OK, so we know Slix is good (and to avoid any press complaints of bias we'll probably cover the other eateries and massage parlours of Stoke Croft in future editions).
We know that, as a convenient and iconic food outlet, Slix has great parking facilities (courtesy of the bike lane which deters commuters, but welcomes the brave).
We know that Noel Edmunds may or may not have eaten there. In his taxi.
We are impressed, though, that it is being protected by the State.
We found it reassuring that Police vehicle WX09EKU had parked-up in the cycle lane to ensure Stokes Croft was safe from errant taxi drivers, mini-cab deliveries and cyclists. We were just disappointed that it hadn't pulled up on the pavement, as that would have allowed us to complain, in true Daily Mail style, about the sort of low-life that populate this part of Bristol scratching the paintwork as they squeezed by.
Of course, it may be that they're there to arrest Mrs Lovett, but her pie shop (and others) still seem to exist on the Croft, so we doubt it.
Luckily, as can be seen from the photo, Stokes Croft is perfect for a new road widening scheme. Here at Bristol Traffic we reckon we could get at least five lanes of traffic in here, probably six if we narrowed the pavements. We will be lobbying our MPs.
We are aware that we are the highest ranked site when you search blogspot for alloy wheels, and therefore that a comment with some banal chat and back links to your own site would help your page rank. However, as well as using nofollow links to remove them from google's PageRank scores, we have a policy that says if you spam us with attempted to links, we only make fun of you. Therefore, please accept this posting as a gift, but note that the nofollow tag above renders your link worthless and all that you will get is more spam to your email address. Sorry.
There is no point trying to push alloy wheel services to our readers, despite our broad readership in Bristol, because (a) you have a Southampton postcode and are therefore unimportant, and (b) we don't think alloy wheels have a place in the city.
Every driver who has alloy wheels values their wheels. Not only does this prevent them doing operations in the city, it holds up other traffic. Takes this video of the bottom of St Michael's Hill from last month.
The car in front of us is waiting to turn slide into the left turn lane -which has a green light onto Park Row. But it cannot do that as the car in front of it values their wheels too much to scrape against the kerb or to commit more aggressively and get both wheels entirely on the pavement, and they still have a driver-side wingmirror to lose. The selfish decision of the first car to have alloy wheels not only slows them down, it slows down the rest of the city's traffic. And this is on a Sunday! Imagine how much congestion one selfish alloy-wheel owning outsider would cause on a busy weekday morning!
Drivers who value their vehicle's bodywork and paintwork are as much an inconvenience to us locals as pedestrians on zebra crossings and cyclists pootling along. You may not realise this as you live in the provinces and dream of day trips to Portsmouth where you can see three cars in a row, but we city folk know the harsh truth: from a game-theory perspective, alloy wheels place you at a disadvantage. They are easily damaged and, as they are a visible status symbol, everyone else sees that you value your car, therefore are more likely to give way on high conflict roads, such as here, the Horfield Road/St Michael's Hill junction.
Please do not bother posting any more spam advertisement comments, as we will only continue to criticise you for your naive lack of understanding of modern driving techniques and issues, as well as your complete ignorance of game theory and its application in city driving.
We're covering Slix in Stokes Croft this week, and we've noticed that it attracts some interesting clientele. It also sells burgers and chicken.
Yesterday we looked at the corporate appeal of the area, with cars such as WP06XTR using the cycle lane as a convenient stop-off to do a bit of business in the area, or pick up a burger and chips.
These parked cars, though, are actually an inconvenience, as they restrict the ability of mini-cab drivers to pick-up, drop-off and park-up to re-fuel.
Slix is an essential part of a central Bristol taxi driver's life-style, and, we hear, a destination of choice for many of their passengers, as YY05WEF and FB57KDF illustrate.
As usual, we got our coverage in days earlier. If somebody is now surprised that it takes a while to get out of town by the M32 at 17:00, they don't know the secret routes through Broadmead or St Pauls. Tourists.
