Filton Road Holdups

From a couple of weeks back, South Gloucestershire Council dared to close Filton Road, that well known short-cut so much loved by UWE students and Business Park users that avoids the lights and queues on the A4174 (the reason for those queues? mostly people using the short cut but never mind).

Anyway, the barriers and signs didn't deter many, convinced this was some clever ploy by Council Engineers into tricking them to take the long way round, a great drivers saw those pesky cyclists sneaking through and decided they'd follow, including the driver we see here in the Citroen Xsara X268GOV.


The only problem was the signs weren't a clever ploy after all, the Council really had dug the road up. And we see poor old X268GOV has been forced to execute a 5 point turn and come back the other way. Worse they've now got to go back down Filton Road, past all the 'Road Closed' ahead and Diversion signs they'd apparently missed earlier and re-join the back of the queue on the dreaded A4174: a dual carriageway whose opportunity for widening has been neglected at the expense of a bike lane that never gets used by bicycles, on account of them being on this rat-run instead.

And the reason for the road closure? Gas works? New sewers? No, to add insult to injury those lunatics at the Council had closed the road to build a new cycle path!

South Gloucestershire is the motor-centric part of Bristol, and such facilities and road closures go against the interests of the residents and commuters. Why do they think we moved to out of town villages and got jobs in a featureless sprawl of buildings, were it not to drive to work and home again, pausing only to nip in to Sainsbury's and B&Q's on the way home, eating a hamburger grabbed from the McDonald's drive through as we do so?

If we had wanted to live somewhere where we walked and cycled to shops and to work we would have chosen to live and work in the city centre. We don't and we didn't -so why is this anti-car council interfering with our lifestyle choices?

Not No-Entry, Slow-downs signs

In our Friday Brain Teaser, some people commented on the no-entry signs at the entrance.

These people need to get a newly-updated "Bristol Highway Code" document, which will bring them up to date with recent changes in the meaning of signs. For the particular Red Circle with White Minus, it's severity has been downgraded.

Old: Do not enter this road
New: Slow down when entering this road

The vehicle heading down Marlborough Hill, WR09FRJ is adhering to the new signage, as the brake lights show that they are slowing down on entering the one-way system from the low-priority entrance.

Bristol Traffic welcomes contributions showing this sign's new meaning being followed, as well as other recent changes in the meaning of other signs.

Datamining the school run

On some initial surveys, Clifton High appeared to be free of parents exploiting the school-keep-clear section. But it was just their school starts early, at 0830.

Here, on Oct 8, at 08:39, One car doing a dropoff in the defacto-dropoff-zone: WU56LUD

Here, on Oct 9, at 08:28, a car doing a dropoff in the defacto-dropoff-zone: WU56LUD

This car is are now, as they say, "in the database". Not some toy little local government database running on a ropy server in an undercooled attic. Not some secret central goverment server farm somewhere of car number plates -no, they are in a bigger database: the Web. In one of Google's datacentres.

Photos are uploaded to Picasa, running on the Google File System. That also hosts the blog, routing the click log back into GFS for Google Analytics to analyse the visitors, creating stats that get stored in BigTable. All words in the blog, including registration numbers get picked up in their PageRank scans, probably implemented as a big MapReduce job, with the results again stored in GFS and BigTable. Which is why, a few hours after this posting, a search for the word will not return "Your search - WU56LUD - did not match any documents.", as it does now, it will return this page -and any others we add later.

That's our database. A combination of photo, tags and text marks up all cars whose driving/parking skills are felt to be significantly entertaining to merit attention, and then, when the time comes to visit the particular schools, we just retrieve all entries tagged with that school, paste the photos into powerpoint, and we have the list of repeat offenders we expect them to deal with.

Which is why it is important to thank people for their contributions. That's the photographers, but also the subject. Thank them, after they've had their car/bus/van snapped, because without their actions, we wouldn't have anything interesting to write up, and the database would be that much less useful. And Google's BigTable would have less number plates in its columns.

contraflow

This is a bicycle. If it were not a bicycle, it wouldn't have been able to negotiate the no-entry/one-way section on Nugent Hill, Kingsdown, and so get to Arley Hill without having to negotiate the queues on Cotham Brow.

The other hypothesis, that the driver of the polo CU02FBC wilfully ignored the no-entry signs and drove a short distance down a one way stretch of road is too unthinkable to even consider.

Bus Parking at Cotham Grammar

Here is a bus unloading at Cotham Grammar; the school kids are getting in what is currently the back entrance. though that may change soon if new proposals succeed. The bus is parked in the "school no parking" area, blocking visibility of and on the narrowed crossing area to the right of the photograph.

This is clearly dangerous, which is why in 2004 an area further down Cotham Road was dedicated to bus parking. Here it is, with a number of vehicles.

Which, given they are in the bus only parking area, must be buses. The black Astra bus YA57RCZ, a blue polo four-seater bus BD53PNV, and a red peugeout bus WN07KKH.


Alongside this bus-van, and three others further down the hill.

It is a shame that there are so many buses parked in this area that other buses have to unload in a dangerous area. Perhaps the 1 hour limit on how long a bus can park in this stretch should be enforced.

Invisible in the slipstream

By driving right behind this bus entering the buses-and-bikes-only stretch of broadmead, this car manages to be hidden from the rear view mirrors of the bus.

Which means that it is no longer there, and free to drive down this road.

East Street: a secret short cut

There is a secret back-route through Bedminster that only a few cars know about it. Here we are going to blow the secret wide-open and share a way to skip three traffic lights and about ten minutes on a weekday morning.

It's called the East Street pedestrian zone, here demonstrated by -----. It may say buses only, but as we've seen before, that's a hint. Any law that isn't enforced doesn't exist, and as driving through here in a car is never punished, you may as well. So who wastes time going round the back streets of Bedminster, when they could punch the core at speed? Losers.

Bristol Motorcycle City

One unmentioned beneficiary of the Cycling City initiative will be Bristol's motorbikes, who can take advantage of the bike parking in Gloucester Road, thus avoiding having to block the bike lane the way cars need to.

In broadmead, a couple of bike park slots provide a great place for a bike. Some people may argue that there are areas for motorbikes, areas marked Solo M/Cs, but as these are used by cars, motorbikes only have one remaining option: the cycle stands.


There are also lots of motorbike friendly short cuts

You can recognise these by the drawing of the motorbike with the red ring around them.

More buses on Cotham Brow

People who complain that Bristol's public transport system is bad have missed an obvious fact: all vehicles are buses. Why else would all of these be going through a road-closed area that is blocked off to everything but buses?

Leading the way

These cars are all driving the wrong way down the one way bit of Nugent Hill

Why? Well, how else do you get from Kingsdown to Gloucester Road when Cotham Brow is closed.

Indeed, two days later, the no-entry signs at this end (and the one-way signs at the other) were taped over. so when there were head-on conflicts such as happens below, both sides would feel they were wronged..

Perhaps then, just as bike lanes follow unofficial cycling routes, these motorists are leading a way in defacto actions which will eventually be authorised.

Probably didn't see the sign

Well, an ice cream van is kind of bus-shaped anyway, isn't it?

(submitted by Joe Evans)