WN15UKX beats the school run queues

It's term time in the city, a so the morning rush hour is worse, and we've seen the return of the mid-afternoon one, seen here.

In order to get anywhere, you need "flexible and imaginative solutions" as our Brexit negotiators say.


Here the driver of WN15UKX finds it impossible to make progress without risking their wing mirrors.

Residents of the inner city know that having wing mirrors is a sign of weakness, but here the driver of WN15 UKX isn't going to let the fact they value their bodywork slow them down. Instead, a neat little nip up onto the pavement, a quick sprint at 14 mph down the pavement and they are on their way. Maybe he was late for child pickup. Because you wouldn't want your child to walk home: it isn't safe, not even on the pavements.

Its drivers like this which give us selfish wanker BMW owners a bad reputation.

Room for Manouevre

Very often people who park their vehicles in mandatory bike lanes are accused of being lazy, selfish and of endangering and inconveniencing cyclists. This may be the case sometimes, but it is not always true, as shown here in Grove Road, Redland

As you can see, it is possible to safely negotiate the junction

the cyclist may be left facing oncoming traffic where they appear to have just popped out from behind a van, but as this is part of the Sustrans NCN4 route, who doesn't want a frisson of excitement before the dullness of the Railway Path?

True Grit

We've been up to Redland, checking out that our roads have been properly gritted.

Remember, people, we pay for the roads, so you can grit them.

Imagine our surprise, therefore, when we found an Igloo, no moving cars, and a place full of community spirit. There were snowmen, of course, but the Igloo caught our attention, as it doesn't have planning permission.

Seasoned readers of this blog will appreciate that we can't stand law-breakers, although we're sure the police will be onto them as a crew from HTV West are reported to have turned up to film the miscreants that created the object.

A group of students (unwashed, probably) built it, and one apparently had the audacity to actually sleep in the Igloo last night to promote the plight of the homeless young in Bristol.

Worse still, they've set up a website where you can actually give money to a charity to support the homeless. Here: http://www.justgiving.com/redlandigloo. Here's the proof:

Quite why people should get involved with this sort of thing is beyond us. Surely their time would have been better spent gritting our roads? 

The upstanding residents of Woodland Road, next to the Igloo, have their priorities much more clearly focused, using the local grit bin to proper effect, ensuring they have direct access to Bristol's road network no matter what the weather.

Saving the taxpayer money

We like this.

By selflessly parking on the pavement, the driver of this Audi - WV56YKD - has managed to save us, the tax payers, the expense of at least 3 square metres of new pavement surfacing in Redland. We are impressed.

Occupy Redland

OK... College Green is full of tents. The grass is a bit buggered. Billy Bragg has sung to the masses. The Council is letting it happen. All good.


So it's nice to see that a break away group appears to have established itself in Redland. Not on the Green, but near it.

This car, we're sure, is the new outpost for "Occupy Redland". YCZ7199. It's been here for the last three days, making quite a statement by parking in a slightly anarchistic state. On the junction of Hartington Park and Woodstock Road.


We thought of inviting the Daily Mail down, with their heat seeking cameras, to see if it was being used at night, but so far we've had nothing positive. 

Exploring Clifton's secret 20 mph zone

Round the back of the school, there's a walking only dropoff area, where the kids can learn to walk round paveparked vans by going on the road.

Then at the end of Wellington Park it meets Whiteladies Road and comes to a timely end
 

Where things return to normal: 30mph, pinch points, pretend bike lanes with tax-earning vans temporarily parked on the associated yellow lines

On the other side, in Redland, they have painted some bicycles on the road of the sustrans "route 4"

These may encourage cycling, but at least they encourage the cyclist to stay far enough out to avoid damaging vehicles, such as the mini WR57XBX corner parked on the double yellow lines. Incidentally, this road may be one that voted against becoming an RPZ. And well they should, as the enforcement of parking rules would remove such parking opportunities.

Laura Local: our favourite new tier-3 provincial journalist

We feel really sorry for the Bristol Evening Post. Most of the real journalists have moved on, leaving only a few people who are actually valued for their knowledge of the area and their willingness to type what senior management want them to write (Ian Onion), and, to replace the others, some unpaid interns trying to learn how to write HTML content to put local journalism as an item on their resume.

In the latter category, then, can we welcome Laura Local, who is now our favourite third-tier reporter for the Redland People subsidiary web site of the Evening Post. We think "redland people" is a bit overambitious, as it implies all the residents check it every morning saying "what's happened in our part of the city?", but that doesn't happen. Nothing much happens there except when some drunk students put some traffic cones on some cars, or the helicopter over stokes croft keeps people awake. Even then, reading about in the Redland People site isn't the way most people discuss some items. In fact, given their readership count, we believe the site would be called "Redland Eight People"; the eight being friends and family of the authors.

