UBHT: our next email to the BRI PR team

Two weeks, and silence from the PR company tasked with selling an eight storey car park in the central bristol "red zone" as a benefit, here is our followup to our initial email.

Hello.

Sadly, we don't seem to have had a reply to our previous email..

Never mind —a polite response would have been nice.

We have a few of questions for our ongoing coverage. While you can opt out of answering them, it will save time compared to filing FOI requests, and give you an opportunity for you to present your arguments.

Terminology

1. What is a transport hub and how is it different from a normal car park?
2. If it is because it has secure staff cycle parking, do the existing BRI and St Michael's hill staff car parks qualify for the title "transport hub"?
3. If not: why not?

Current/Planned capacity

1. Across the entire UBHT Kingsdown Campus of BRI and St Michael's Hill hospitals, what is the total number of parking spaces?
2. What is their breakdown into: facilities, staff, disabled and visitor
3. How was the number of new spaces to build chosen? Was it demand driven, or simply "number of floors times spaces per floor?"
4. With the proposed multistorey-transport-hub, what will be the new breakdown of facilities, staff, disabled and visitor?
5. Why was this specific balance chosen?

Demand Modelling

1. Which tool did you use for modelling demand?
2. Did you model the pollution impact, and if so on the "we trust the manufacturers" EURO5/6 numbers, or the real world datasets?
3. Did your model consider that Metrobus promises a step change in Bristol transport? If so, what impact will it be considered to have? If not, why not?
4. Did any model you explored actually reduce pollution within the central bristol "Red Zone"?
5. Did you explore different mixes of staff/visitor allocation —and what impact did it have?
6. Did you explore different sizes of car park —and what impact did it have?

Finally, can we have the model you've built up? We can sort out the software.


Thanks,

The Bristol Traffic Team (data and traffic analysis department)

As the outreach on an eight-storey car park over staff parking, adjacent to the sole child's playground near Stokes Croft takes place while everyone is out of town, we send a note to the PR team doing their utmost to make this consultation achieve the outcome the hospital wants: support, or at least acquiescence.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: bristol.traffic@gmail.com
Date: 7 August 2018 at 10:53
Subject: Re: hospital parking feedback
To: uhbt@jbp.co.uk

The Bristol Traffic Project

The Bearpit, Bristol BS2

Hello,

Thank you for your letter to residents proposing replacing the multi-storey car park comprising primarily of staff parking with a new, larger car park composing primarily of staff parking.

There appear to be a few other omissions from your letter

1. The claim "it will be a transport hub" fails to consider the existing multi-storey staff car park has staff bicycle parking, as does the Southwell Street facility. If adding secure bike parking to a car park makes it a "Transport Hub", then the existing car park must also qualify for this term.
2. The fact that existing Eugene Street car park is primarily staff parking. We estimate of your quoted 192 spaces, 165 are exclusively for staff.
3. The fact that total parking capacity across the BRI and St Michael's hill area comes to 1.9 miles —and that's without including the three floors of staff-only parking in the existing car park
4. The fact that air quality in inner Bristol is a significant health hazard, and that if that 800 space car park were used for higher turnover visitor parking, there would be many more than the baseline 1600 journeys/day one would expect. This will generate significant congestion in the area, along with the pollution.
5. The "it is set back in the hill" claim misses to note that it will in fact tower over the Dove St children's park behind it —the sole childrens play area within a part of the city whose demographics markers indicate "somewhat deprived".

We like to consider ourselves the purveyors of an ironic perspective of Bristol's many traffic issues, so are tempted to cherish the delicious irony of your proposal, "increase hospital staff and visitor parking at the expense of the health of staff, visitors and residents", along with "improve staff parking by removing staff housing".

However, we've decided instead to stare in disbelief at the disingenuous hypocrisy of claiming to be doing this for the health of patients where it appears to be more of a reaction to the residents parking zone changes, combined with an excel spreadsheet showing the revenue opportunities of high-turnover visitor parking.

We shall cover this topic over the summer. Expect forthcoming FoI requests to explore both the number and purpose of parking spaces across the entire Kingsdown Estate, your modelling of the congestion and health impact of adding six hundred more spaces, any artists impressions you have made of the "View from the Dove Street playground", as well as on your business model —including who is funding the project and whether you've included in your business plans the risk that a labour government will mandate that England follow Scotland and Wales in offering free hospital parking.

Current and future coverage will be appear under the URL http://bristolcars.blogspot.com/search/label/BRI

Thanks.