Bristol Indymedia has some more coverage. While we are against students, obviously, some of them may go on to earn enough to afford decent cars -but with these proposed funding changes, they may be forced to walk, cycle or use public transport for many years after graduating.
Which is why we have a company car, just like anybody with a proper job. And we like to park-up on the pavement outside Bank to monitor the competition.
Not all cars are company cars, though.
There's no way to tell if T31DYA is parked in the cycle lane to grab a legitimate and corporately funded bite to eat in Slix (or Mrs Lovett's), or if it just belongs to a local from City Road picking up a few extra copies of the Big Issue to sell in Clifton.
The same is true for other cycle lane users, J44NUG, T364VCF and R790EDV.
One thing is certain: these cars are not there now, which at least proves that none of the drivers, even if they had their hair cut in 'Anointed Touch', ended up as take-aways from Mrs Lovett's. These drivers are safe.
We know that Stokes Croft is the centre of the universe.
And at the centre of Stokes Croft is that most favourite eatery, Slix.
Ignore the fact that it's next to Mrs Lovett's meat pie outlet, ignore any references to Sweeny Todd, or the fact that the Stoke's Croft is full of barber's shops. Probably more barbers than massage parlours. Even the venerable Croft features Harry Blades in the front room once a month at their heady "Barrymore's Pool Party" Nights - buzz cut for a tenner, anyone?
No, the interesting thing about this stretch of inner city Bristol is the way in which users of the Bike Lane here generally form a parked string of pearls on an otherwise unused piece of road.
Also interesting is the wide variety of patrons Slix appears to attract. So this week, in the spirit of a minor contribution to documenting the urban fabric of Bristol in 2010, we'll be celebrating a small selection of the trades that frequent the area.
Now that winter is here, can we drop a quick reminder to everyone driving around not to believe those "buy a 4x4 and cope with winter" adverts. Without studded tyres or chains, all four wheel drive will do is get you into trouble by hiding the problems on the uphill, only for them to surface on the descent.
Here is some footage from Seattle last week:
Lots of these vehicles are 4WD, but once you've hit the brake pedal, that's useless. Winter tyres then studded tyres (legal in Washington State during winter) and chains are what you should be thinking of. Otherwise, stay at home. Don't walk down the sidewalks on roads like this either. If you have a 2WD car with traction control features, when that light starts flashing it means "chains on". No chains? Pull over, park on a road that isn't so steep, walk.
While a darkness falls over kingsdown as new yellow lines and pay-to-park machines pop up, Cliftonwood is holding out against the resident parking plans.
As they must! Were resident parking zones to pop up with their neat little white boxes showing where people can and cannot park, the middle of Ambra Vale would certainly not become a "designated" parking area, so vehicles like J6SRY would not be able to keep their car safe in the road, away from pedestrians who could damage it.
The same time we were getting a video of one driver, X108YDY, prepared to fight the anti-car city and use the secret rat-runs of Kingsdown, we were also getting some shocking footage of parents walking their kids to school.
Some were clearly going on to cycle to work, so instead of driving their children to school in comfort and safety, they were being forced to walk alongside a bicycle -while the parents push them without even a helmet on!
Others were actually encouraging their children to cycle to school.
Such actions not only endanger the children, they threaten the bodywork of those of us who drive the wrong way down one-way streets as an alternative to traffic lights. Can't these parents see that we are in a hurry!
Over in Caledonia Mall, Clifton, someone selfishly attacked a car doing a bit of smart-car parking, by pulling up their wipers
Nearby, another car, KL51UUY manages to get by unscathed. We have mixed feelings here. Yes, smart-car parking finds a new space, but it makes double parking harder, and this road is ideal for a bit of double-work.
In Clifton Village proper, we can see the real problem: mud covered bicycles and their rides, taking up the pavement. by leaning them against dustbins.
Apparently the Ashton Court golf course cafe no longer has its "no muddy mountain bikers" sign up. We say every cafe in the city needs such a sign.
