Picton Street Roadworks

Picton Street has some roadworks going on -the footpath has been closed.

No diversion, no blocked off bit of road, just the stock "footpath closed" sign, forcing the pedestrians to walk down the middle of the street.

This insensitive and unacceptable behaviour for a building works contractor, needlessly interfering with the traditional right of Montpelier residents to walk along the pavement.

Mum Rage

No video this time of the driver of WU57KJF, but you can be assured she gave a good rant about how her overtaking and pulling in while half-way past one on Cotham Road was fine because her husband is a cyclist.

Maybe he is, but we suspect that he waits until his wife has gone off on the school run before venturing out the door.

The fundamental problem here is that Cotham Road is narrower because of the building works, yet the drivers still think it is safe to pass bicycles while there is oncoming traffic. This is not the case. We understand that drivers may have been upset at having to wait 30 seconds for a large lorry delivering building materials, but a moment of patience and even the slow-moving tax-dodger can be passed safely, without them getting annoyed and sticking your photo and registration number up online. She was not happy.

Note in the background the small child on a scooter without any hi-viz clothing, and the teenager walking in on the left on their phone -again, no hi-viz. Without the proper clothing, these schoolchildren will never be safe from parents on the school-run

Lift? No -a chairlift!

Now we come to the climax of our Clifton Week, the real reason we spent time there. We were in fact being sponsored by the city to come up with a dramatic plan for Bristol

Following up our engineering proposals for Clifton, here is our big one. Rather than just propose a lift to bypass Park Street, we have something far more ambitious, which would also become a tourist attraction

It's for a chairlift from Southville up to the Promenade on Royal York Crescent -one that takes a bike on the side. Here is what it looks like from the passenger seat. Incidentally, this bike was stolen in 2007 -there is still an outstanding death penalty waiting to be applied to whoever is caught in possession of it.


Think about it. A single cable could run from Coronation Road, over the Avon and the harbour, and swoop up the hill to Clifton. Once your bike is up there, most of the city is a downhill. Even if your final destination is the centre or Gloucester Road, a lift up the hill, followed by a bit of a descent, is all you need. The lift would eliminate all the problems of negotiating hotwells or Prince Street Bridge -that could be given over to Bus Rapid Transit. Indeed, we estimate a new chair lift system would cost less than a new bridge. It's all electric, so with a good green source of energy, carbon neutral.

Furthermore, as it would help pedestrians get from Clifton to Ashton Gate, it would provide fast and easy way for pedestrian shoppers to get to and from the proposed Tesco Ashton Gate supermarket, a worthy proposal only resisted by a few subversives and their videos. We hope that this new city chairlift could be funded from Tesco's Section 106 levy.

There is one problem: bike panniers and tagalongs are both tricky. Panniers are uncool, upgrade to a satchel. As for the tagalongs, that's a problem the engineers can worry about.

Clifton's secret bike path

Another way Clifton resists joining the rest of the city, is that it remains happily free of bike lanes and bike paths. There are none. Not on the downs, not on the roads.

There is one place that would be a prestigious location for a cycling city path, but it is kept a secret.

It is course, the promenade on Royal York Crescent. It is wide, not very busy, and accessible on the flat from Regent Street. A lovely place for a kid to ride quietly, a resident to wash their bike in the September sun.

There is a small technical problem at the far end.

In one direction, you'd have to be good DH mountain biker, and on the other, fit and without a tagalong.

This is where we have a plan. In keeping with the idea of making bold suggestions for Cycling City engineering works, we propose a bicycle flyover from here, the under-exploited end of the promenade. This flyover would curve rightwards and provide an on ramp for bicycles heading onto the promenade from the north, and an exit route. It would join the promenade up with an approach to the suspension bridge.

Some people may worry about an anti-bicycle organisation such as ourselves proposing this, but we are not worried. Putting bicycles onto the promenade will keep them out of our way. Clifton is the neglected corner of Cycling City.

We have an even more cunning plan for this promenade, which will be covered tomorrow. The thing to know is that from here, most of the city is downhill. If you could get your bike up here, everything else is easy.

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.

The problems of Royal York Crescent

As we've been exploring, there is no bike parking in Clifton. There is too much demand for car parking to waste any space on bicycles.