The Bristol Traffic Team

"Weakly-defensible data-driven traffic analysis since 2008"

bristol.traffic@gmail.com   @bristoltraffic

How much parking does the BRI have? 1.9 miles

One aspect of the greenwash letter on the new BRI multi-storey car park was its claim that the current multi-storey transport hub only had 200 spaces. That was a surprise, as if you ever spend any time in that part of the city you will know that UBHT property can be recognised by the way all garden areas have been converted into some form of parking.

Have the PR consultants forgotten to mention that detail? Hope that locals wouldn't pick up on that any more than they'd be expected to notice that you can't set an 8 floor car park into a hill when there's a child's play area right behind it? Whatever the reason, that failure to list all the parking spaces seems designed to make you feel sorrier for those who can't park -and again, by emphasising patients over staff, going for the maximum sympathy

Sadly, we are a data driven organisation, so set out to count up the spaces ourselves. Attempt 1 was on a Sunday afternoon, it took about an hour to get round and is too boring to share. What's surprising is how many little blocks and crannies they've managed to fit a car into. We estimate that in the combin f BRI and St Michaels hill hospital "campus", there are 400+ spaces, outside the existing multi-storey transport hub. That's not obvious to patients for the following reason: a lot of these spaces are dedicated to staff. As for the disabled? You get into double digits, but really -the majority of dedicated disabled parking is the double-yellow line areas on the council roads.

Here is our second attempt at a tour of the parking areas, starting in Dove St at the children's playground the BRI pretends doesn't exist, finishing off directly above it in Marlborough Hill place. This complete loop of the many transport hubs belonging to UBHT here takes 15 minutes, and covers 1.9 miles. That is not a typo. If you cycle round each bay in the car parks, one by one, the total amount of space comes in at just under two miles. There's a small amount of public road to connect all this together, but there's parking there -free form disabled, paid for visitors. How can the hospital PR team say with a straight face that it doesn't have enough parking when it has 1.9 miles worth?


What they should be doing is looking at the allocation of it: how much to staff parking, does facilities have theirs in the right places, how many people with disabled parking needs come a day -and are they satisfied. Instead, we get a grand plan to poison central Bristol, one which simply puts off addressing the big issue: why does everyone seem to expect unlimited staff and visitor parking at a hospital in the centre of a city?

Anyway, here's the video showing exactly how much parking there is for the UBHT to choose how to allocate. It's taken about 5pm on the first day any light drizzle had fallen from the sky, making the roads a bit skittery; you can hear the back wheel slide out at one point.


(Literal) High point: our (expendable) reporter discovers the base of the St Michael's Chimney. It just comes up out the ground, behind the asbestos waste skip and near the toddlers house. Maybe in future it will get the recognition it deserves as central Bristol's highest structure. We'll need a Banksy or two on it first though.

For those who hate our cyclists (expendable), skip to the end of the video and you can see them getting a "snakebite" puncture just trying to ride down one of the many potholed roads in the city. This is Bristol cycling. You can't even complete a two mile loop of the BRI car parks without getting a puncture on the small amount of council road covered on the ride. Interesting question though: given this is clearly filmed as happening on a council road, are the council billable for the replacement inner tube?

Finally, purists may fault us for not actually covering three of the for floors of the existing multi-storey transport hub. Can't get in there see: staff only. The secret that UBHT press releases dare not mention.

Further down ninetree hill, there's a red clio SN52BNJ paveparked quite elegantly.

It's only when you get alongside that it's clear that this car wasn't parked -it crashed into a lamp post while sliding backwards down the hill -presumably with all occupants screaming in terror trying to wheelspin their way out of trouble.

It must have been frightening -we hope they are all right.

Even so, as you look up the 1 in 4 hill, seeing more than one vehicle crashed on it, some thoughts spring to mind.

1. What made the drivers think going up here was a good idea? You can't into kingsdown by car all that is left is the parking on Dove Street.
2. On a day like friday, all parking restrictions are cancelled.There's no reason to park on Dove St.
3. The streets were covered in snow and ice, and vehicles couldn't get up less steep roads -some of the main Kingsdown access routes were blocked off, and we saw Cotham Hill earlier -that's a 5-10% gradient maximum.
4. If you do get to the top of Dove St to park, you'll have to come down this or the other hill-option later -and again, that could be icy.
5. If your attempt fails, you aren't going to just get stuck. You will slide down backwards until you hit something.