Laura, we are pleased to see, is trying hard to get the audience into double digits by printing an anti-cyclist rant. We do that ourselves, which is why our daily audience is in the high double digits, and we can see why a commercial site that tries to make money through advertising revenue would aspire to be as successful. Hence this lovely article, Redland cyclists among the worst in the Bristol? Here's the opening paragraph

I was turning right out of North Road by the Arches when a cyclist, who wasn't wearing a helmet I hasten to add, whizzed by in the middle of the road heading the direction I wanted to go - towards Gloucester Road. I pulled out behind him, as I would have done had he been a car and he stopped in front of me all of a sudden and started mouthing off before jumping the red light.

Maybe I was a little too close to him when I pulled out but I felt any criticism was rich coming from a guy who was bombing down the centre of the road without a helmet and straight through a red light!

We aren't going to defend the tax-dodger, but we will provide some constructive feedback to the author

1. It's not actually a legal requirement to wear a helmet. The only time you should criticise them for not wearing a helmet is when someone gets run over by an HGV driver on the phone, then you can say in the daily mail comments section "were they wearing a helmet" and so absolve the whole of society for their death. We do.
2. It's not illegal to cycle down the middle of a lane. Yes, it annoys us as it stops us driving above 25 mph, but for the troublemakers, it gives them more options avoiding being hit by redland residents who are too lazy to drive to the gloucester road shops, and who open their doors without looking or pull out without indicating.
3. If you were the first vehicle to pull out, and you were parked in the ASL under the arch itself, the cyclist may have crossed the traffic light while it was still green, then if you pulled out aggressively he may have had some reason to express concern.
4. Don't ever admit in print something like "Maybe I was a little too close to him when I pulled out." It removes your ability to take the moral high ground. We never discuss our own driving actions for this reason, or make videos from our van -the police might want them.
5. Gloucester Road isn't Redland. It's Bishopston, on one side, St Andrews on the other. When when it becomes Cheltenham Road it's called "the arches" until you end up on the disputed Cotham/Montpelier/Stokes Croft region where the new Tesco is. Not Redland. If you have to drive outside your own reporting area just to get content to rant about, well, that may show some weaknesses in the "Redland cyclists amongst the worst in Bristol" story. We recommend spending some time in Cotham Hill, which, while again not quite Redland, is full of pedestrians, cyclists, school-run parents and us vans, so creating a lovely mix for new articles, such as "Redland Van drivers amongst the worst in Bristol?", "Redland students amongst the worst pedestrians in Bristol", and of course "Redland school-run parents amongst the worst in Bristol". Together this will keep your article quota fulfilled for a month with only one morning's worth of research. Or you could walk along Chandos Road and have a geographically correct region for the "Redland parkers amongst the worst in Bristol" article.
6. Do try and back up your articles with photos other than faded bike path signs that may convince everyone, motorist and cyclists alike, that Bristol's cycling facilities are dire.
7. If you do want to get a video of someone cycling through the red lights on that stretch of Gloucester Road, stand there with a camera on a weekday evening and wait for one lights cycle: it's not hard.

Anyway, Laura -welcome to the tier-3 anti cycling rant pages of Bristol. Those of us already in the business welcome new competitors, as it keeps us on our toes. Just try a bit harder and we might even feel slightly threatened.

The Cost of Education

It's expensive, having children. 

Even more so if you send them to Public schools, of course.

State schools, however, can also prove costly. 

Here's the scene just after the 2011 Ski trip to Austria arrived back at Redland Green School (we know this, we asked). A trip that must have cost over £1000 per pupil when spending money is added to the bill. Ouch.

Imagine the added insult, therefore, when you walk out of the school grounds having picked up your child to find Bristol's finest traffic wardens have chosen just this moment to visit Redland and ticket any car blocking a dropped kerb (not a yellow line in sight).

One of Bristol Traffic's many roving reporters managed to get this photo of the ticketing in action, whilst the wailing of the Redland Mum's affected by the outrage could be heard across the neighbourhood. Less off-piste, more piste-off.

   

So now, for at least two families, that'll be £1040 minimum. For a ski trip. Shocking.

