Hurlingham Road -we have lost the battle

Shocking pictures reach us of how a rat run has been stolen

The presence of a cycle contraflow shows that this was put in by an anti-car council. Is it a coincidence that the councillors for the area are Jon Rogers and the green councillor Gus Hoyt?
 
They've even put in double yellow lines at the new parking bay.


We also hear of a petition for a safe pedestrian crossing on Ashley hill, which will add even more delays on our journeys.

When will this outrageous war on motorists ever end?

At least central government is on our side -but what use if that if road-by-road, the rat runs go away. This is even more insidious than 20mph limits, which you can ignore completely if you are on a hurry. This is total rat-run theft.

Gloucester Road #2: an eerie calm over the A38

Normally this road on a Saturday is pretty chaotic: through traffic, shoppers trying to park outside their shops, either in the designated areas, or in the bus stops, the buses trying to get through, pedestrians trying to get across without walking 200m to the lights and back again; then there are the cyclists.

Today: silence.

Police to keep things calm, close the road and keep people on foot out the way.

One conclusion you can draw from the emptiness of the parking area is that the area really is only used by shoppers and shop staff. Today there's just a Paul Roberts car and a fireman -who does walk around with helmet and hi-viz clothes with identification details, the way we think everyone should dress.

There's also a command unit with a CCTV camera to the top and a satellite uplink pointing towards something in geostationary orbit above Africa.

The odd thing is everyone assumes at first that the troubles have come up from Stokes Croft -an eviction, another bank wrecked. But not today. It's worth visiting though, just see what Gloucester Road is really like when closed to traffic.

Bad timing

The van BK58CNV chose a bad day to park on the double yellow lines on the ASL on Bath Buildings, hence the ticket on the windscreen.

The road was closed while a 30T load got delivered by HGV, and PCSOs were manning the junctions to make sure nobody tried to turn into the road. With the police by the van for a number of hours, eventually one of them was bound to notice it and ticket it.

Unlucky!

Bridge Valley Road: stolen

Parking on the Downs for a picnic last week was pretty hard. It wasn't just all the roadside parking spaces were taken up, everywhere off the road where you could get a car was full with a family or two, parked up, cooking up a barbecue. No room for more cars

Except what's this round the corner: Bridge Valley Road. Closed to through motor traffic on account of emergency wall repairs.


We understand the need for this, but resent two things. First, pedestrians and cyclists are allowed up the pavement. Second, the road is fenced off, so preventing the area being used for parking.

If some turnaround zone had been provided at the end, you could have parked cars on both sides of this road, so added room for a few hundred more families on the downs.

They could even have used the footpaths that aren't normally accessible on account of the high speed passing traffic to get up to the park.

York Road Montpelier is Closed!

They have stolen our Road! York Road, from the Thali Cafe up to Fairfield Road, the secret locals-and-minicabs-only route from Stokes Croft up to Ashton Vale, is closed with a diversion onto an even narrower road.

What's worse, bicycles are still being allowed through.

As well as doing something to stop bicycles, they should take away the bollards closing Richmond Road off to traffic, which would give us an alternative. Instead the build-outs get abused as a place for small children to play.

With no road, and less parking, Montpelier residents are being forced to park across the city and walk home. How can you recognise them? Wherever they have to park, they do it Monty-style:

You soon recognise it: as far up on the pavement as you can get without damaging that wing-mirror; with the roadside wing-mirror folded in. Shown by Monty refugee X931BFB, forced by the York Road closure to park on Duchess Road, Clifton -over a mile away!

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?

Students have stolen our parking!

Days after the banksy-takes-our-parking debacle, now woodland road is closed to cars

There are pedestrians, but few are walking round in hi-viz

And the banksy ice cream van has moved

What is up? Students have arrived. The university is giving them a false sense of security by closing the roads. Better to give them each a hi-viz top and show them how to cross the city.

Tax Dodgers have stolen the A4 Portway!

Look at this! This is what the view from the suspension bridge was like at lunchtime!

The A4 Portway is again closed to road-tax payers!

This time, its runners, out there, blocking the Portway as they run along. If they can afford iPods and high-end trainers, they can afford to pay an annual runner tax. And a bridge fee.

This is because the Cumberland Basin bridge is closed to tax-payers, who are being forced to divert over the suspension bridge, and pay for the privilege of being late.

The runners should pay to cross the Cumberland Basin bridge, and that money should be given as rebates to cars crossing the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Better yet, open up the bridge for free crossing -just as tax dodging walkers, runners and bicycles get.

The worst part? A lot of todays runners aren't even running. They are walking. Why close the Portway for walkers?

We should write a letter to evening post about this, but as we suspect our fellow-traveller, local ABD representative Bob Bull will have printed off his set letter on the topic, there is no need.

Banksy vs Bristol Traffic

Has anybody seen the Banksy vs Bristol Museum exhibition?

Graffiti is wrong. We all know that.

But the exhibition is, in fact, not a series of witty or political statements of a 'Bristol lad made good'. Nor a comment on society as it stands in our green and pleasant land. Or even a celebration of Bristol City Council's ability to not know that a major crowd-puller was being installed under their noses. On their premises.

No. In true Banksy fashion, it was just a ploy by the 'artist' himself to inconvenience Bristol's drivers.