These are from mid sept, just some photos of some vehicles encountered on a traverse of the city, from Monty to the Triangle.
#1: Upper Cheltenham Place 16:02, September 9.
There's a car in the middle of the road; it's go belongings in the back including a childs seat. A PCSO is looking in it. Left hand side of the vehicle is pretty bashed up. No other vehicles "unusally" bashed. No skid/ABS marks. Other than the PCSO, nobody is paying any attention.
@2: Nugent Hill, 16:15, September 9.
A car is on the pavement/build-out on Nugent Hill. Both sides of the car are bashed, the gap between them suspiciously as wide as the gap between the two cast iron bollards just in front of the vehicle.
Again, nobody around. This one looks exactly what you'd get when you were parked on the hill, the handbrake wasn't on (+wheels not turned, engine not left in gear), and the car rolled down the hill. If that' the case, at least it didn't hut anyone or any other vehicle. Provided the engine hasn't been damaged/pushed into the passenger compartment, then the VW polo should already be up and running by now.
Overall then: the background hum of bodywork repairs which keeps the city alive.
The 20 mph zone has been up for a year now, so it's time to review it as drivers
It doesn't make things slower. Really. It's the delays at junctions & in queues that increase journey time.
It makes things calmer. There's less pressure to put your foot down when you do clear a junction.
Similarly, as you approach a junction, you can coast down more gently.
As you are going a bit slower, you can take time to look around, which gives you a better view of pedestrians. This is tangibly better at night.
It actually helps you pulling out from side roads to main roads. Why? As everyone is moving slower, the time window for you to do things like pull a right turn with cars approaching from both directions is larger.
Fuel economy? No obvious difference. The engine may be less efficient in 3rd than 4th, but you don't have to accelerate so hard, and can coast down. Of course, anyone in a hybrid car is laughing as their petrol engine can work even less, and gain more regenerative braking from the gentle slow down.
Keeping track of your speed? Third gear low RPM seems to work. If you feel the need to go to 4th, you are going too fast.
Does everyone follow 20 mph? 22-25 is more realistic daytime speed; at night the speed goes up to 30 until the minicabs come out, when it ramps up 40 mph just when the drunk people start walking home.
Increased road rage? No obvious difference. As the average commute speed is < 20 mph in Bristol (TomTom's unverified data, not ours), it's hard to see how it could be made worse.
Collapse of businesses due to increased white van journey time. Not obvious. Congestion is the limiting factor, not maximum speed.
Passing Bicycles? No harder or easier. It's still irritating to be behind someone going along at 12 mph. But the speed limit doesn't make passing harder. We just want fitter cyclists out there.
Then there's the "two shopping trolley" man wandering round the streets these days. We have no idea why he has two shopping trollies full of his entire belongings, but he does, he goes down the roads (not the pavements) at about 4 mph. Again, 20 mph doesn't make a difference.
So who loses? People who spent money on fast cars. You shell out all that cash for a nimble toy, for an extra digit or two at the end of your car brand logo —"i", "GT", etc—, tinted windows and some wheels that just scrape easily. The key "performance" benefits are tighter suspension, and most of all the ability to accelerate better.
Which is now utterly wasted, as most vehicle's 0-20 numbers are relatively similar. And pootling around at 20 mph means no need for suspension that lets you do 90 degree turns at 35 mph.
That's enough to drive you to road rage: not the fact that you are doing 20 mph, but the fact you spent a lot of money on your status toy and are doing 20 mph. Even if you want to go faster, there'll be someone in front who doesn't, who appears to drive at exactly 20 mph on a fast ratrun road like Ashley Down, Pembroke Road or Filton Ave. It's almost as if some people, on noticing an important person driving a high-end Audi or BMW SUV actually take their foot off the accelerator, dropping from 24 mph to 20. Which we consider unacceptable and strongly condemn anyone doing this.
For those people who have spent the money, they expect something in return.
Fortunately, every so often the opportunity arises. Here is one our instrumented tax-dodgers going down Nugent Hill, Cotham, using the bike contraflow to get to the Arley Hill evening traffic jam, and so on to Stokes Croft. As they join the Arley Hill queue, you can see a green light allowing some traffic to slowly get out to places more interesting.