This is Royal York Crescent. It's unusual for the city in that cars park "echelon style". Here they are, in front of the "please park parallel to the kerb" sign.

If they parked parallel, parking capacity would drop significantly. Yes, there may be more space for bicycles, but the road would not be wide enough for cars to pass, so there is no point.

The other way they may effective use of available space is using the build out, here with three cars on it. Together LS51YWD and W359YBW and the car opposite ensure that no small children run out onto the road at this point.

That's important, as there is some steps down from the raised promenade here -this is the highest risk area, so it's good that someone is being conscientious.

There is a little note on that car, CP54PLZ, perhaps a polite message from a neighbour?

No, it's from "Mr Ahmadou". this sounds like one of those names used in the  "business opportunity" emails that come in so often, but no, this man is a professional problem solver

Results are Quick and Guaranteed

MR. AHMADOU
SPIRITUAL HEALER AND ADVISOR

No matter how difficult your problem is, there is a solution to it.
Problems regarding black magic, love, sexual impotency, business
transactions, exams and court cases etc. I can help you reunite with
your loved ones, split unwanted relationships and gambling.
For all your problems Mr Ahmadou is the answer.

So there you go, now we get a hint of what the issues in this part of Clifton really are. But even there, you have to conclude that Clifton is still playing catch-up, they saw those flyers in Stokes Croft back in April.

Clifton -no need for bike parking

We have done some research, and have concluded that there is no need for bike parking in Regent Street. The primary short-stay shopping outlet is Bargain Booze/Post Office, it has signs up on the pavement showing cars where to stop outside, an option exercised by WR57BBV

And shortly thereafter by the Saab RJ53MXW.

Further up the road, a mini-Tesco provides somewhere to lean kid's bikes against the railings.

If there was any need for bicycle parking in this street, you would expect to see bicycles. As there are none -no demand.

Rumours

We hear a rumour that the council has got the signoff for FirstBus bus cameras to be able to take enforceable photographs of cars in bus lanes -and are rolling this out across the city.

This must only be a rumour, as it if were true, the entire white-van economy of Bristol is doomed. Given the perilous state of the economy, removing the only place in the city to park such vans as WU55NYM, here making use of the Whiteladies Road bus lane, would be devastating.

Inheritance laws

It's Belgian, but funny.

We wonders what a Bristol version would look like.

The Polis on Cotham Road

Bristol Traffic has developed a little rule, which is "always treat any crash with sympathy"; it's always a mess, nobody is happy. The only exception is when its one of us doing the crashing -scanning in some old photos on that theme is on our todo list. But if it is not us, then sympathy.

We also try and balance out coverage of the city, though for some reason there is a bit of a skew towards Cotham, Redland, Kingsdown and Montpelier. It's started that way, and becomes self-reinforcing. Though commute routes for some of the contributors also has something to do with it.

Here, at 17:58 on a weekday, we are at Cotham Road -again. Covering a crash, the third in this street, after a probable drunk-driving incident, and a car not looking where it was going. Today, a Fiat Bravo/Brava has taken a pretty harsh bash to the side of the car -but only to the door. It's stopped in front of a driveway, so probably hasn't been parked here. No other vehicle in sight, no bicycle or pedestrian.

Some people are talking to the police. This is just above the big zebra crossing BTW, you can see the zig zags in front of the policeman giving our cameraman a hard stare

You can just see, to the left foreground of the photo, a hint bit of this policeman's colleague, coming over for a quiet word with the cameraman. Which we have on video, obviously. A nice feature of the old Canon Ixus cameras is that you can flick them from photo to film with your thumb, and then record conversations while trying to film what's going on.

Unfortunately, our camera crews do need to learn how to make videos, a key trick being "point the camera at something interesting" -the hard part in this context being trying to do this while talking to the police.

Anyway, anyone sitting through to the end will notice that they are in fact quite happy to let us take pictures, even if they don't see why anyone claiming to be from the Bristol Cycling Campaign should have any interest in road safety. Perhaps next time one of our reporters gets stopped, they should say "press" and measure the reaction then. The key thing is that the police agree that it is perfectly legal to take photographs of pretty much anything, and that we can can carry on. Which perhaps shows the difference between Bristol and London.

