Chris Hutt: the last ride

This, then, was Chris's last bicycle ride. Here are many of his fellow travellers. the Martins from the BCyC, Sarah of the Save the Railway Path campaign; Cecilia, Terry M and one of the Steves from that group were also present, among the many others -and those look like Sustrans people loitering to the left of the frame.

At the traffic lights, we can see Eric, ex-ByC and now involved in Cycle City work, Rob Gallagher, and various other people none of who have registration numbers for us to complain about -especially Terry Miller, who is standing on the pavement with his bicycle.

Here's the final approach to the crematorium. Notice how little hi-viz clothing was to be seen, and how they didn't get out the way of our van, despite its obvious importance. Do they not realise how dangerous it is to cycle next to a van whose driver is filming while driving?

Here we can see Jon Rogers; he also gave an excellent tribute, one which mentioned his disappointment with Chris awarding him the second place in the Bristol Traffic anti-bicycle awards.  He hasn't yet discovered we caught his secret tree plans on camera yet, something that he was only told of later on in the day.

Finally, the coffin is unloaded and taken in to the crematorium, leaving Kevin and Sylvie to take the empty vehicle away and stand guard over it. We believe that these peoplehave plans to make the September Bristol Cycle Festival more interesting -and are even behind a planned meeting on that topic, which obviously concerns us. Were he to link up with Quercus, whom we saw later on descending from St Michael's Hill with some of those critical mass people on funny bicycles, we fear for the city.

No coverage of the event inside, except to say it was pretty hard for a lot of people there -and there were a lot of people there. Furthermore, nobody seemed to have picked up on the fact that the cover photo of Chris shows him cycling the wrong way up a one way street!

Chris Hutt Funeral, part 1

One of our team members participated in the funeral procession.

The cycle hearse was supplied by Cap'n Bikebeard, a festival bike that was decorated for the event by Chris Hutt Junior.

The hearse was actually encountered on the approach to the funeral directors, with it and the support vehicle, they brought westbury to their knees.

Indeed, it was very hard to take these photographs from a motor vehicle while handling a phone call and sounding the horn, especially as more cyclists kept joining the route. By the time we were in Westbury on Trym proper, the roundabout was taken over by these troublemakers.

Out in the roundabout, artist and writer, Dru Marland. On the left, with purple jacket: John Grimshaw of Sustrans -who gave a very moving tribute.

At the head of the procession, Chris Junior is on the front left of the hearse, Cap'n Bikebeard behind in the back row. Chris senior gets to take a rest on his last bike journey. Behind the hearse, Steve K of the cycling campaign and the CTC, with some of the CTC people in their roadie clothes.

Before anyone points out that by participating in this event we must be part of some kind of vast cycling conspiracy, we will point them to this video. As you can see, bringing up the tail of the parade is a large white van: us.

Such a vehicle actually benefits the cyclists as it ensures that nobody aggressive would try and overtake them, so we hope our contribution was appreciated. It is rare -indeed this is a precedent- that we did not try overtaking them, but then the sheer number of them made it tricky.

More coverage in parts two and three.

The politicians are stealing our pavements!

We had looked forward to seeing one of the party leaders doing their set piece "one of the people riding on a bike" shots, so that we could accidentally clip them in our vehicle. Indeed, we drove around all morning looking for such a scene, but presumably their minders had recognised that the only people who ride bicycles in this city look and smell funny and it doesn't help win votes in the rest of the city, let alone the country. Eventually the passengers in the back of the bus started demanding that they actually get to Fishponds, so we had to return to our scheduled route. Also you have to be careful when you go off-route in a double decker, as low bridges can catch you out.

We are grateful, however, for this photo send to us by Andrew Stagg, who was part of the press entourage. It shows Nick Clegg, out for a walk in Westbury on Trym to meet people holding up mobile phones or banners protesting about something or other.

Think about it. A walk? Who walks in this city? Unless it is someone going from the school-keep-clear zone in their 4x4 to the school gate, or someone in the B&Q car park picking up a jet hose for driveway cleaning, the only people walking are the very elderly, children and students. The elderly are going to vote for whoever the Daily Mail tells them to, children can't vote, while students, on account of the fact they don't pay any tax yet, shouldn't be allowed to walk on the pavement, let alone have any say in who runs the country.

