The cycling police state: first they came for themselves

Cycling is apparently, "the new golf" for the silicon valley people -the cyclists building the new surveillance state.

They can pop out on a weekend and climb the Santa Cruz Mountains

In the distance, the airship hangars of Moffet Field, which we covered earlier.

We pointed out that the NSA could easily run a fibre cable under the cycle path to the Googleplex. We broke that news two weeks before the "legacy" printed press. Nobody can accuse us of being a spoof now.

What do these police-staters talk about? Their plans for watching everybody. But who do they start with? The drivers? The pedestrians? No, they come for themselves, with the Strava application running on their phones, measuring their time up Old La Honda.



With their phones they can measure their speed, compare it with others, and give them their performance on a ride

 
Which is where we have some bad news for this particular tax-dodger. 2400 of 7500 puts them only just inside the top 1/3 of climbers, which isn’t very good, not for someone near the top of ninetree hill. And that heart-rate numbers makes it clear they were suffering all the way up, heart rate jittering between 170 and 184.Which tells us that they are under fit, getting old and losing peak heart rate, and possibly overfond of consuming beer at those establishments at the top of Ninetree Hill, such as the Hillgrove.

No, this person wasn’t up to having business deal conversations with anyone else, not in aerobic deficit for half an hour. If cycling is the new golf, this person isn’t a good golfer.

Which is information that Strava now knows. In fact, it will know

• who they ride with.
• what their fitness levels are.
• whether they are Soft Southern Jessies who don’t cycle in the rain.
• what their commuting schedule and route is
• what their leisure hours are
• what health issues they may have

This is valuable information -and yet they are giving it away for graphs of how fit they think they are.

For everyone worried about the cyclists building a surveillance state, know this: they will practise on themselves first until they have it right

Love bristol go brent -issue 2

More coverage of Brent, looking at anything we can learn from here

First, look at how the council has taken a lane away from the road -they could have turned it into a bike lane, but chose to add extra pavement, in the hope of adding extra walking area will increase footfall.

It doesn't, but it does provide some staff parking

Here and across the road

Where the bollards prevent staff parking, the shops are for sale. There are some conclusions to be drawn here.

More tangible is the effort gone to stop shoppers parking on the nearby pavements, with bollards backing up the yellow lines

bollards on bollards
 
It's the removal of the paveparking opportunities, along with the sainsbury's round the corner that killed this high street. Widening the pavement has done nothing for anyone: on foot, on car, or even pedalling along on two wheels

Love Bristol Go Brent #3

As we said, the pavement provides extra parking options. First, note the bollards, They aren't designed to stop vehicles getting on to the pavement so much as to make it clear to pedestrians that turning vehicles can cut over that corner. Vans that want to park can just get up onto the pavement past the bollards


Some viewers may think "this road is four lanes wide in every direction, and the pavement is perfectly wide enough to have a good, segregated bike lane". Those people are missing the point.

  
The four-lane-wide road provides enough space for an HGV to do a U-turn.
 d
So letting it get up and park on the pavement in the direction it's going.

You couldn't do that if there was a cycle path here.

The sheer provision of a vast off-road "pavement" here is a fantastic facility for motorists. It's wide enough that street furniture can be kept far enough back to make parking along here easy -regardless of the length of your vehicle.

Bristol just lacks the imagination. Even that "let them park on the pavements" mayoral candidate explicitly mentioned Gloucester road as an example place where paveparking shouldn't be permitted.

Yet Gloucester Road is a shopping street -like this one in London- the provisioning of more pavement parking area is what is critical to keep it alive. Look at the one here -even with all this excellent paveparking it's barely surviving.

Love Bristol -go Brent #2

Continuing our tour of the best ideas from Brent, we want to highlight side roads that don't let pedestrians cross them

by doing this on a "shopping street", Brent makes sure that nobody who actually -insanely tries to walk to the shops will feel as unwelcome as they should be.
  
All it takes is a continual line of traffic, pig-pen barriers to make you feel unsafe, and no attempt to provide anything other than a dropped kerb.
 
The best bit? That wide pavement provides extra parking opportunities.

Love Bristol -go Brent

We went over in our van to see how leading edge councils were improving motoring conditions.

Brent, initially.

The first step is competely remove all front gardens and replace them with cars. This not only increass parking capacity by 50-100%, it makes it far more obvious to passers by who is the wealthiest. The house on the right with the Porsche, the 4x4 and the Audi is clearly more important than the toyota owners next door.
 
The other key isse is infrastructure provisioning.