And here you can see the BMW 3 series YF57KTE getting some return on investment. First they can come off the speed bump while accelerating (suspension), then put their foot down to catch up with the cars in front. Those cars in front who are going through on orange we note. But as the BMW is now almost joined up with them, it can do the "part of the same group" gambit and carry on through on the red light.
That tactic has given them a bit more speed than the vehicles in front, forcing them to negotiate what is effectively a chicaned right turn fairly aggressively: that suspension at work again.
They then need to put their brakes on, not because of the speed limit but because they've caught up with the car in front.
There: 15 seconds of real driving, out of probably 30 minutes of suffering. Not much —but that's all a 20 mph zone offers, at least during the early evening commute.
Our Whiteladies road texting coverage shows that 1 car per traffic light cycle is on the phone. Well, if that's clifton and the commuters from the ""20 mph means road rage" suburbs over the downs, Stokes Croft will have to do better -won't it.
Here then is a video at about 16:50 on a weekday evening. The tax dodger is cycling up Nugent Hill, while some children are returning home in the other direction. Given the 15% gradient, that family is earning its school dinners.
Then, down to Arley Hill to count the no. of vehicles phoning or texting in the traffic jam. Arley Hill cuts through from Cotham to Cheltenham Road, where, if you tuck into the bus lane and then go up to turn left towards Ashley Road, gets you to the M32 at the St Pauls Roundabout -without having to go to the bearpit roundabout or nearby. This makes it a nice little route from Redland and Clifton to the M32 at peak hours -too nice, and too widely known.
If you look, there are a set of different actions taking place in the vehicles
despair. driver holding onto the handle above the door, disbelieving that it can take so long. Tourist?
phone: talk, text or facebook.
eat. Not just junk food either -a couple of people are eating prepared meals from plastic containers. These are locals who know it takes 10-15 minutes to traverse Arley hill at peak hours.
enjoy the music. Only a couple of people are doing this -but they seem happy.
It comes out to seven vehicles: P217UWS, HG10AKP, KM59KML, FA04VZL, G869UAM, KF54EHH, BF08DJP.
Fluke! the Cliftonians cry! Pure Chance!
Possibly. Lets try that again, shall we?
Heres the next video, from the bottom and back up again.
There's been enough of an interval that the cars at the tail of the previous survey are now at the front: KF54EHH, texting at the end of the last video, is now the second car in line, still texting happily. Now the car behind, MF56VJC, has joined in.
Carrying on up, we encounter the van BF05VZT, gsfcarparts.com, a large grey van WV13YHA on the phone, and then the white BMW WN13CCE with the driver texting.
The driver in the "don't cook just eat" car is hand-rolling a cigarette -false alarm.
After the speed bump comes the renault megane HV03WNR, then, after a small gap, the Honda Civic WJ06ZBN with its driver speaking on his phone. Finally, just after the RAC van comes white van W9MWM. At this point the vehicles are moving, so the driver here is left with a problem: how to text while driving over a speed bump.
The solution is obvious, put the phone onto the steering wheel and hold the wheel while you text with your thumbs.
After that: no more. Note that the normal scapegoats -taxis and minicabs- are not joining in. They work in the car, there's no need for them to text ahead saying "I am stuck in the traffic jam that stretches from Arley Hill to M32 and which appears here every evening".
Looking at the numbers from that last video and comparing with Clifton, in that initial stretch from Nugent Hill to the lights, there are 13 cars, of which five are on the phone: one speaking, four texting.
Thats 38% of our sample set. Discount the speaking and focus on texting: 30%.
Those are numbers clifton doesn't even come close to. Here we have a line of traffic and over one driver in three is on the phone.
We actually agree with them. Yes, we do love to see new junction improvements adding gratuitous pinch points, such as on the top of Jacob's Wells Road -because that stops the cyclists sneaking up the inside and avoiding in queueing.
But at the same time, we suffer when we have to wait behind a cyclist that is blocking the way. Or, if we go past when there is plenty of room, we still have to deal with abuse.
Look at this video of Cotham Brow. It's a quieter Cotham Brow than normal -roadworks have isolated it from Gloucester Road at the bottom. Having less traffic, it should be better to drive up, as you don't have to negotiate a narrow route with oncoming vehicles. Yet all it takes is one selfish cyclist to get in the way and you are stuck going up a hill at under 10 mph.