Over in Croydon, the local MP got stopped and searched for photographing a bike lane, an event which provided much entertainment to Crap Cycle Lanes of Croydon. Over in Waltham Forest, their Crap Cycling and Walking team got told to delete all their photographs of a bus crash. London? Even MPs get pulled over for looking at a bike lane. In Bristol? Subversives are allowed to carry on, without being arrested and soundly beaten.

This is unacceptable.

Lane Markings

Following on with the thought that bike lane markings are bad as they create unrealistic expectations in bicycle riders, can we also complain about that other bit of road that is taken away from us road-tax-payers, the pavement? Again, there are subtle cues - raised kerbs, the texture of broken paving stones underneath- that create the belief amongst tax dodging walkers that the pavement is for them.

Which it isn't. Not here in Cotham Hill. Here it belongs to the vehicles that pay for it -car CW55EUA and van HV53SFE

In the Avenue, Clifton, at school pickup time. It belongs to the parent's whose cars pay for it.

Elsewhere in Clifton, the pavement is shared by the cars LS51YWD and W359YBW.

While on the fringes of town, out near UWE, the pavement provides the ideal space for a small car  like WR03HXU. At least in the new developments they drop the kerb to make its role for cars more obvious.

If the pavement wasn't available for the car owners to use, they woudln't be able to commute by car -so generating tax revenue for government, and it would be much harder to pick up children.

Yet there are activists out there, Living Streets Bristol, who are trying to take away our right to park where we need to, saying the pavements belong to pedestrians, and streets are to be lived in! This is nonsense! Roads are to drive along, pavements let you park near to your home or destination without walking. These people are only whining because they can't afford a car. They are jealous.

There is a living streets meeting on September 14. We need to infiltrate it. They are our streets, and the pavements are for our cars. Here is what we know so far.

14th September 2009 7.30pm
Stag and Hounds upstairs room - Old Market/ Temple Way Junction (next to Evening Post)
Neil Harrison will be coming to talk about the forthcoming Council's draft walking strategy.

Anyone who wants to preserve Bristol's way of life needs to get down there and stop it before it gets out of hand.

Bike Lanes considered harmful

There's been some new report published about bike lanes. Here is one of Bristols, underused by bicycles despite all the money put on a stretch between the building works on Dighton Street

And the junction with Marlborough Street. Despite all the money put in to supporting these tax-dodgers, for some reason, they don't use them. That really annoys us.

This new paper claims that cars drive closer to bicycles when there is a bike lane, as it creates a clear expectation in the driver that the bicycle will stay in the bike lane, regardless of its width or quality, while when they are not in lane, the driver has to make their own decision as to how to pass them, and they get more room. For cycling campaigners, it is an argument against bike lanes, the other being these lane's tendancy to vanish when the road gets complicated.

We in Bristol Traffic are against bike lanes for another reason. They create unrealistic expectations in the cyclists -that there are bits of the road there for them, and advertises to pedestrians and morally weak car drivers that there is some alternative to driving.

This is of course untrue. There is no bit of the road "for them". It is all for us, the road tax payer. We paid for it, so we can use it when we need it. That includes the bike lane and the pavements.

Take this contraflow on Cotham Hill. There is a delivery vehicle WU58OVZ doing something important. Does the cyclist stop and wait patiently? No they do not! They swerve into the oncoming lane. This bicycle is now illegally going down a one-way street. How can such criminals deserve respect?

Like the South of France

We are very excited to hear that when a Football World Cup camp is built it will not be like Glastonbury, it will be like the South of France.

This must a different Ashton Court from the one near Bristol. Here is it in February

A few months later, the snow went away

The only time we have seen the mud dry out was September last year.


Now, compare this to the South of France. It is sunny, the mountains look lovely.

There is faint hind of mud on the bike, but nothing to worry about.


If there is to be a world cup football campground for two weeks on Ashton Court, the only way to pull it off would be to cover the entire area in a wooden floor first.

Thali Cafe Clifton News! Clifton gets Gentrified!

Gentrification is normally associated with a run down part of down being made "nice". You know when your area is becoming gentrified when you sit in on a PACT meeting and the complaints are about party noise rather than heroin addicts loitering around where the needle swap van comes. That and skateboarding.