If this hill was a secret rat-run, we could see why someone would want to go up there. But it isn't -and these photos show why you should avoid it after snow unless you have a sledge.

FA54OEF -truly impressive parking

It's not often we have to call out someone in the Stokes Croft area for actually parking in a way that even we think is selfish and lazy, but today we have to say this little mini, FA54OEF, manages to pull off a parking option that overwhelms even us -and as a regular parker in the area, that's hard to do.

Notice the mini is parked vaguely near a corner -"cornerish-parking", on the wrong side of the road, here at the junction of Dove Street and Nine-tree hill



It's got its hazards on, though as it didn't move for the ten minute period needed to get through or Sunday morning breakfast (Breakfast at Cafe Kino washed down with some White Lightening at Turbo Island), this is more of a long-stay than a quick pause.

 
By parking with the lights on, it gives anyone cycling down ninetree that fear that the car is about to pull out and turn over them, especially with the position right on the corner.
-  
For anyone heading up the hill, it's the same. This car looks like it's about to come out, and it also destroys all visibility of anything coming up. It's  a single parking decision that makes it tangibly more threatening to cyclists going up and down ninetree, which apparently is popular because the "safety" outweighs the 25% gradient. Lucky that FA54OEF is here to set the record straight.


One little complaint though. The way the car has parked makes it impossible for important people to get their car into Dove St without swerving into the opposite lane, a lane which has reduced visibility from the car itself, as all cars are of course approaching from downhill.

This is why we think the person who parked this car is, well, selfish and lazy. There's room behind the mini to reverse and park; there's room on the proper side of the road, there's an entire lane on the northern side of ninetree. It's a sunday -no parking will be enforced, so why park exactly on the corner?

On a weekday, we'd understand, but on a weekend? It doesn't make any sense and doesn't take the needs of other people in cars into account.

Impressive, but fundamentally stupid

Kingsdown RPZ, interesting, but too early to reach a conclusion

We've been driving round the new RPZ; watching. It's not until the students are back with their cars and their lessons that we'll see how it works, so right now it's in a transitional phase.

What is interesting is how much empty space there is. Here on Dove Street, the entire side of the road that you can park on legally is empty, though the Mercedes driver still wants to avoid the challenge of crossing the road.

Perhaps they didn't have a permit, and as the penalty for paveparking by a yellow line is the same as a non-resident in the resident area, you may as well park closest to your destination.

Elsewhere, the new restaurant Alfred's has space outside it in Alfred Place for lunchtime customers.

And along the road, a view of what the houses must have looked like in Georgian times, before modern inventions came along.

Most interesting was on Somerset Street, which is yet to be repainted. Look closely at the ground here, on Spring Hill

That faded paint implies there has always been a keep clear zone here. We never knew that -all we could see that it was an ideal place for wide vehicles to park. The markings on the ground imply the anti-motorist council will not just leave the obsolete signage to fade, they will be adding double yellow lines instead.

We close by sending our team cyclist round the area (sorry, but we did wait until a Sunday), to get a video. This shows us a number of things.

1. There are some interesting pubs in the area.
2. A loading zone is no substitute for zebra crossing zig zags if it involves more walking.
3. Someone has added parking spaces to Nine Tree Hill.

That final point is interesting. Until now, Nine Tree was lost space, you could park there, but then you could get a ticket. Now locals can park there. How do they get out of this dead end? Presumably by reversing down the road which today is only used by cyclists and pedestrians walking up the hill. Even so, four extra spaces there barely compensate for all the lost corners. Our footage of this area will have to be preserved for posterity, "Kingsdown before the changes came"

We care, we really do

Some web sites have been a bit critical of us, arguing that we should obscure the number plates of photographs of vehicles in our coverage area, rather what we normally do -type in the registration number without spacing for easier indexing, then tag the entry with the road and district within the city or "abroad" for anywhere out of town.

Sadly for those privacy activists, registration numbers doesn't constitute private personal data, and EU/UK data protection legislation doesn't kick in. And as it's a public street, privacy rules and human rights stuff doesn't either. Were, say the son of Oswald Mosley to pay prostitutes to dress up in army uniforms and beat him while speaking in German on a street in Bristol, he wouldn't be able to argue that it was an invasion of his privacy to put the pics up online. So there you go. You want privacy, do things like that at home, with the shutters closed.