Pinch points make this worse, by removing opportunities to pass.
Here in the video, one of the cyclists has dismounted and is pushing their bike up the 8-9% gradient hill, so allowing important people past. Yet the one with the camera does not -and they have the audacity to be abusive (swearing!) at the important people in the volvo XM08XMJ. Do you think the woman in the passenger seat wants to hear language like that? To see her face on you tube? We think not.
What is annoying is that the pinch point is entirely gratuitous. It's on a zebra crossing. They could take away the island and it would still be a zebra crossing. Even if in theory the island would let two-way traffic have to stop less often, it's too narrow a road for two-way traffic further down the hill, so entirely moot.
All this traffic island does is introduce conflict at a point where it is not needed. Removing it would not only benefit pedestrians and cyclists, it would help us driving by stopping us being held up by tax-dodging and abusive troublemakers.
In this video, the tax-dodging and abusive troublemaker actually adds insult to insult, by turning left down Freemantle Road, then left again to descent Nugent Hill at speed, then joining Arley Hill to get to Montpelier.
That means that they had no justification for going up the hill and getting in the way of the Volvo, they climbed up Cotham Brow at 8-9 mph purely to aggravate people in a hurry. Then, by bypassing the cars in the Arley Hill queue, they go on to aggravate people who have been waiting patiently.
Finally, they descended Nugent Hill at about 28 mph -even though you can clearly see lots of schoolchildren walking to school -families forced to walk as an anti-car council blocked up all the secret routes from Cheltenham Road to Kingsdown. The fact that they can get up to such dangerous speeds on a weekday morning shows how the removal of commuter parking actually endangers schoolchildren. Before the RPZ rollout, every road would have someone driving around looking for a space to park, every junction have someone pulling out as they went round the block again. These people performed the valuable role of traffic calming cyclists, who couldn't descend a hill like this without worrying about vehicles coming out of side roads. Now, with the exception of the one at the bottom, they don't have to do that.
Whereas before the cyclist was selfish by going up a hill at under 10 mph, now they are being selfish and dangerous by descending above 20 mph. There is no speed on our streets where they are safe -they are unwelcome at any speed!
The other "say no to RPZ" myth is: there's no guarantee of parking even within an RPZ.
Maybe, but here is Nugent Hill, and there are plenty of guarantees here. And this is on a Saturday.
The main guarantee of "nowhere to park" is the decisions of your neighbours: how many vehicles they own, what type, and where they park them.
One of the most resented parking problems in Kingsdown and Cotham is actually student parking in the HMO-student houses. A house with 4+ students would often have 3-4 cars, cars which would sit there all week. Sometimes the students would even forget where they'd left them -you can see them wandering about on a weekend.
The RPZ has said "residents are buying the option of using their car on weekdays in exchange for limiting vehicles/household to two, maybe three". Well, that limiting of vehicle numbers is what keeps space around. You still see the student cars, with their Cotham RPZ sticker alongside their London one: richmond, highgate, whatever. But you don't see so many.
The result: more space.
There's another aspect to this. Whenever some land fill-in has some new flats built, the landowners always say this is a "sustainable development", putting in a bike rack and pretending the owners won't own a pair of cars. Now the council can say "if it really is sustainable, there'll be a one car limit". This forces the architects to come up with designs that admit there is a need for on-site parking -so not creating problems for the existing residents- or embracing that sustainability story by saying "it's designed for a one-car household" -and making it suitable.
So again, this shows that the RPZ isn't anti-car, especially anti-resident-car. It's anti many-student-cars-that-never-move, and its anti-fake-sustainable-development-proposals, but for anyone who lives in an area who likes somewhere to park evenings and weekend, the upper limit of vehicle ownership benefits them by restricting the amount of space their neighbours will occupy.
For anyone living in Clifton saying "no guarantee of parking", they have to ask themselves:
Do they ever find that student parking is an issue, and during term time do they find they have no guarantees of being able to park on their own street?
Do they ever to oppose new planning proposals on the basis that it doesn't provide enough off-street parking to avoid reducing parking guarantees for existing residents?