In Bristol, gentrification means an area gets some good pubs, decent graffiti artwork -especially on the pubs- and good food, in the form of local cafes consortium Cafe Gusto and Thali Cafe.

Clifton has had a Cafe Gusto for a while, but you don't get free croissants there, so its not as good as the Bristol University outlet. It has long lacked, sadly, a Thali Cafe. Which is where one man: Jim, from the Thali Cafe team, comes to the rescue of this neglected corner of the city.

Here he is, pointing at a building. In his hand, a piece of paper. It says "October 2"

That date is the date of Clifton's October revolution: a thali takeaway cafe, serving the same food you would have to take your 4X4 over to Montpelier, or points further east or south, places where your satnav starts beeping saying "turn round now".

We mention drive, because people won't be cycling to this shop. There is one bit of gentrification that Clifton has resisted -there are no bike stands on these buildouts.

For a moment there appeared to be some bike stands nearby

But on closer inspection: barriers to stop cars using a car park without permission.

The only place that does have parking is a line of ancient Victorian railings, up on Bristol's Secret Bike Promenade.

More on that underexploited tourist attraction another day. The key thing is that it's a secret, because Clifton doesn't want visitors by bike.

Now, when will Clifton get the graffiti that the inner city deserves?

A rural path -right in the city

We have a lovely video from GentleGreenGiant looking at a rural bike lane, right in the city.

This path is on coldharbour lane, linking down from UWE to Frenchay, where a lot of the UWE students live. On the basis that the students are all impoverished, and that UWE is in the sticks -and nowhere near the rest of Bristol- we can concede that some of these people should be allowed to cycle.

The video starts in South Gloucester, in a stretch of the road that is now 30 mph. There is an on pavement bike lane which we have noticed before, but this video looks at the downhill.

Downhill, the phrase that lights up the eye of a mountain biker. A descent, steepness, rough ground underneath, speed -danger. These are the kind of things that make DH work fun, the kind of thing that makes commuting entertaining. How then, do you give a on-road route the downhill experience?

Simple: leave the path alone so it returns to the wild. Looking at the video, you can see the county boundary. The S. Gloucs road team have tamed it -30 mph roads, lane markings, bicycles, double yellow lines. All the signage of bland suburbia.

Now look at the transition into Bristol -the city itself. At the county line the lane markings go away, the path goes from suburban to rural. Speed limit? gone. Lane markings - a memory. Surface -what was once tarmac, is now a thin layer of vegetation atop the tarmac base.

This is a downhill to cherish, especially for a bit of night work.

The summer that never was...

If you look carefully, it will be apparent why Eurotaxi coach, C1EGO, is parked up in the zebra crossing zig-zags in Redland Road...

It's there, back in summer (you do remember that day, don't you?) when it was so hot that all the ice creams melted, forcing creamy treat vendor L11ATA to head for the shade to serve a coach load of children and school-run mums.

Luckily for him, and other ice cream operatives in Bristol, even though the heavens subsequently opened, and summer was cancelled, Banksy came to the rescue.

(I could now bang on about the benefits of large trees in urban areas, but I won't).

UPDATE: Summer has apparently returned. Sorry for any confusion.

Assessing the effectiveness of bicycle parking

We are doing a survey to see how effective the new cycling city bike parking facilities are. Looking at the parking on Stokes Croft/Nine Tree Hill on a weekday morning, we see that there is room for six more bicycles; the occupancy of this facility is only 40%.

If you look at the car parking, not only is every parking space on the road taken up, but there is a large van WN09PCZ on the pavement, and a car in front of it, a space only useful when trying to get a bike to the parking. With only ten visible pavement spaces, we see 12 cars, therefore the occupancy of the car parking spaces is over 120% -three times that of the bike parking

The conclusion, therefore, is that car parking is more efficiently used than bicycle parking. By removing these new bike stands, there is rom for at least one more van on the pavement -and as that space will be used, we can be sure that the space will be valued more.

Bristol your Bristol

A reader, one of those tax dodging cyclists, emails us:

"As I write, highly civilised people are pulling their buses into the lanes occupied my bicycle, trying to kill me

They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life. On the other hand, if one of them succeeds in running me over with a bus, he will never sleep any the worse for it. He is serving FirstBus, which has the power to absolve him from evil."