Bristol Engineering Projects - Merry Christmas

This is the season of Christmas cheer, so spare a thought for Bristol City Council's "Bristol Engineering Projects Team". This secretive bunch are the people who put the traffic lights in our roads and re-design our junctions.  We do wonder if occasionally, for a little bit of fun, they are behind all those particularly dangerous and annoying cycle lanes, installed as part of Bristol's failed attempt to become a 'Cycling City'. It’s sad to say but in these straightened times they seem to be running out of road “improvements” to carry out.


How nice, then, to see to see them busily working in Redland Green (a park) and discover that they are now finding new places to practice their art.  We love the fence that they are building across the park to make life difficult for cyclists, especially as there is a real chance that the fence might eventually injure or even permanently incapacitate a few of these freeloaders.  The fence on the Green really represents a great achievement because it has been constructed in such a way that it will make it hard for baby cyclists to learn their despicable habits. Quite literally, it cuts them short in their tracks.  Hopefully, they will all learn to drive instead with Second2none.  That is, if they haven’t been too badly injured by crashing into the fence, or crushing their driving fingers in the finger trapping gates (the gates are particularly impressive and may even prevent a few mothers and buggies from even making it to the playground).

The Bristol Engineering Projects Team appear to have cleverly managed to do the whole thing without even telling Bristol Parks. Let’s hope they can do it again and again so at last we will get some of these scruffy areas fenced in and preferably paved over.


Bristol Traffic applauds councillor Sylvia Townsend for her spirited defence of the fence at a recent Neighbourhood Partnership meeting, especially as she was entirely alone. We don’t attend such things but our spies tell us that the miserable local community objected to the fence one and all and have written hundreds of letters and emails against these forward-looking proposals.  Can you image that some of them even had the audacity to ask what the fence was for?  How mean spirited and narrow minded of them.  Clearly these residents are deluded in thinking that Redland Green is meant to be an open area of park for people to enjoy when we know it represents a great opportunity for highways thinking.

At the other end of the Green some road construction is already happening and a forest of railings going up to catch unwary cyclists and even a few small children.  We’ve been disappointed to see railings and bollards disappearing from roads because the nanny state panders to the whims of busybodies who pretend to care about the serious injuries to pedestrians and cyclists.  Well, we at Bristol Traffic are made of sterner stuff and we salute you councillor Townsend.


Pushed out of the highways maybe, but we are happy to report that highways engineering is alive and well in our parks.  


We feel that parks offer many opportunities. The area inside the fence must have already been earmarked as a car park which will at last make some proper use of this redundant space and who knows, there may even be a traffic light or too. Modest maybe, and we realise that this is a far cry from the major road schemes of the past, but there are so many things to be done in parks that we can be sure that the Bristol Engineering Projects Team won’t now run out of work.


Merry Christmas!

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.

Delivery Vans

A lot of people complain about delivery vans, but consider this: they are the price of internet shopping. You cannot buy things online and expect them to be delivered by bicycles, so vans it is.

Here we see a royal mail van, an ikea van, and a sainsbury's van edging through Meridian Road, Redland.

These people know the width of their vehicles. Even so, we suspect the IKEA van fears addresses in Montpelier.

This shows an interesting consequence of those people who say "I don't need a car", because they buy their IKEA "malmo" sofas online and have them delivered along with the supermarket supplies and some books from amazon. You may have avoided your own car, but this is the congestion you are creating instead.

Not that we wish to denounce on-line shopping and local delivery. Indeed, we will draw our readers' attention to Bath Ales, who, if you sign up for their email letter, will sell you 12x500ml of their Dark Hare beer for 12 pounds -very good value, with free delivery in the BS postal district, as well as bits of the BA area. One warning though, the van that does the delivery does say "Bath Ales" all over it. This means you had better be in when they deliver, otherwise your neighbours will note a Bath Ales van arriving, someone taking a crate of beer out and hiding it behind a dustbin, and before you get home they will be the ones enjoying a fine stout. A detail to be aware of.

Emergency Services

It's not just the AA and RAC that are our emergency services.

Apparently there are others.

Here we see the HQ of a major player in Redland, Bristol.. and YG07XBL.

Ready for any emergency.

24/7. It's good to know we're in safe hands.

Friday Brain Teaser (5)

The mansions of Redland, a conservation area.

It's Friday the 13th.

What could possibly be behind this?

The Friday Quiz Returns

After a break, and now that we've had a bit of summer, it's time for some fun again.

So here's a picture.

Is it just me or is there something wrong here?

Fear the Tree!

This week we are reminding everyone that the annual critical-mass prance round the city takes place on Saturday May 1, as people dance and hop their way from the Arnolfini to Horfield Common by way of a large number of pubs, including, here, the Highbury Vaults.