If either of those two questions are answered with a yes -you have problems that an RPZ can address
We are impressed. Every day that one of the team members has been down to Cheltenham Road this week, there's been a vehicle or two outside Tesco. What was once one of the showcase "cycle city" and "Greater Bristol Bus Network" routes has been returned to the tax paying driver -and as vans and lorries pay more road tax, they deserve to use it first.
"Slug" sends a couple of Pics from 09:15 on Friday 17 June showing a security van outside tesco,
And right outside the credit union, another lorry, MX07GJV
As slug says " It can be very dangerous for a cyclist to cycle in the cycle lane because it is to the left of traffic turning left. So the lorry driver out of concern for the potential danger that inexperienced cyclists are putting themselves in, decided to park on the double yellow lines ... ignoring the no unloading sign.
Behind the vehicle you can see all the way to the security van that is also parked on the cycle lane -and in between the lane is completely empty! Mission accomplished! no cyclists Left Hooked at Ashley junction this morning.
Interestingly, we have a different video of the same stretch of road from someone else taken about ten minutes later. This video is interesting because it is from the perspective of one of the tax-dodgers, someone who is trying to get across the city "after 9am because the roads are quieter." See that? These people have deliberately chosen to commute outside "the rush hour" because they prefer it. But that reduction in road traffic creates an illusion of safety -and encourages more of such behaviour.
At 0:03 there's another cyclist on Freemantle Road -heading towards the university or Clifton, then our underemployed camera-enabled tax-avoider descends Nugent Hill, an option forbidden to cars, especially since they put that island in at the bottom to stop right turns, a feature few motorists have managed to deal with. Our troublemaker negotiates that island by abusing the contraflow bike lane on Arley Hill, then flips into the left lane to undertake the stationary traffic to wait for a green light.
While waiting we see important people in cars and taxis, some public transport users, and unimportant pedestrians, and another cyclist at 1:58 crossing over to the contraflow. Because The A38 here, it could unify or divide the city. The council wanted to make it a showcase for the cycle city program, encouraging people from Bishopston (out of town; to the left) to head into the city centre, down this very road!
That is something we need to stop, which is why we are grateful for Tesco and its support. Because as well as unifying the cyclists, it could divide them. It and Muller road are the two roads that anyone cycling around north Bristol has to encounter, and if we can only roll back any pro-cycling "enhancements" there, then we can discourage anyone not just from cycling on these main roads, but even get across them.
That is why it is so essential to fight them on the streets, and why the Tesco delivery process is helping transform this road, and hence the whole of north Bristol.
At 2:14 you can see the bicycle head in to town. Although they think they have a lane to themselves, at 2:22 you can see their mistake -the security van has moved on since 09:15, but another delivery van has taken its place. Then at 2:34, a car half on the pavement, half on the bike lane. That bike lane is considered unsafe anyway, which is why they and the next lorry are blocking it. What's changed since the photos earlier is that the lorry seems to be deciding to pull out now; it's flipped its indicators on. The tax dodger goes past, and at 2:47 you can see another paveparked van; a 2:49 a similar car. All it takes is one or two vehicles doing this, all the time, every day, and people will be discouraged not just from commuting along this road by bicycle, but across it.
At 3:04 our troublemaker does a U-turn and heads out of town, showing that the bike lane there is in its usual state: short stay parking for shop customers and staff. This bike lane has been reclaimed!
At 3:36, they are now waiting to turn right towards montpelier, where you can see that the row of vehicles blocking the left lane do actually turn it into a bikes-only lane, albeit because nobody actually wants to turn left. Anyone turning left will have to swing over from the right hand lane, which might be a surprise to anyone cycling down it, of which we can see a couple at 3:50.
Then, finally, at 3:54, our errant tax dodger turns right, and then left into Montpelier, where they can feel slightly safer.
You see that? How the quiet bits of the city, Cotham and Montpelier, can be made cycling unfriendly not by adding any anti-cycling infrastructure, but by making it unpleasant to cross the roads between them. We don't need to ask the council for special anti-bicycle features, the way they do in Waltham Forest, all we need to do is park our delivery vans where we want on the roads the cyclist have to cross. It only takes a couple of HGVs to set an example, and once it's begun, every else will copy. What was a bike lane has become a parking area, not just to achieve the tactical goal: park outside our destination, but to achieve a strategic one: to knife the cycling city dream in the back.