Well, that's right. He is trying to kill you. He is engaging, as Chris Hutt puts it, in "anti-terrorist activities". It is everyone's duty to fight the war on bicycles. It's for your own good. Now put the bike down and start saving up for a car.

When George Orwell wrote the essay that has been misquoted above, he was trying to define what Englishness was: cups of tea, "old maids hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning ", etc. No mention of bicycles. They are a foreign invention. Possibly even Scottish. No, what Orwell celebrated included "the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road", windy country roads, and the motor car. Admittedly he wrote it at a time petrol was being rationed, and if you did have any it would be for an Austin Morris vehicle whose quality control issues were a warning sign of the break down of the British factory system, a precursor to the economic problems this country has today. You could go out on your vehicle for a spin round the lanes, but you wouldn't know if you would get back.

Times have changed.


In the 1940s, a trip by car would have been an unusual event, the breakdown an adventure. Nowadays, its how you pick the kids up, the breakdown a crisis if it happens at 15:00 on the first day of school. You need help, you need an organisation that cares about you. Hence, the AA, here seen double parked on Whiteladies road as part of such a support call.

According to Wikipedia, the AA was founded in 1905 by a collection of motorists who wished to build a list of where speed traps were. This shows that the nanny state has been interfering with our rights for over a century -and that the AA has been standing up for them.

This week, the AA are pushing out a report, warning that the recession is threatening what it means to be be British.

Increased costs of motoring means that drivers are looking at ways of making motoring more efficient., This means we are more likely to question if we need to go to that meeting, can we avoid rush hour by going to work earlier or staying late, can the kids walk to school?

 The AA's president Edmund King said

"The motor vehicle is an integral part of British culture we rely on - whether getting to work, taking the kids to school or delivering goods. So when times are hard it is with reluctance we look at ways of cutting down on car journeys."

The report brought the shocking news that not only are some people walking and cycling to work, the increased cost of driving is encouraging people to work from home, or even to postpone their journey times to avoid peak hours. Some people have discovered that the unfair tax regime in the country now means that it is cheaper to walk your children to school.

The AA were quick to condemn this, and understand that people look at these options with reluctance. Being stuck in a traffic jam on the M32 is what defines us, and it brings in money for the government and the phone companies. If we did not spend an hour a day stuck on the M32 flyover, we wouldn't be funding the government. Or the AA.

Working from home, walking the kids to school, the AA are right to demand the government acts to stop these. Orwell's dream of a maid walking to communion has been replaced by the Honda CR-V sounding their horn at the bike in the way while the kids in the back argue over which DVD to watch. This is the dream of Britain that Cycling City is losing touch with. We must all support the AA in their campaign to focus on the real problems of the country: roads that aren't wide enough, and not get distracted by other issues, like the fact that we have got the next decade's governments forced to introduce scathing cuts to all government services through a year's worth of printing money and nationalising banks with a bigger exposure than our entire annual Gross Domestic Product.

If we do not fight the bicycles, we lose what it is to be British. We will be Dutch, or worse, Scandinavian.

Two Wheeled Terrorists: official

There is a new paper out which argues, according to the Daily Telegraph, that Cyclists killed more people than the 7/7 bombers, on account of people switching from the tube/bus to bicycle. We were a bit doubtful about this, the null hypothesis being that the Telegraph reporter had made everything up, but no, it turns out that the alternate hypothesis, "the researcher made everything up" is in fact the correct one. As the paper author says to Moving Target, "cycling has been a greater hazard than terrorism and is responsible for far more deaths."

Reading the paper, it is clear that the author has confused correlated with causated (i.e. there may be other causes of any increase in cycling deaths/injuries than an increase in numbers; Olympic construction springs to mind), and relies on the same weak measurement of cycling traffic as everyone else does -some samplings of a few main roads that nobody rational cycles down. And as it doesn't take any health benefits into account, overestimates the damage of cycling. That is, technically, it's bollocks. But from the researcher's perspectivel it does achieve one wonderful goal: it gets read, it gets cited, they get more funding.