Our biggest issue is not just that cyclists don't have number plates, but that pedestrians don't either. Take this small child enjoying the swings in lower Kingsdown -an area to be covered in the RPZ. There are two cameras covering this play area to make sure that no children misbehave by doing something hazardous like using a swing without a helmet.

Yet how can you enforce non-misbehaving legislation without every child, every adult, having a machine readable registration number? How else can you see if they are paying their fare share of road and council tax, that they don't have a track record of hit-and-walk scrapes against parked cars on the pavement, and other crimes which pedestrians are capable of?

We are with Crap Cycling and Walking in Waltham Forest here: not only should every pedestrian have a registration number (apart from those walking directly between their car and destination), but that the council and schools should run special Walkability courses teaching schoolkids how to safely walk round our city -and that they should only be allowed to walk round if they and their parents have their licenses. And they have third-party insurance for any damage they cause!

Dove Street Parking Options

Signage changes in Dove Street now show which area is reserved for Wino parking, and which for Gnomes.

While unawares of the Stoke's Croft gnome problem, it is nice to see that those fond of nipping down to the area for a quick beverage now have somewhere convenient to park.

We should also draw everyone's attention to the Hare on the Hill pub, just above where the previous photograph was taken.

It is a Bath Ales pub, and when combined with the Hillgrove, a few doors along, can make for a fine evening out.

We also hear a rumour -just a rumour, that there is a local cider being brewed near here -"Ninetree cider"- from locally grown apples. More investigation is needed.

Death on Dove Street

Chris Hutt, that known subversive, sends news of a death last Monday.

Police are appealing for witnesses and information after a fatal road traffic collision in Kingsdown, Bristol. The incident occurred on Monday 4th January 2010 at around 10.56am in Dove Street. A Honda Jazz was in collision with a low wall. The 82 year old driver died later in hospital.

This is sad, and it is something that seemed to miss getting coverage in the other local media outlets.

Dove Street is the semicircular road that goes round the 1970s housing block in Kingsdown. We've sent bicycles along here, we've also seen how cars pulling on to Ninetree hill correctly assume they don't need to look for traffic coming down the hill.

During the snows, ninetree became a sledge and snowboard route, not a driving option. Here is the view uphill, Dove Street is just visible to the left. This picture was taken five days before monday's death; things got icier.

The pavement was unusuable, pedestrians were in the road. No cyclists to worry about, just snowboarders and sledgers. Someone had wisely scraped all the snow off a bit of the road at the base, to stop such snow-users ending up on Stokes Croft.

Off to one side, no obvious cues as to whether Y64PNV had chosen to end up here or been forced that way by gravity. The tyre treads implied that the wheels had been rotating, so perhaps this was a parking action.

Visiting Dove Street a couple of days after the fatal incident, police signs are up and some tape is across the road; now broken. There was more tape on the lampposts at the bottom of nine-tree hill.

Otherwise, no details of what happened. Presumably the car started off on Dove street and then ended up on Ninetree hill, which turned out to be non-survivable. Either the driver deliberately went onto that road, or it was trying to park on Dove Street the way the cars above have, and somehow ended up on ninetree hill, at which point there weren't many options left.

It is a tragedy, and we extend our condolencies to friends and family.

Down by the bus station

Whenever you monitor humans, you have to worry about The Hawthorn Effect; the fact that people behave differently when being watched. This is notorious for skewing the results of many experiments, and you should always ask experimenters how they compensated for it, to make sure they knew what they were doing.

We solve this problem by not telling the cyclists that it's a camera. They think its a light. Of course, having the bicycle with lights on would effect the experiment too, so to avoid that it doesn't actually work as a light.

By monitoring without them knowing, we get to see the world from their point of view, hear their complaints, then dismiss them.

Today's video: Dove Street Kingsdown to Broadmead, by way of the Marlborough Street Bus station.