Whose streets? Ours! For parking in whenever we want!
One day in the week, our drive up Nugent Hill was interrupted by this woman pushing a bicycle with a small child on it up the road.
Madam, if you are going to push the bike up a hill, could you make it Ninetree Hill, which, having already been closed to cars, is not disrupted by a cyclist walking up it.
Later on in the week, something worse. The entire road closed while officials -in hi-viz- make some film shoot which apparently required no adults in the shot, and cars blocked from this road while these teenagers pretended to play.
Such media coverage will only reinforce the myth that teenagers should ride bicycles and roads are a safe place for them to do it. It is a an affront for our TV licensing tax to be frittered away on pro-cycling propaganda!
A recurrent theme in the Evening Post web site is how bicycles harass cars. Finally we have collected evidence of this, from our instrumented cyclists.
First off, somerset street, Kingsdown. A taxi is waiting in the middle of the road. The cyclist cannot get past. This is not the taxis fault, it is the fault of the car that has chosen to park on the pavement to the right of the taxi. Together: no room for a bicycle.
When the tax dodger comes to a halt, the taxi/minicab waves their hand to point out that spring hill is to the right, the cyclist could back up and go up that road. But no, the cyclist stays put, and after a bit more hand waving the driver turns their engine on, backs up a bit. And the cyclist continues -then turns up Montague Hill, so making it clear they could have gone up Spring Hill, but were just being selfish and lazy. Think of the extra fuel wasted and pollution costs of forcing the car to turn their engine on and reverse -yet these troublemakers imply they are the "green" transport.
Another day, the Nugent HillContraflow. As usual, a car needs to run the one-way system so as to get to Arley Hill and the new tesco project on Cheltenham Road.
Initially the bicycle blocks the car by staying in the middle of the no-entry section, but then even when the tax-dodger deigns to get out the way to the driver paying for the roads, they get their camera out and harass the driver by threatening to photo them as they do "a bit of contraflow work". And who doesn't do that, from time to time? Yet now with these digital cameras built into phones, stuck on bicycles or helmets, anyone can take a video of an innocent motorist, send it off to the police and have someone get more penalty points on their license.
As the Daily Telegraph says, quoting the AA, "There is a wide range of new regulations waiting to catch you out." driven by NuLabour and their "new government road casualty targets". This nanny-state government went and made up new anti-car laws waiting to trap the innocent motorist, like "being involved in a fatal accident while unlicensed or uninsured" and "causing death by careless driving". As the Telegraph says, if you innocently kill someone while carelessly driving in an uninsured car -and how can you insure your car once the DVLA takes away your license from some minor drink-driving offence- it's now a prison sentence. In the old days, with their requirement for "reckless" or later "dangerous" driving, you could get a lawyer who went to the same school and participated in the same hunt as you and the judge show that you were only slightly careless when you ran your range rover through a zebra crossing full of people while talking on the phone. Now killing people through mere carelessness has penalties! This is so wrong. It is exactly the kind of thing we look forward to a new government fixing. Remove penalties for running red lights and contraflowing, ban the bicycles! Yet will any of the mainstream parties stand up for the motorist? We doubt it!
We have some back catalogue of vehicles getting into trouble on ice on Nugent Hill
It doesn't come out that well in the pics, but here these vehicles on Nugent Hill drivers must have had a bit of a fright.
This one is wedged in on a corner where it must have been skidding down the road until they got to veer toward somethign that would halt it.
This next one got a fair bit further down the road before they managed to bring it to a halt. It's entered the contraflow , but they managed to get it to halt without causing any damage, and its been left until the snow goes away.
This last car WN08EZX ended up going all the way down the contraflow, executing a right turn despite the "no right turn" feature on Arley Hill, and managed to come to a halt just before the traffic lights with Cheltenham Road. The driver must have been pretty shaken up. We are glad they made it down the hill safely!
On a normal evening you'd think "Oh, this car is running the one-way stretch to bypass congestion on Cotham Brow and put in on the Arley Hill traffic jam". But this wasn't a normal evening. No road traffic, no traffic jams, and both Cotham Brow and Arley Hill were gritted. There was no rational reason to deliberately drive the wrong way down the Nugent Hill contraflow -an ungritted road on a steep hill, when the legal option was in fact safer.