For some reason we could not get our van down Whiteladies Road and over to the M32 this afternoon, so had to divert up the hill and hit the Highbury Vaults for a few beers before continuing. One thing we could see was this police helicopter circling the university quarter, which may be a sign of student unrest.
Students! Yes the government is going to massively increase fees for all future degree students, and take away the attendee allowance for anyone in higher education colleges. But the collapse of the economy implies the chances of you being in the payback part of the scheme is much less likely than you think! Furthermore, this government has abolished all funding for speed cameras! For that reason alone, we cannot come out and support you. That and the traffic jams you have created today!
Back in June we covered the unfair persecution of a motorist, purely because they had the temerity to park across a dropped kerb.
It seems this sort of behaviour by uncaring, irresponsible council officials is still going on. Poor old YL04ZWW has been targeted in the same way, with a ticket on two successive days.
Our roving reporter did re-visit the site on the third day, but sadly the Mini had gone. We suspect the evil council took it to the car-pound to be crushed, but it could be (this is Redland after all) that some kindly neighbour contacted the owner, who then flew back from Barbados, and parked somewhere else.
We just hope it wasn't here, where unlucky R125SLB, has also been persecuted for nothing more than inconveniencing a few children on their way home from Redland Green school.
I love Christmas. Especially the oversized tins of chocolates that have become so symbolic of the festive season. As soon as Christmas season officially begins at the end of August I always make sure I buy at least three tins. One for the kids and family, one to keep on the passenger seat for those long winter commutes and one to store in the space where the spare tyre used to be in the boot.
So imagine my disappointment when I went to fill in a form to win some "quality streets" and found out it was actually just a devious plot to subvert people into fuelling the war on the motorist.
We know it's illegal to pretend to be police, but is it illegal to put out fake police warning signs?
Look at this sign here in Cliftonwood, telling off a car for parking on the pavement.
Now look at the car. One wheel up. Over in Monty the fact this car was sticking so far out would merit attention -that it was stopping through traffic, not supposedly interfering with pedestrians. It has to be fake.
We aren't naming names, but we do note that John Grimshaw of Sustrans lives nearby...
October's bike park movement on Cotham Hill was apparently to help the local cafe -the one that is being repainted as "manga manga" have some outdoor seating. Well, we don't know or care about that, but one thing that does interest us is whether the newly positioned bike parks do enough to discourage walking?
The combination of some seemingly accidentally badly placed bike racks with some shopping signs put out for passing cars does make it very hard indeed to walk across this road, and so should discourage students from doing so. FirstBus and we motorists will benefit from this, obviously.
But does it work? We can still see people trying to squeeze past all the furniture.
The bike racks make cyclists feel welcome, even if the one we see is heading towards a junction which we hope the GBBN proposals will make impossible for them to cross.
Furthermore the other side of the road is still open to pedestrians, and if they can't skateboard down the pavement, they just switch to the road instead.
It may make walking less pleasant, but it isn't enough to stop the locals and students from getting in our way.
We posted a while ago about the Emergency Services, and we're pleased to be able to report that the Manor Park emergency service has now acquired a second vehicle.
The addition of M758XWS to this essential 24 hour service must be a good indicator that the economic recovery is well underway.
Whilst we are always happy to park anywhere we want, there is a downside, as WU58ZFR demonstrates. This is the Downs, where thankfully no cycling is allowed.
The problem is that if you can park a car on the grass you can also put a bin on the grass, which is a real waste of parking opportunity.
We love taking visitors from the US through Montpelier at speed, watching them in teror stamping the ground where the brake pedal should be, as we drive our van through at 40 mph with millimetres between us and the parked cars on either side while texting ahead to our destination. But sometimes we like variety, and other fun place is Cornwallis Crescent and Clifton Vale. That blind Z-bend/T-junction when you are coming up the hill is fantastic. No visibility, you have to get the line exactly right or you get stuck.
This week we are making it more entertaining by making our US visitor cycle round, so watching someone from "cycle-friendly Oregon" encountering urban UK roads, so we took the opportunity to take them down this and see if they'd survive.