Discounting the "cyclists cause more deaths than terrorists" hypothesis as being invalid, we do note something that the author missed, namely that cyclists hold up tax payers, and if there were more cyclists on the road after 7/7, more of us tax payers got held up by bicycles. That is, the cyclists will have cost the country far more in car commuter hours than the 7/7 TfL shutdown ever did.

And that is where we think, unarguably, you can say that bicycles are a greater threat to Britain than the 7/7 bombers. Really. Yes, some insane idiots blew up a bus and some tube trains. But it was a bus, not a decent car, like a Mercedes. And it was in London. Whereas bicycles, they irritate everyone across every city in Britain. They are out there, every day, getting in the way, slowing us down, creating congestion where before there was none.

When will one party stand up and recognise these people for threatening our very way of life; our dream of a quiet commute in from the suburbs to our jobs in the financial services back offices, day in day out. Not just slowing us down, but stressing us out, getting us angry, shortening our very lives!

In this city, the council has sold us out. Only the conservative party is fighting the bicycle terrorists, and they aren't doing a good job of it.

There are three groups of people out there doing their best: the bus companies (FirstBus and Turner Bus), the taxi and minicabs, and the Clifton Downs committee. The bus and taxi people have to do it discretely, punishing each bike they see by cutting them up, by going past really close, by blocking the ASL -so that eventually the cyclists will see what we are trying to tell them -that cycling is dangerous and that they should stop it.

The Clifton Downs committee, they ban bicycles, especially kids bikes, to stop them getting addicted to this class-A drug and then going on to the roads when they get bigger.

But look, here we have one of these subversives standing on the grass, right next to a no-cycling sign -there it is, on the path, between the Mercedes WR08CPY and the double yellow lines.  And he's ignoring it. He's laughing at the sign as if it is some kind of joke.

It is not - the Clifton Downs committee are standing up to bicycles, the greatest threat our country faces.  Now we have the peer-reviewed literature to back up our claims.

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.

Traffic Calming the Railway Path

The greenbank development has surfaced again, with the developers asking for more input on their plans to build houses straight on to the path. The previous proposal was rejected by the community as having 20 paths opening on to the path was felt to be dangerous.

This time the community has the option of the same number of paths, or half as many, with the option of traffic calming. Oddly enough, there is no option to reject the proposal, which is clearly a bug in the web page design. It's tricky, getting those <select> buttons right.

Evening on Muller Road

Muller Road, evening. A line of cars, not moving, heading back towards Horfield. Where are they coming from? A mystery.

Where are they going? That's clearer. The M32, and then onwards: M4, M5. Out. It is everyone's right to live a long way from their place of work, and the duty of the governments to take whatever measures it deems necessary to ensure that the petrol keeps flowing at a price the voters deem acceptable. It is also required to provide the roads needed to keep the cars moving, and here they fail.

This road has pavement on two sides, yet almost nobody walks on this, the purdown hill side. It would be trivial to remove the pavement, take a bit away from the hill, and what do we have? Another lane for cars. That is, provided it is kept for cars. If they turn it into a bus-lane, or worse, a bike lane, that would be a waste.

On that topic, we were pleased to hear the AA on the radio earlier in the week, complaining that it now costs an extra 2p/Litre. Yet they said something we disagree with. Their so-called spokesman actually advocated funding public transport from our road and petrol taxes. This must have been a slip of the tongue, as that is one step from advocating funding bicycles.

Datamining Banksy Traffic

Bristol Blogger complains that Banksy brought no new traffic to their site

For the curious, here are the top fifty search terms that brought visitors to Bristol Traffic during July and August. Banksy comes in at #26, "banksy bristol parking", way below "parking on clifton downs" and "cabot circus parking". But what's at #27? "banksy parking". If you add the (secret) numbers together, then banksy brought traffic to our site between #16 high kingsdown playground, and #17 northumbria drive henleaze.

Suprisingly, Bristol Traffic only comes in on page 2 of google's search of "high kingsdown playground", but on Yahoo! we come it in fourth place. The fact that Yahoo build their indices using Hadoop, the official Bristol Traffic datamining platform, is not a coincidence. What is even stranger is why High Kingsdown Playground or Northumbria Drive Henleaze is so interesting to some people. Two people, we suspect.