That leaves
They loved danger
They were stuck in this ungritted part of the city and the only way out was down the hill
For these reasons we will not be passing the photograph of this vehicle on to the local Kingsdown police, the way we normally do to help our city's drivers resistance to the oppressive anti-car one-way infrastructure get more widely recognised. We in Bristol Traffic celebrate your bravery!
Some people point to our linking to Stolen Bristol bikes, as a sign that we are not really anti-bike. However, we don't like bikes being stolen as (a) they get replaced, so increasing the number of bicycles in our streets and (b) the people who steal bikes move up to cars later. Believing that bike thieves should be put to their death before they have learned to drive does not conflict with our other belief, namely that cyclists should be beaten soundly with their own bicycle before being made to pay 15 years worth of back-tax on their vehicle. Indeed, we hope to see the DVLA van performing such a service rather than clamping car drivers who innocently forget to tax, MOT and insure their cars.
We do not like to hear of stolen bikes. Sadly, today, this one: a Marin aluminium mountain bike, rock-shock suspension forks. The key features: small child seat on the front and the seat-post attachments to clip a tagalong and second small child on the back. Taken from near Fairlawn Road, Montpelier, while the father was returning the tagalong to the house.
The owner and his small children will now have to walk to school, which will still inconvenience us car-driving parents, especially as such an ex-cyclist is going to be the kind of troublemaker who ends campaigning against cars driving down the pavement.
Hopefully whoever stole the bicycle will realise that child seats are uncool and abandon it, in which case the owner will be grateful for any sightings.
July 3rd, 18:18. Tennis still on. Tennis lovers in a rush to get home. Which means "bending the rules". The little ones. Like one way streets, and which direction you are allowed down them
First the van YR51XJX sprints down Nugent Hill and, showing the agility that modern ford transit vans have, swings right onto Arley Hill.
Then while taking that photo, this other car R214RVN popped down the nugent hill contraflow, swerved round the bit of pavement put in to stop cars turning right, and carried on down Arley Hill. But they at least waved at the camera.
Given that this junction has been fairly peaceful since the "feature" was added, what could bring two cars to do this within 30s, given there isn't even a traffic jam up Arley Hill? The only possible explanation: tennis lovers in a rush home.
This on the afternoon of the St Werburgh's Fair: someone has graciously put a sofa in their driveway on Nugent Hill.
It may seem like a little gesture, but when you are walking up the hill, somewhere to sit is good. There are no council provided seats, so this privately managed resting facility is much appreciated. Some day, every hill in Bristol will have a sofa half way up it.
Since the island went in at the bottom of Nugent hill, we have had no submissions of photos of any cars driving the wrong way down the one-way section. Since we were getting one a week and the island has been up for four weeks, that was quite an improvement. Has it stopped cars trying to avoid Cotham Brow and most of the Arley Hill traffic jam? Yes -most cars.
But not, apparently, "Direct to you Cleaning Services", and their van VA06DDN
This is the first vehicle encountered doing the contraflow with the island in place. Interestingly, it does make it harder to pull out, because cars in the Arley Hill traffic jam can ignore you more easily -the contraflowing vehicle can't edge out and force its way in to the line of traffic. Now it has to rely on a vehicle coming down the hill to be generous.
If we have a reduction of one vehicle report every four weeks compared with one a week, that's a reasonable success, possibly a 25% reduction in the number of cars or vans completely ignoring no entry signs in this stretch of road. Progress!
Oddly enough, the driver of this vehicle, was not at all excited to be the first person to enter our database for this action since the road was changed. After congratulating him, instead of him saying "Thank you", he said "Fuck off and get a life". Which is a shame, as he has shown such dedication to shaving 30s off his journey that he really needs to be recognised, and he should be proud of the recognition.
We shall forward his photograph to the local PACT group in order for him to be more formally recognised.
Here in Bath Buildings, a car is completely blocking the pavement alongside Kwik-Fit: the dropped kerb here must have convinced the owner that they can park here when Kwik-Fit is closed.
With the roadworks on the other side of the road, there is no way to walk into Montpelier without going on the road.