The first issue here is that one of the cars in front gets its line completely wrong. For reference, here are the tactics
Descending from Goldney Ave: hold back until you see a gap, then commit, but swing out before turning in, Alpine style. This early swing out ensures that you finish the turn on your side of the road, which is better for bad visibility situations, and here, ensures you can get round.
Coming from Cornwallis Crescent: head through, don't show weakness.
Coming up from Clifton Vale: head up, keep left ready to swerve right into Goldney Ave.
After the entertainment of a car having to back up twice, our U.S. tourist gets the give way markings wrong and almost loses out to the car on Corwallis Crescent. More importantly, by waiting where he is, he's lost visibility of what's happening on Clifton Vale, which can be tactically unwise. This time, he survives as the cars in front have stopped motor traffic heading up, but next time may not be so safe.
People have been mailing us, where is the Yoghurt Van YA55VDY? Has some disaster struck Bristol's supply of dairy goods. The answer is no, the clocks changing just altered its schedule.
It doesn't pull off without indicating from the buildout by Whiteladies Gate until 08:10 now, helping to remind the driver of the honda SUV why buying a vehicle that may survive a collision with a white van was a good decision that makes school runs safer.
Note how the driver actually waves our (sadly cycling) reporter. The proposed GBBN changes may make it harder for this van, as the buildout may not be so large. While we can't see from the design whether or not bollards are planned, we fear the worst.
By way of the Legacy Printed Press, we see this video of a car being forced to push a Ford Ka out onto the road by the school entrance to Cabot Primary School.
The comments on the E.P. Article are pretty polarised.
On the one hand, this is someone exerting their right to get their car out of the garage despite the selfish actions by lazy parents who themselves park on the keep clear zones just to drop the kids off faster. On the other, this is someone potentially endangering children who if not walking to school, are being dropped off by their parents outside it and expected to walk across a road. It's hard to say who is most wronged here.
The Bristol Traffic Project is a Big Society project, a community database of those people bold enough to stand up for their rights in an anti-car city. Today we are pleased see it at work.
This is Marlborough Hill, "nominally" one way. We say "nominally", as it is wider than most two-way streets in nearby areas. While over in Waltham Forest, Freewheeler complains that one-way streets increase traffic speed, our niggle with it is that it increases the expectation by cyclists that they should be on the road.
Look at this video of the polish-plated BMW KTT86LT heading doing a bit of contraflow on Marlborough Hill.
The driver is giving way to cars coming up the hill, on the narrow one way bit he even slides to one side to let the bicycles up this 1:5 hill. Yet are the cyclists grateful for his generosity? No, they abuse him. At least he is generous enough to laugh politely while shaking his head, but then he is probably in a hurry. Why else take this contraflow rat-run on a Sunday morning?
Returning to our community database project, note how we always omit spaces in registration numbers. This makes it easier to index them in large distributed column tables and other fancy servers, which makes it easier to find them in the search engines of our strategic partners, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! included. Today we can see that KTT86LT has already been seen in Stokes Croft. We are slowly building up our dataset on who is prepared to stand up against the oppressors -and who the little people are.
If you have not yet had the honour of being on our site -you are probably one of the little people.
Our commentary yesterday hinted at bus problems in Crow Lane, as a result of criminal activity in the area.
Over here leafy Redland Road this is less of a problem, and the brave owner of EF59VBA is even comfortable leaving the Volvo half on the pavement.
The problem here is not muggers, but bus stops. This bus stop in particular, and the one nearly opposite it, where poor people, the young, the old, students and those awful busy bodies from Transition Bristol stand and wait to catch their sustainable transport down to Temple Meads.
This means that those of us with a proper job, and car to match, have to suffer huge tracts of perfectly good parking provision removed from use, just to accommodate a bus stop. Just how selfish can these people be?
Why is that unusual? Well, FirstBus are stopping buses coming past here from 18:30 onwards as it is too dangerous -the drivers keep being robbed. They may go through the area, but they won't stop. On the back of this bus is a mural encouraging people to walk. Sensitive that.
