author of this post may actually qualify for a disabled sticker. Certainly when the doctor finally got back to me on the phone 3 months after the MRI they spoke about "long term mitigation", which would seem to apply acceptance of the state . And to make up for not being able to walk or run around: you get to park almost anywhere. It means I know what its like to have to accept that things aren't going to get better, walking will hurt. And as for trying to cross roads in this city -if you can't run, forget it!

Because walking across roads in the city for disabled people is so hard, this driver is forcec to park on the keep clear approach lines of a (light controlled) pedestrian crossing on a busy road. These lines are not there to improve traffic flow, they are to provide a safe view of the crossing to approaching cars. One might think, therefore, that parking here would endanger pedestrians. Clearly the driver of this car does not think so, and we must respect their judgement.

Dangerous Crossing

The cotham hill/Abbotsford road junction is very popular with shoppers, hence the dedicated one-hour-only shopping areas on one side of the road. Of course, if you want to go to a shop on the other side of the road, they are no, you have to improvise, as the minivan GU04HUH appears to be doing.

Given the traffic volume, it is worrying to see a pedestrian using a phone while crossing the road, as they are clearly not paying attention to what is happening around them.

Can she not see how dangerous it is? How cars turning left into this road would have to swerve round the parked car FG08KGU without warning. Pedestrians like this need to go on a safe-walking course before they should be allowed onto our streets. This could be one of the campaign points of the Association of British Drivers: make all pedestrians pay a walking tax proportional to the number of miles they walk a year. Only if pedestrians pay for the upkeep of the roads should they be allowed to get in the way of tax-paying cars.

Footpath Closed Cyclists Only

Terry Miller sends in this photo of some of the "improvements" near Cabot Circus, on the junction of Bond Street South and St Pauls Street.

Terry states that although he got off his bicycle to take the photograph, he was standing on "an open shared use pavement" so there was little risk of the police giving him a spot fine for walking or standing in a cyclists only junction. He also says:

If these will stay:-

• gaps are dangerously narrow for 2-way cyclists to safely pass
• signage is needed to divert westbound pedestrians BEFORE they reach this BLIND CORNER crossing.

We look forward to the opportunity to write letters to the Evening Post complaining about pedestrians getting in our way, as having someone using a cyclists only facility in the city is as as wrong as those fell runners who go round the Ashton Court MTB trail because they like the mud. Cycle facilities are for cyclists!

There is, however, one little question. Why do this? The purpose of road crossings is to provide a safe way to cross roads. If the crossing gets taken away, will the people suddenly not cross the road? Or will they just run out anyway? It would be interesting to have a discussion with whoever designed this junction to discover what assumptions about pedestrian (especially child) behaviour they had made, what experiments they had perform to test the validity of the aforesaid assumptions, and whether they were to engage in long-term monitoring of the facility to see if the assumptions held up in the field. Civil Engineering may not be a science, but there is no reason why it should not be scientific in its approach.

Now seeking: photographs of pedestrians ignoring these signs and inconsiderately inconveniencing cyclists.

Ghost Rider

Ghost Rider: someone on a bike who has chosen a path of action for which the outcome may tangibly result in death.

Here we see someone cutting across the lanes of the inner ring road/lewins mead while cars approach. The cars are moving pretty fast here.

And he's across, alive. All hail the brave!

A Half-Zebra Crossing

Pedestrians crossing busy roads often use Zebra crossings, as they are the only safe way to get across. However, for the car driver, Zebra crossings are bad news: the walkers have right of way. You can ignore the crossing rules : examples, the silver BMW on Saturday, the grey Bristol taxicab on fFiday. But that places you at a legal disadvantage.

You could petition the council to take away the zebra crossing, but that would look bad on their pedestrian safety statistics. So what other options are there?
One option is to replace the zebra crossing with some kind of pelican crossing, with the timings optimised for traffic flow and not pedestrian convenience. Examples of this are common in the Gloucester and Cheltenham Roads, but they are expensive.

What is being prototyped here in Whiteladies Road is a new crossing, a half-zebra.

In a half-zebra, the zebra crossing only goes half way across the road. the other haf is marked "Crossing Not in Use".

Leaving the pedestrians to run across the road with no requirement for cars to give way to them.
If this trial is a success, it will be rolled out to more parts of the city

Walking Lessons

The growth in numbers of schoolkids being driven to school not only increases congestion, it means that the children grow up not knowing how to walk round a city. To correct this, some schools are providing lessons in how to walk.

Here a class from Sefton Park school are being given a walking lesson up Hurlingham Road, St Andrews, practising walking along a pavement with cars parked on it. then crossing the road itself. As it is so unusual for children to be on a pavement, they are all equipped with high-visibility yellow tops.

This may seem an admirable exercise, but note how the teachers are actually blocking cars from getting down the road while the children get across.


This creates an unrealistic expectation for the kids: that cars will give way to them, and inconveniences car drivers, who get needlessly delayed.
There must be a way to provide these lessons without inconveniencing cars. Maybe there is a Nintendo Wii "walking" game, or perhaps a special part of school -the playground- could be set up to resemble a Bristol street. That way the children could get their lesson in without making the commuters late.