Yet here we have it, someone trying to be one of the people, despite the fact in this city to be one of the people means spending a hour a day stuck in the A4, A4174, A370 or the M32 roads swearing about the incompetence of the car in front, or stuck on Gloucester or Whiteladies road complaining about bicycles and pedestrians.  And to achieve this photoshoot, the pavement -our pavement- has been cleared of cars, the double yellow lines backed up by extra traffic cones and there are police around who are fining neither the politicians nor the protesters for using our parking area to walk around on.

Indeed, one of the security or propaganda minions is actually walking on the road, which is normally a ticketable offence as far as we are concerned, certainly something which absolves us of any blame if they should end up under our bus.

People still keep asking which politicial party Bristol Traffic, the city's premier car-centric news outlet will support. Well,  nobody has made an offer which is compelling enough, by which we mean a carrier bag full of money in a currency we trust, that being US$, Euros with german artwork on the coins and Swiss francs. When we asked the UKIP for their advertising funding in Euros they weren't willing to oblige. Do they mistake us for idiots? Bribe us in Sterling? Don't be serious!

Problems in the Village

As regular readers of this blog will know, we at Bristol Traffic campaign tirelessly for the travelling public.

A rival publication, the Bristol Evening Post, does the same. And today it has surpassed us by publishing a letter from a certain J W Hall of Stoke Bishop, who dares to point out the honest truth about parked cars in response to a proposal by SusWoT:

"Pushing two-way traffic into one side of the street will mean that people walking on the pavement on the west side will then be directly adjacent to a moving traffic flow, instead of being shielded from it by parked cars."

There, it's been said better than we ever could - parked cars save lives.

The letter also offers some comfort to cyclists as it goes on to state:

"It will also be worse for cyclists, since they will be confined into a narrower carriageway with the moving flow."

Bristol Traffic doubts that cyclists would care, as they usually use the pavement anyway, but it's nice to see BEP facilitating the debate when it comes to 'improving' our city.

Eastfield Road: view from the hill

Eastfield road isn't much fun by bike; there's a steep hill by Westbury that is the most hazardous: narrow pavement, downhill cars and bikes at speed, uphill cars trying to accelerate out of the Westbury congestion. This would seem the obvious place for a crash.
When we heard about the tragedy in Westbury, we assumed that is where it was. But it isn't, it's further back, towards the Southmead/Henleaze mini roundabout. This isn't a fun stretch to ride down, as cars are often impatient, it's hazardous (bends and side roads), yet sufficiently wide that can't easily control the cars behind you by occupying the lane. Even if you are in the middle of the lane they will go past you, upset, causing problems for you on the downhill when you need to get past them.

Here's the view from the pavement looking towards Henleaze and Horfield -where the car came from. Despite stories in the press saying the car "lost control", it looks from this angle that the car driver failed to turn the car into the bend, but instead skidded in a straight line onto the pavement and the adults and children on it.


Google streetview gives you shows what it is like to approach from from the Horfield/Henleaze mini roundabout.

View Larger Map

There's a a traffic light protected pedestrian crossing (sign of problems in the past?) and then a straight stretch with a bit of a rise.

If you follow the road along, you come over the hill, and reach a bend. That is where the crash happened.

While not a police "traffic forensics" expert, they have marked the road up with the same awful painted annotations that Cabot Circus now has -a history of someone's death, painted on the road and pavement. Those markings seem to indicate that the car didn't try turning either before or after it was skidding -it just went straight onto the pavement, going fast enough that the brakes couldn't stop them in time.

If the driver hadn't put the brakes on and skidded, if they had instead followed the turn of the road, then Sam Riddalls's parents, friends and family wouldn't be mourning his loss. So what happened, where did things go wrong?

We aren't skilled to judge, but it certainly appears that speed was be a significant factor in the incident. The skid marks are long, and you wouldn't end up having to hit the brakes and go up on the pavement unless you were going so fast down that road that the bend came up unexpectedly, you couldn't steer the car round it, and using the brakes was the only option that sprung to mind.