Another issue we had with the Russel Square area is that this marked a clear attempt to bring cycle-friendly infrastructure into the inner city, rather than, as in Bristol, leave it places where we hope it doesn't get in the way of anyone important.
First, signs, encouraging cyclists to find their way round
Full green bike paths, with raised kerbs to make it slightly harder to accidentally park in them.
Junctions for the bicycles themselves, with no cyclists dismount signs
And here, worst of all, an "except cycles" get-out clause on a one way street. Not "except cycles, taxis and van drivers", but cycles only.
What is really depressing here is that the Camden council staff behind such schemese visited the proposed GBBN Whiteladies Road development, the one that will help motorists driving in to town by removing the zebra crossings in our way and making cycling more dangerous. We know this as we infiltrated the event, keeping track of what people were saying, and whether complaints were being dismissed -as expected- or actually listened to, and tried to slip our own ideas in to distract them.
On the topic of that camden council cycle team visit, can we extend our apologies to the woman driving the green nissan micra down WL road who was held up for fifteen seconds by the funny bicycle people. Yes, you were right to beep your horn at us for not being in the bike lane, even though cyclists don't have to cycle in them, they can cycle two abreast legally, and the traffic jam ahead meant you weren't losing any time. Yes, you were right to complain that eight people on bicycles at 08:50 on a weekday were causing utter chaos, which is why the local council had arranged the cyclist visit to during the quiet period mid-morning. Sadly, some of the cycle troublemakers had spotted the flaw there and pressured for a rush hour visit, which is why you were held up by three people cycling two-abreast down whiteladies road.
Because we were trying to blend in with these subversives we did have to come up and argue with you while you were stopped at the traffic lights, as anything else would have aroused the suspicions of the rest of the group.
Sorry!
We didn't really mean to call you a selfish idiot who would clearly benefit from getting out of their car and trying to do some exercise! It's your right to get fat and stay unfit by driving to work and back, stopping only in the supermarket to buy ready-to-fry fast foods.
We didn't really want to dispute the niceties of the highway code and the fact that nowhere in it does it say "bicycles should be banned from our roads" -because like you, we think it ought to! It was just something we had to do to blend in!
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.
There is only one free parking space for electric vehicles.
You are limited to parking there for 2h only, which is barely enough for a family-funded arts student to finish three cafe lattes.
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.
Along dovercourt road, we see a member of Keiths Driving School and a paying customer getting their paveparking right.
Note how
the wheels are all aligned
it is further in than the nissan micra, so should avoid being scraped by passing traffic
the driver has left enough space for a pedestrian to pass
Learning such skills are what makes the difference between a low-end driving school and a high-end one. We just hope that the driving examiner recognises the harsh truth about Horfield's parking problems, and doesn't live a noddy-land world where people park on the roads and even then not opposite junctions or within 50 feet of a corner.
Everybody knows that there are no parking problems in Cliftonwood, and that is why its citizens recently rejected the imposition of a CPZ. However, what fewer people know is where the "secret" parking slots are - the ones that are normally free and you actually have to seek out. Here we see two cars demonstrating two of these slots - DY52OLC at the end of Randall Road, and NY54EWP at the bottom of Ambrose Road.
What these camera angles don't show is that both of these cars have bits of paper stuck under their windscreen wipers. They were probably from admiring local residents congratulating the drivers on locating these hidden parking spots, but we'll never know - sadly, the rain has rendered them illegible!
Concerned of Cliftonwood
PS: In the case of DY52OLC it could be to apologise for the fresh dent in the back right hand corner. Whilst admiring the honesty of the perpetrator, we say: next time, use indelible ink! Unfortunately, the wronged car owner will never know who you are.
Whilst we all get hot under the collar about the problems that putting Bus Lanes up Whiteladies Road are going to cause, and the onerous parking restrictions that will be put on us as a result, here's something to think about:
Tax dodgers, parked for free, making their own entertainment.
We can't do that, the best we've got in the X5 is sat-nav and Jack fm.