Together with TfL, Brent and Harrow councils have made sure that the shopping areas are very accessible by cars, with laybys and two lanes on this, Kenton Road, for the shopping traffic.

As you can see, there are no cyclists and very few pedestrians -so that car traffic is essential to the livelihood of the remaning shops.

Brent -what are the cyclists complaining about

On our london trip to the Zil Lanes, we spotted in Kenton this segregated cycle lane

The barriers keep the cyclists safely separated from the moving cars in the foreground, and the dedicated shoppers parking lane and parking area behind. We can see they improve safety by the way that 80% of the barriers are bent or bashed -that's a lot of "cyclist hit a car" incidents that have been prevented.
 
Yes, for the 30 metres of this path, the cyclists of Brent have nothing to complain about
 
If we had an issue, notice in the left of the photo how there is a car parked up against the cycle sign. The addition of a pedestrian crossing and cycleway stops parking on the through-traffic lane, so reduces  the parking capacity of this shopping street from four cars in parallel (there's the other side of the road), to two cars. This is exactly the kind of anti-parking measures that are leading to the death of traditional high streets such as this.

the Zil Lanes of London

We had to use the range rover for a special delivery to London this week -the national coverage of Stokes Croft has expanded our customer base. If someone called "Boris" wants a four day old cheeseburger from Slix, we will oblige.

Over in London, we saw the first "Zil Lanes", lanes dedicated to exclusive use of important people.

We have has these for a while, "bus lanes", only the fact that bicycles are banned from here makes it better.


Before anyone asks, "how does the B.T team get to use them?", here's the answer.
 
Diplomatic plates

This sign is up in the Exhibition Road "Shared Space", which makes it extra special: we can share the space with any other vehicle with diplomatic plates. Lovely.

Fighting Back: why it doesn't work

People email us and say things. A lot of things, most of which we can't print, as they assume the team are some group of bicycle-people. Not so. it is just that we don't film from our own vehicles, so have to send out "expendable tax-dodgers" to get footage for us. Why don't we film ourselves? This video from London shows why.


As you can see videoing from the vehicle doesn't help

1. It stops you being able to make and take calls with the camera phone.
2. Holding a camera over a passenger while driving along makes it hard to maintain full speed, especially when you are hanging back to disagree with the cyclist.
3. The troublemakers all gang together when the police get involved

That's the worst part. Your own video can be used as evidence against you. As for the whole nature of this dispute -the tax dodger wing-mirror-taxing the smart car as it pulls out into his lane, well, if you have wing mirrors, you aren't a proper Bristol driver -a fact which the very presence of wing mirrors radiates to everyone nearby and puts you at a disadvantage in all right-of-way negotiations.

Anyone thinking of visiting the city -just stick some duct tape round the mirrors to create that local-driver look without having to actually do Richmond Road, Montpelier, at full speed.

Electric Vehicles

A lot of the press and our glorious leader of the Department of White Vans, "Hoverboard Hammond" is saying that electric vehicles are the future. We disagree, as their design goals are incompatible with white vans and their owners needs.

Their range is too limited, luggage space too small. They only suit people doing commutes to and from work. It's a very expensive way to subsidise that commute. 5000 pounds is like giving away a season ticket or five bicycles. It's like giving away a six year old car.

The EV charge points will take away parking from us the tax payer. We say "us", as EVs don't pay road tax, don't pay fuel duty, and therefore have no more rights than cyclists. So they should get off our roads!

Depreciation is an unknown. This isn't picked up on, but on a laptop with LiIon batteries, batteries decay with age -independent of use or charge cycles. That's why a five year old laptop has to stay plugged in to the mains all the time. As the users of vehicles that we like to run into the ground until the cost of MoT fixup becomes too high to justify continued use, this is ridiculous.

For the car manufacturers, having a shorter lifespan for their products suits them. That's why they had the vehicle scrappage scheme, that's why a second car that can only be used for commuting, shopping and school runs that will have a completely dud battery within 5-6 years has their eyes lit up, especially if the government is giving 5000 quid back on each purchase. The customers will still need the big car for weekends, so this lets them charge a premium on short-lived urban toys while pretending they are greeen.

But it doesn't suit us, the van drivers who keep the cities afloat. All they are are just more school run parents pootling along in our way.

This doesn't mean we are coming out in favour of boris bikes either -they take up parking and space, but since the space is in London's C-zone, that's not our problem. At least every user isn't being given 5000 pounds worth of our road tax money. And they are in London, not Bristol.