1. Notice that in Dove Street, those vans parking 3/4 on the pavement ensure that passing bicycles do not get hit by open doors, and make it easier for passing vehicles to get by them.
2. The Honda LG57XPV that appears to pull out without indicating before veering across the road is not victimising the cyclist, it would behave the same regardless of whoever was behind it. While driving along, had its brake lights on, "tourist lights" as we call them, which warn the vehicles behind that it is planning something.
3. Pulling in to Dighton Street at 1:00 we see a line of bicycles using this road to avoid the St James Barton Roundabout/Bearpit options, or to head over to Clifton without cycling over the big hills. [Incidentally, we hear a rumour that the Bristol Cycling Campaign, as well as promising free drinks at their EGM on Thursday, are planning a Bastard-Hills-of-North-Bristol ride that will not avoid those climbs].
4. At 1:20 the instrumented cyclist and another cyclist both slide past a taxi to occupy the remaining half of the ASL. This does not leave room for the two other cyclists following. What will they do?
5. At 1:28, the cycling-chic woman passed earlier appears to be having braking problems, as her bike only stops after she has shot halfway over the junction. Notice how she stops by putting both feet on the ground. That means fixed-speed or broken brakes. Given that cars are still heading across this road from the right hand side, only three sets of lights/two junctions from the M32, everyone anticipating a bit of speed, this is a brave things to do, she has earned her ghostrider label.
6. At 1:35 we see that the vehicle waiting to turn right is in fact a police car. Presumably our little ghostrider was too busy looking for cars from the right to worry about what cars were waiting to turn.
7. At 1:41, the police car pulls forward, and by 1:45 is parallel with the rider. Is she going to get told off?
8. No, it turns right, as do the vehicles behind. Even the lorry at 1:57 doesn't clip her, despite her being positioned on the inside of the bend
9. At 2:02 the high speed sprint of a van through the lights tells us that they have just gone red for that lane, and that the bicycles will now get a green light, which kicks in a couple of seconds later.
10. At 2:06 our camera enhanced cyclist sets off and never sees the ghost rider again. She had not only tried to cycle across the red light and the lanes of traffic, she had positioned herself so she could not see the lights, and so missed them changing.
11. Our cyclist uses the bike lane until it ends, and is then forced to turn off the road, to go down Whitson Street to the bus station. There then follows 30 seconds of dullness.

Where things get entertaining again is 2:44, where the bicycle is in the bus and bike only lane heading towards Broadmead. They have a red light. Will they wait? Or has the previous junction given them ideas?

They wait for three seconds, then veer over to what appears to be a pedestrian crossing -but actually has a bicycle on it. Therefore we must sadly conclude that this bit of crossing on bike is legal, and we can not report it to the police.

We are not so sure, however, about the pavement riding they do afterwards. They do not go straight on, where they would encounter the car, but instead veer left past some phone boxes, over the bus lane and then on some more pavement. We were beginning to get hopeful again, but then saw that they were actually riding up to some bicycle specific traffic lights -which were going green- and then they set off again, into Horsefair and hence Cabot Circus.

As you can imagine, we are unimpressed by the cyclist who ran the first red light. Not only was it dangerous, it didn't gain anything. At least when we speed in a car we get something in exchange -the feeling of speed, reduced journey time. She got nothing, and forgot to keep an eye out for police cars. The second junction though, leaves us confused. The bicycle clearly went up on the pavement, over a pedestrian crossing, on some more pavement and then up to some lights. We do not whether to be

• Upset about the behaviour of the cyclist
• Upset that an anti-car council added these features
• Confused by the fact that these features seem to not be at all rational. Surely to make it easier to get from the bus station to broadmead, the crossing lights would be on the left of the junction, so the bicycle would not have to zig-zag everywhere? We suspect the lights were put in on a budget to help tax-dodgers head the other way.

We have decided to go for all three options. Bristol Traffic: confused and upset.

Spring Hill: Kingsdown's Downhill

Some more research into the mythical Boxing Day staircase race turns out that it was never a race, just a fun ride, through the stepped streets of Kingsdown. That's a tradition to bring back, down Spring Hill. Normally that only gets coverage here at the top, where it becomes gentle enough to allow motor vehicles to park across the road. Further down, it's stepped.

The middle section has some barriers at the top to stop you entering at speed, but then there's a fairly straight run with a dropoff to Dove Street, one with inadequate visibility to be sure there isn't something about to run you over.

You have to cross that road to enter the final descent

This is a number of flights of stairs, none on their own too hard, with some runouts to allow you to change your mid or just drop a bit of speed. It then levels off into a good runout stretch into the dispersion zone that is King Square.

This would be a great place for a Downhill Race, "Kingsdown Technical". The square would be where the finish would be, the audience would get a fantastic view of the bikes coming down at speed.

This is something to think about. It would be an exciting Cycling City event - a downhill run in the heart of town, where anyone can come to see it. It would make for some great photos of the city and make up for some of the bad press it's been getting in the cycling world, with its recent war-on-pavement-cycling. Hold the event on a Sunday and there's no through traffic to speak of; closing the roads wouldn't be hard. And if it can't be done officially, it would be a good night-time event.