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49. banksy vs bristol
50. bristol cycle blog

It is pleasing to see that searches for Turner Bus Bristol and Turner Buses Bristol coming at #7 -our page describing a Turner Bus driver's attempt to reduce the number of children they have to pick up by one. If you endanger people, the fact becomes known. Similarly, Thali Cafe is popular -on account of its excellent food.

What is sad is to see visitors asking about Troy Atkinson -killed in April while crossing a road, and Pete Taylor. These people are being remembered, but it's sad to see that people are still looking for answers -especially to Troy's death.

Summary: not much Banksy traffic; we get many more visitors by way of Bristol Blogger's site. But that is now sliding down the rankings -google images is bringing in more traffic. There's a reason for that. Between us and Bristol Graffiti, we provide the photographs of Montpelier, Stokes Croft and regions nearby, such as nine tree hill. This is not an accident, this is part of our strategic plans.

More motorbike shortcuts

Here's a couple of shots, courtesy of Google Earth & photoshop to let our motorcycling readers know of a fantastic new short cut that will save you microseconds in your journey. Are you stuck at point A waiting for the lights to change?. But you want to get to point B?. Well, no problem - simply make a sharp left turn and take one of the two routes highlighted in red and pink. Although it's probably illegal (and bad riding), nobody will notice, except maybe those pesky bloggers from Bristol traffic. Just be aware of the annoying pedestrians and cyclists who swarm all over this bit of the short cut as it might add a few nanoseconds onto your journey. It has been rumoured that the council might try and thwart your time-saving by increasing the size of the island at point X, but you can always cut around this by using the two lanes indicated by the dashed lines on the road. Again, beware of the humans wandering around in these lanes, getting in your way. But you're in a hurry, so who cares?.

Dissent in the cycling community

Being an underground documentary project, we in Bristol Traffic are secretly infiltrating the cycling and walking groups, to identify the troublemakers, and stir up dissent. Here we are pleased to see John Grimshaw of Sustrans publicly apologising to Chris Hutt of Green Bristol Blog (out of picture to the right).

Chris had stated that a road crossing of the A4174 was part of the Cycling City plans, John corrected him, then Chris corrected John. We like to see such disagreement, as it stops them co-ordinating their efforts against our plans.

But who do we see in the foreground? Laughing? Cllr Jon Rogers, that's who. We shall have to find some more embarrassing photos of him, to stop him interfering with our plans to make Bristol a Car Friendly City.

Shaldon Road Advanced Suicide Lane

This is Shaldon Road. Behind the camera is a path leading to the Farm Pub Path -Shaldon Road is the main route from that path to Lockleaze and hence UWE. As and when the "new" North Fringe route gets rolled out there will be one less steep, but it will still suffer from the problem of getting over Muller Road, of which this is one of the junctions.

What is that bus in? That's right, an Advanced Stop Lane.

Now, some people, and Crap Cycling & Walking in Waltham Forest spring to mind, would fault this bus for endangering cyclists. We do not. Not just because we view cyclists as tax-dodging troublemakers, but we don't think bicycles should be using this ASL on safety grounds. Remember, the primary route on this road for a bike is straight on, towards Ashley Down, Horfield, St Andrews and St Werburghs. No cyclist planning of surviving their commute back from UWE should use the bike stop lane. They should hang back.

Here is a video showing why, taken from the other direction.

Note how buses turning left swing round to completely scrape clear the ASL of bicycles? And while someone could try sticking to the far right of it, vehicles turning from Muller Road into Shaldon Road will get them there.

Once upon a time, this ASL was actually wider, yet its right hand side was removed to eliminate the illusion that this was a safe place to loiter. It would seem to us that painting out the rest of the ASL would benefit everyone.

Kingsdown without cars

A strange event occurred a few weeks back -there was a stretch of Kingsdown without cars one Saturday.

It gives a hint, just a vague hint, of what the city must have looked like 150-200 years ago. Except back in those days there would have been horses belonging to us tax payers, and it would have been the poor pedestrians holding us up. The Association of British Horseriders would have been the pressure group that represented the needs of important road users.

It's just a fluke that there are no cars here, but it is interesting to see.