Don't try this in Stokes Croft

It seems that NYC is as bad as Stokes Croft. Both for Police persecution, and parking in cycle lanes...

It isn't enough -the freedom of freeways

Our main reason for a trip to the US was to learn from the road builders. Just as the cycling activists go to Denmark and the Netherlands, we, along with the West of England Partnership, head to America.

Look at this scene: flyovers and flyovers, heading into the distance. San Francisco

Up in the sky, from one freeway, another one above. So much choice, and that word, Freeway. Freedom. The American way.

From above, you can see wide city streets. What can you see from the M32? Eastville.

But it isn't enough. It's never enough. They built the roads, the people came, the economy grew. And the roads filled up.

What can be done to help the US -or UK economy. More roads. It's obvious really.

A roadbuilding program is never finished, never done. Yet in the UK we stick in a couple of flyovers and declare "Mission Accomplished". Only Glasgow recognises that the work is never done; that you need to keep planning motorways; more flyovers over the city; more bridges. We understand them.

We also see what the cycling troublemakers miss: the same thing applies to bicycle routes. Their adoption of "vehicular cycling", to cycle in our roads, means to surrender to our needs. Yes, they can get on our roads, while we sound our horn behind them, if we see them at all. But we drive the cars, going past them at 40 mph with six inches of clearance, saying "look how insane you'd have to be to cycle out there, it's really dangerous." They get out there, they have near-death experiences, they give up, drive, and the economy moves forward. It would only be by adopting a freeway-style program, one of cross-city routes, that they'd ever get anywhere. Yet in the big UK cities, nobody has noticed this. The only big in-city equivalent of a freeway for pedestrians and cyclists is of course the Bristol-Bath Railway Path, a flat, nearly uninterrupted route between the cities of the South West. Which is precisely why we and the WoEP want to put buses on it. Not only does it get buses off our roads, out of our way, it kills their dream: a walking and cycling version of a freeway.

Helmet legislation

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Bristol Traffic
Date: 1 February 2011 22:31
Subject: Helmet legislation
To: p.ramsey@sdlp.ie


The Bristol Traffic project exists to document the traffic issues in the city, of Bristol England ones we normally blame on pedestrians and cyclists.

Yet occasionally we use photographs from out of our fair city, "abroad", to provide commentary, and we have covered both Northern Ireland and your constituency town and its issues have surfaced
http://bristolcars.blogspot.com/search/label/ireland
http://bristolcars.blogspot.com/2009/02/new-cause.html

On that topic then, can the team thank you for giving us something new to make fun of. We love the idea of a country coming out the thirty years of darkness, picking on unified enemies, and cyclists make such a wonderful outgroup, we can imagine everyone all unified, all marching (or at least driving) with a common narrative for the region: cyclists are the common enemy. Except the cyclists of course, but that's not your problem or ours.

Thank you for giving us something new to talk about, sorry if it means you get more email criticising you!

The Bristol Traffic Project!
http://bristolcars.blogspot.com/

Fun in the Forest

We're a bit concerned about government plans to privatise the forests. This is not because we have taken up mountain biking -even though we appreciate such activities do not get in our way, we fear that they encourage the riders to get fit during the week by commuting.


We're slightly worried that even our papers, like the Daily Telegraph, are expressing doubts. But frankly we don't care that much about dog walking, horse riding or other daytime leisure activities.
 
Some people may think we would be in favour of cutting down the trees, putting in more shopping malls, new suburbs. Motorways. But remember, we are part of a big society that uses those forests for night time activities too.

Who hasn't nipped up the M4, over the old bridge and up to the Forest of Dean, pulled in one of the laybys and had an intimate encounter with a complete stranger from time to time? It doesn't matter about your sexual preferences, it's classless: MP, priest, van driver, housewife, TV presenter of football or car shows -it's all the same in the dark. Anonymous entertainment, with only the bridge tax to stop us doing more than three or four times a week.


And with our van being a roaming retail outlet for the city's sex life's accessories, those trips can a big business for us. Selling safe sex accessories in the 'dean can be a nice little earner -some of those TV presenters have been round the block a few times, and you need all the protection we can sell you.

The proposals to sell of the country's forest to the highest bidder will interfere with small businesses all round the country. 

There's a national campaign against this organising a petition; everyone should sign. There's also a local group, Hands off our Forest, working for the Forest of Dean itself.

These people have been very active, and have this lovely quote from their conservative MP Mark Harper on Jan 3 2011:

there are not and never have been any plans to sell off the Forest of Dean to developers who would cut down the Forest to replace it with recreation parks.