This may seem an inconvenience, but the driver of PKA3A10 has deliberately parked here to make it clear to pedestrians that they are in Montpelier, and it is socially acceptable to walk down the middle of the road.
This is to make clear the contrast between Monty and the Nugent Hill area of Cotham, where the pavements are kept clear, but pedestrians are positively discouraged from using the road.
Vehicles like YN52NNU selflessly park across corners and dropped kerbs to ensure that pedestrians stay in their part of the street, and do not interfere with passing cars.
Nugent Hill is a regular on this site, as cars running the contraflow are part of the evening entertaiment. But not for long.
At the bottom of the contraflow, where the hill joins Arley Hill, a new island is going up which is positioned precisely to stop cars turning right.
It also provides space for bikes using their contraflow lane to go up, forcing oncoming cars to get to the proper side of the road. Progress.
There's only a couple of concerns here in Bristol Traffic, semi-official docuementary of our streets
1. Why are there no warning signs telling cars about to run the Nugent Hill one-way stretch that they can't turn right at the bottom?
2. What's going to happen when downhill bikes are forced into exactly the same narrow lane that the uphill bikes are using? In the space of a few minutes observation, one of the two downhilling bikes chose that option.
We propose that the traffic island gets a dropped kerb for downhilling bikes, and the space for a lit sign on the downhill side filled in, letting the DH bikes take the corner at speed, pop up the dropped kerb and the jump off into the gap between cars in their traffic jam and bikes going uphill. This would make it fun and reduce the risk of head-on collisions.
Spring is coming, making the streets lighter. This is making it easier to photograph cars on their evening journey home Even at 18:11, a photo of this Honda civic R968NKX clearly shows it driving the wrong way down the one-way stretch of Nugent Hill, whereas a few months back, the photo would have been a complete blur, leaving only our video of the car in the traffic queue round the corner and the voiceover registration number reading as the sole evidence of its discovery of a secret new shortcut through Kingsdown.
Tuesday morning's ride; Nugent Hill was, well, hairy. Some cycling campaigners demand gritting and other facilities for bikes, and while it may make sense for the railway path, one big problem is that all the back roads of the city form the safe and quiet bike routes of the city. Yet it is impossible to expect the council to grit every single back road of the city. Either different equipment is needed: studded tyres, or a bit of route replanning is in order. And here's the route. Getting to here was a bit tricky -St Andrews was skittery, but up on the Purdown Camp escarpment, there's the tracks of 3 or 4 other bikes that chose the off-road option.
Looking forward to thursday's conditions - the snow is falling already
Looking down nine-tree hill, we can see that the number of trees on it is still below nine, and that some people have been forced to abandon their cars and trudge up hill. Over on Nugent hill, it was steep and hard work to get up It had actually been gritted at the bottom, which is something to praise. This has been quite an icy route some mornings this winter, the big problem being the cyclist is lined up to hit the contraflow gate at speed and a car will pull out on the left, not expecting any straight-on traffic. Although technically the cars pullinout may be at fault, given the visibility from parked cars and the fact that this is a residential back road, keeping the speed down may make sense.
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.
There is an emergent movement for Bristol to become a Transition City; to become one that is ready to handle a post-oil environment, one in which you grow your food in an allotment, and cycle around instead of driving. Ignoring implementation details like the fact that even in WWII, when the population of the island was on 30M, we couldn't grow enough to live on, it is an admirable goal.
These two cars are participating in Transition City Bristol. They are transiting from commuting by car, to commuting by bike. First, at 18:04 on 27 Jan 2009 the Toyota Minivan, H603EEU
Secondly FM04HYR seen at 18:33 on 28/jan/09. How exactly are these vehicles transitioning?
They are learning to get around Bristol as a bicycle, both having just used the bicycle-only contraflow to get down Nugent Hill.
Already they are learning the benefit of avoiding much of the Arley Hill traffic jam, and the ability to go through the nearly-traffic-free area around Nugent Hill. Perhaps next they are off to use the bus lane on Cheltenham Road before turning left towards the M32, or may even head to the Montpelier Multimodal Interchange to swap transport modalities.
Once they are confident that they know the bicycle routes round the city, we expect them to engage the next stage of the transition, to actually leave the car behind and get the bicycle out. First things first though: learning the routes.
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