Now, we too like a couple of pints before getting the roads too, but find that drink-driving laws prevent us having more than four pints before heading out, and even then you have to hope the police don't pick on you. Yet here we can see -in another example of anti-car bias- that it's OK to bounce up St Michael's hill so stocious(*) that you think dressing up as a tree is a good idea, yet we car drivers are not only prosecuted for being less drunk than that, we even get held up by these tree people.

And their families! They bring out their children! And walk them down the road!

This is unacceptable. A strong government would ban this kind of thing, not just re-instate foxhunting, but let us hunt people that dress up like vegetables.

We plan more coverage of this problem, unique to Bristol, in the coming week.

Including, exclusive, shocking, scandalous video coverage of the council's secret support for this so called "alternative transport"!

(*) Stocious: to be very heavily drunk. A Scottish word (there are lots of words for drunk in Scotland, more fine-grained than elsewhere). Even the Eskimos with their alcoholism issues don't fine-grain the details quite as much, but then they have the snow to talk about.

(*) Update. The original article said Saturday May 3 -Saturday is in fact May 1. 

Recycling problems

This is not what it seems: a car on the road, a car half on the pavement, and a car across the pavement.

No, this is not a demonstration of thoughtful parking, it's not even an example of how to get as many cars as possible into the smallest possible space.

No, this is a recycling problem. As we can see, the bin men have been, they collected the bottles and paper, but they forgot to collect all the tin.

We suspect BMW R255KAB has been left out for collection, but was just too big to fit on the lorry. After all, the scrappage scheme is now over.

UPDATE

Just heard that the scrappage scheme has been extended until the end of March 2010, so there's no need to leave any unwanted cars on the pavement until 1st April.

Foxes don't pay Road Tax

Yes it's late.

And yes it's 02:00 on the 12th Day of Christmas, and...

Yes I'm just a big kid - I've sent the children to bed (ages ago), but I'm still up...

But look - it's snowing... and the only subversives in Bristol's ecosystem apparently able to use the roads are Foxes and Cyclists.

If only there were more urban 4X4s we could rid Bristol of these pests once and for all.

Remember: Drive safely.

RNIB: Protection by cars

Snow. Frozen water. And as we are all aware, water has a memory.

Here we see it remembering that a car has been parked in the road.

And here, the view from the other direction, before the snow arrived.

In the foreground, the ubiquitous dimpled paving and dropped kerbs that do so much to help those with vision problems. Of course, in the snow, the dimples disappear, which is why that first photo is so shocking. The driver has departed the space, leaving the visually impaired vulnerable to stepping into the path of an oncoming car, without being aware of the tactile paving beneath. Push-chairs and even pavement cyclists are affected by this disgraceful behaviour.

The usual state of affairs in Manor Park, Redland, is normally much safer, as the self-less drivers of WR54ZDE,

N950UPR,

CA02VXV,

and GD04SEF

all demonstrate.

By parking in front of the dimples they provide an excellent additional safety barrier by preventing cyclists getting onto the pavement, and acting as an excellent warning feature for anyone attempting to step off the kerb.

Of all the helpful residents of this corner of Redland, though, the owner of NA05CVX must be the most considerate, both night...

and day.

Unless, of course, it is their car that's left that nasty view of black tarmac in an otherwise perfect Bristol winter scene.

Shoes with Wheels

We have recently focused a little attention on those free-loading skateboarder types that imagine themselves above the law, but still have the temerity to use our streets and pavements. Unlike we motorists, they do not need a licence.

Nor do users of wheeled shoes, either.

Even worse, dog licences were abolished in 1987 in the UK. And not one of the main political parties sees the (long overdue if you ask me) necessity for the introduction of cycle licences.

No wonder we motorists feel so persecuted!

Anger Management

The photos have come back from Jessops at last, and one reveals a pic of the car driven by the Redland Mum that caused me so much vexation last Saturday that I had to have a little lie-down and a strong snifter.

Yes, cyclists should be aware that this black Toyota Avensis FY58PVN, when driven by a woman with "no points after thirty years behind the wheel", may still cut you up to save one second off her drive home to the leafy Victorian suburb of Sustainable Redland.

Cyclists should also be aware, if they swear at this motorist, she may tell you that she "has no time for people like you."

I probably overreacted.

But a different driver in a different car managed to mangle my bike and break my elbow very effectively last year, and I was in such shock that I didn't swear at him.

So I swore at her instead. I have since washed my mouth out with soap.