This is beautiful. If they say, sell off half the forest to developers who cut it down and replace it with recreation parks, the MP was being honest. If they say, sell of the entire forest, cut it down and replace it with suburban housing estates, the MP can say they were speaking truthfully. And if if they do sell of the entire forest and have it cut down and replaced with recreation parks, provided the documentation shows the planning didn't begin until Jan 4, then again, he was telling the truth at the time.

For some reason it reminds of Bill Clinton's "technically we did not have sex" claims, or Tony Blairs' "The legal opinion was that we didn't need a second resolution". A statement which, from a legal perspective is honest, but means something entirely different at the time. We'll have to remember something similar the next time one of the team's drivers is caught in a compromising situation with a local MP up near the Forest of Dean.




This is why we not only support the Hood campaing, we propose a new slogan for the campaign " Fuck in the forest, not with the forest"

Sleeping with the enemy

We at Bristol Traffic never hesitate to drive where others may fear to tread in the pursuit of truth and justice for motorists. It is in no small part to our fearless reporting that the war on the motorist is finally being won but are always keeping a look out for any danger that the enemy will retaliate.

Which is why we were very concerned to hear about a splinter group that is being formed specifically with the aim of attacking the rights of the motorist to drive where we damn well please. Who else but the tax dodging, lycra lout, cyclists, always whinging about our hard taxed money being spent on cycling "farcilities" that they should be grateful for. It seems that they want cycling infrastructure that is as good as the Dutch model (which, incidentally, we were very disappointed to hear does not involve David Walliams's wife.)

The meeting of this splinter group was in a far away forbidding place designed to strike fear in the heart of any motorist, yet we were spurred on by the recent revelation that the police planted an informer into an environmental activist group. If they could do it then so could we and so we fuelled up the white van and headed east, braving the congestion charge and the danger that we may need to have sex with some of them (despite being confident that they were all certain to be mamils.)

Our fears were realised; not the sex part unfortunately, but the purpose and organisation of this subversive organisation. Calling themselves the Cycling Embassy of Great Britain, it was a group of diverse, passionate and probably even intelligent people that are trying to take road space away from the motorist and give it to pedestrians, cyclists and communities. We were disturbed that there were so many attendees and as far as we could tell, not one of them was actually wearing lycra (apart from us trying to blend in), in fact the ringleader was wearing a suit!

It may be humble beginnings but we really fear that this group could actually make a difference with this manifesto. Whatever you do, do not encourage this behaviour or talk about the set up of their "Embassy" or before you know it there will be 20mph zones and no pavement parking for starters.

Do you really want this to happen to Bristol's gloriously car centric streets?

Aberdeen Good, Bristol Stupid

Here's a photo one of our roving reporters took.

Of Aberdeen.

Notice how carefully, and sensibly this city has been planned, unlike Bristol.

There's a railway for poor people to use, a proper road for real people to use, and a pavement for the bins. Luckily, there are no cyclists in sight (unlike Bristol).

Proper job.

Unfortunately, Bristol is full of idiots.

Luckily, the gene pool cleans itself, or so we're told.

Fraternal Greetings to our Aberdeen Franchise

The BBC has some excellent coverage of the anti-car experience in Scotland, where some people are being forced to use the (minimal) underground system round Glasgow, rather than drive. This saddens us.

We are pleased, therefore to announce our own contribution to helping Scotland's transport issues, by opening up the Aberdeen Franchise of our community service. We consider this the Big Society in action.

Apparently in Aberdeen, oil is so central to the local economy as car imports are to Avonmouth, so anyone not driving is rightfully viewed as some kind of social subversive threatening the entire existence of the city. In Bristol, this truth is not reported outside of the Evening Post, and its readership figures are so bleak we fear for the paper's continued existence.

Aberdeen Cars promises to explore the PaveParking opportunities of the city, as well as how to effectively drive and park in the area. Apparently also pagan era midwinter solstice rituals do take place on nearby standing stones, so in exchange for some of their "black haggis" we shall be sending up some "local food for local people" food from a well known stokes croft takeaway that provides special meat products for those they know well.

Aberdeen! Welcome to the Team!

Walthamizing Russell Square

Crap Walking and Cycling in Waltham Forest recently popped over to inner London to denounce the area for having a parking space.

Interestingly, this bit of the city exists in our database, but it was actually so depressing to us we hadn't bothered to put up. Look at this, Malet Street, the heart of the student area, just E. of Russell Square.