As we said at the beginning this doesn't look like a car "lost control", as the local paper is describing it, any more than it would have picked up excessive speed by "accident". This is a car whose driver chose to drive too fast for a city, way too fast, and as a consequence, killed a child.

The dark pavements of Westbury on Trym

For the second time in a week, we find ourselves visiting a roadside memorial to a pedestrian killed by a car. Last time, Troy Atkinson, age 15, killed at Cabot Circus. Now, Sam Riddall, 11, killed on the pavements of Westbury on Trym.

Everyone should go and see both their memorials, to spend a moment watching the traffic carrying on, while on the ground, yellow paint show the police marking up what they saw on the ground, as they try and determine what happened.

Here, the car slid down the pavement, after having clipped the wall. If cars were parked on the road, as it sounds like some were, then there would have been nowhere for anyone to run to, no way to escape, in the little time they had.

Further up the hill, you can see where the car mounted the pavement. You also get a hint of the energy involved in the collision -hitting a kerb like this could have destroyed the wheels, yet the car kept going.

Everyone knows that you can estimate vehicle speed from skid mark length; a full document on the topic gives the specifics. To really know, you need to conduct experiments with a similar car, and know the condition of the brakes. What is clear is that the car did skid a long way.

At the top of the hill, the police are asking for help: 0845 456 7000 is the number. Someone out there killed a schoolboy on Friday, and is now hiding.

No photos of the flowers and their messages -go and see them yourselves. And the ones in Cabot Circus. Last week was an awful week for the city -the loss of its children must not be forgotten.

11 year boy old killed by a car in Westbury on Trym

The police are reporting that an 11 year old boy was killed on Friday evening when a car went up onto the pavement in Westbury on Trym and hit a group of kids -the (female) car driver then ran off.

This is a really bad week on Bristol's roads, with two children, one 15, one 11 killed by hit and run drivers, as well as someone on a bike injured by another hit-and-run incident. A trend perhaps? It's too early to say. What is clear is that there is a single unified cause: a car. And there seems to be a unified decision by the drivers that the best thing to do is run off. Perhaps the drivers felt they could get away with it, or maybe there was enough alcohol in their blood that they didn't want a breath or blood test at the scene of the accident. Certainly when someone tried to run off from a car crash we were reporting on, alcohol was probably a cause of both the crash and them trying to run.

Everyone in the cycling/walking/street activist community will be pretty unhappy about this -as will, presumably, be the police and other emergency services. Every death of a pedestrian or a cyclist represents a failure of everyone's efforts. Yet what can you do if some people in the city are going to drive round in big metal boxes?

1. It would be useful to know if (enforced) 20 mph speed limits would have saved lives. That would make for a better argument to have wide-area 20 mph zones, instead of leaving the main roads at 30. In particular, would Eastfield Road -the narrow hilly route between Westbury and Horfield, have counted as a main road?
   
2. The Evening Post needs to keep an eye on the comment sections of any article involving cars crashing with bikes or pedestrians. The paper has put a lot of effort into pushing a bikes-are-the-enemy theme, and whenever something like this happens, the comments by some of the readers are appalling. They do eventually delete some of the comments, but by the time they do it's much later, when the damage has been done.
   
3. In fact, we wonder if maybe it is time for the E.P to back from its bikes-are-the-enemy theme, as it doesn't appear to be true. The vehicle that kills people on pavements is called a motor car.
   
4. When we look at the traffic logs of the web site, news of someone being killed on our streets brings a lot of traffic to this site. We'd rather that people didn't get killed out there; so that people didn't have to go to the web to get news about another tragedy. That web traffic is something to mourn.
   
5. There's a good case for setting up a serious web site alongside this one. It's hard to mix satire that argues in favour of helmets and high-viz clothes for pedestrians with reporting the death of people walking down the pavement. Something that carry's the city's cycling news and events and not much else. Volunteers to help with this would be welcome.
   

This is the second time this week we've had to express our deepest sadness and condolencies to the parents, friends and family, yet we know that nothing we can say will ever take the pain away, especially for the parents. When we said on Wednesday that it was a dark day for Bristol, we didn't know how bad the week was going to turn out. It has been a dark week.

All scheduled postings that were indended to be entertaining have been postponed for a week. There's nothing funny to say.