1. There is only one free parking space for electric vehicles. 
2. You are limited to parking there for 2h only, which is barely enough for a family-funded arts student to finish three cafe lattes.
3. The fast moving bicycles endanger the paintwork on these premium vehicles. 

Yet to the left of the EV parking space, there is clearly enough space to put in four or five more charge points, enough to make a greener city. Yet it is taken up (even on a saturday) by a vast collection of bicycles -parked on our road tax funded roads- and a zebra crossing, again, tax dodgers stealing Road Tax space.

Slightly south, a row of borisbikes on a pavement buildout.

And in the university itself, some bicycle lockers for staff -even they are being encouraged to cycle.

Paul Dirac -Bristol's greatest physicist, apparently moved from Cambridge to Florida in a dispute over allocated parking spaces. When are the London universities going to realise that the only way to attract and retain the best staff, and the most well-funded students, is by providing parking for motor vehicles?

New link: road justice

We've added a link to a new site today, Road Justice.

This is a Canadian site which puts up photographs of the terrible thing cyclists to Vancouver, such as cycle around without helmets. They also have that hard taxpayer/cyclist split that we use, though they don't yet call them Tax Dodgers!

Road Justice! Welcome to the debate about the future of transport in the cities of the world! We have one concern though: are they some kind of spoof? I mean, to criticise a cyclist just for standing on the pavement, or not having a helmet? Yes, we hate them too, but there aren't actually laws against owning a bicycle -yet.

They also ask for money, which makes us wonder if they are trying to trick us out of the money we have left after income and petrol tax takes away most of our earnings for bike lanes and buses. We have had enough money stolen without them asking for more.

Anyway, the link is up there, we are keeping an eye on them to see if they stay consistent and aren't some kind of trick site put together by tax-dodging cyclists to discredit us, Bristol's premier traffic news outlet. The fancy web site design and the demands for money are warning signs. If we think they are spoof, we'll delete the cross-link before long. Credit for the Copenhagenize blog for bringing this site of fellow-travellers to our attention.

Feedback: the Southsea Cycle Lane

We like to track that we are on message by the mail and comments we get back: if people aren't upset by the truths, well, we aren't writing the right truths. Our Portsmouth Seafront Update upset someone, so it must have been good.

We criticised someone for cycling down the (admittedly wide) seafront, arguing that their actions were not only endangering themselves, their child and pedestrians, but the entire Southsea seafront economy.



This triggered some feedback from Byron of Southsea, who said

"There are a few cheap stalls and a run down arcade along the front...so how much do you think the economy of Southsea is really affected? Of course the real sensible solution is (like many other seaside towns in the UK) to paint a cycle lane along the promenade. It has ample width. We must try harder to get people out of their cars and (safe) walking or cycling."

Well  we looked back through our photographs, dataset, as we like to call them, and concluded that yes, the arcade is a bit run down, as is the funfair at the end of the pier.



The photographs hide the 20mph wind which made the crazy-golf a bit more problematic than usual, but you get the general flavour. Room for improvement.

Similarly, the clubs along the seafront do appear to have seen better days. All that was up and running over the bank holiday was the Southsea Folk and Roots Festival, and even there the bar on the South Pier let the side down by running out of all beers  -even Fosters- by Sunday evening.



However, note that these photographs were taken on the same day we saw the man and his child cycling down the seafront. There is no way to disprove our claim that the cause of the problems is in fact the intermittent cyclists and their families on the sea front, scaring off people from the arcade or the night clubs.

Byron! We thank you for your feedback but we refudiate it!

Portsmouth Seafront update

For the bank holiday w/end we checked out the anti-bicycle improvements in Portsmouth.

We couldn't be bothered to drive our van to where the new segregated bike path is, so we stood by the Southsea Pier to watch two cyclists who have come from it experience the joy of a FirstBus bus turning over them.

They survived to carry on the short distance before they have to swerve out past the parked cars to then get in our way.

For those people who aren't in the loop, the Portsmouth Council has pulled in plans to expend the bike path all the way west "for review" after complaints about the first stretch. This means there is nowhere safe for cyclists in this part of the town.

Well, some people may make the case for the sea front itself, but you can see on a bank holiday weekend that this is over-busy. The valuable revenue streams of the telescope and southsea pier fairground are dependent on passing traffic. These people walking down here -presumably people who drove here first- hold together the local economy. Reducing parking or making walking more hazardous would destroy it.

This parent selfishly cycling down the pavement at five miles an hour, with small child on the back, is not only endangering pedestrians

He is threatening the entire economy of the Portsmouth/Southsea seafront.