Here at Bristol Traffic, we like leaving the 4x4 outside Somerfield all day, whilst walking into Clifton, pretending to be pedestrians. Unless we complain by 12th November, that'll all be over and they'll give our parking spaces to bicycles and buses, at least in rush hours.
If you want to keep the free, 24 hour, inner city parking in Whiteladies Road you'd better get over here and make some comments. Quick.
Yes we've seen this car before. The miracle that is an internet-scale index/search engine tells us we saw WR08HXK in exactly the same place in Chedworth Road, Horfield, back in March.
Well, before your customers are ready for the pavements of Monty, you need to teach them how to get on and off the kerb safely, and quiet roads like this with plenty of dropped kerbs are ideal. One issue though: six months? And their customer is still learning? That's not good.
Footage of someone on Cobourg Road managing to get their car out safely.
This is why in inner city Bristol you don't want alloy wheels. They may be a status symbol for some drivers, but they are clearly not people who have to drive round the anti-car parts of town, where getting on and off pavements and skirting kerbstones are a regular part of every driving journey. They are a luxury for outsiders.
We celebrate people who stand up against oppression, who fight an anti-car council in and anti-car city. This why we are proud to celebrate the driver of X108YDY as he drives down Marlborough Hill, from Kingsdown to Jamaica Street.
For some reason he didn't seem to appreciate that he was on camera and thought it was a stokes croft weird person who had come up the hill, rather than a member of the Bristol Traffic reporting team. The parents walking their kids to school through Marlborough Hill Place and then the hospital car park were giving funny looks too, hence the explanation at the end that it's on camera.
It is only by driving the wrong way down this street that motorists can get rapidly from Kingsdown and without getting stuck in traffic on Horfield Road. It should be made two way. Admittedly, there isn't room for two cars, but it's wider than your average Montpelier street, so why the problem?
Look at this shocking footage of a cyclist making their way into Montpelier
There it is, just near the end of the sequence. A big 20 mph sign on the road. And it's not just here, on Picton Street. The zone begins here, but spreads all the way to Easton. Even Ashley Vale is 20 mph in the bottom half. The high speed rat-runs like St Andrews Road will never be the same again, now that some sanctimonious cyclist or smug prius driver can pootle along in front and not feel guilty about holding our van up.
One more video from our tax dodging cyclist, who we sent on a mission to get crushed by a bus on Whiteladies Road. For some reason they survived.
Anyway, here is the video. Whiteladies Road from Lower Redland Road down to the triangle, Park Row and then towards Jamaica Street and Stokes Croft.
This just reinforces our previous conclusion: that during peak hours the causes of delays on our route are not pedestrians, they are in fact the big traffic jam around the Triangle. This time, continuing past the Triangle, we can see that the traffic sources there are in fact vehicles heading up Park Street or those coming in down Park Row. Which we believe is our inalienable right to do, and even with this bus network, we will continue to do.
Why then, do they want to mess around with the pedestrian crossings, the left turn by the downs into Redland Hill, or the right turn out of Cotham Hill -one that actually works well in peak hours because the pedestrians are triggering the crossings? That doesn't mean they shouldn't need a license, pay road tax and be insured, but that sometimes they have a place in our world. We just think there should be slightly less of them, and we should be exempt from stopping for them at zebra crossings.
This video has gone up early so that the owner of a red nissan micra further along Cobourg Road has more details of the van YK57BHZ- that scraped their car on the way out of the road. The camera was off at that point, but that bit of pavement where your car was is narrower than this stretch, and as you can see here, it's a bit close, and one has to question why the lorry chose to continue, instead of going up to Fairlawn Road. Indeed, one has to question what it is doing in the area in the first place.
At the end (above the camera), the top of the approaching van is touching the van heading away; people have to help push the smaller van's body away to reduce the scraping it would otherwise get.
Clearly this is an anti-van part of the city, one where it isn't wide enough for two to pass each other, even when both are up on the pavement. So why don't the drivers' satnav units start sounding off the moment anyone picks up a route that goes anywhere near it, like those airplane collision avoidance systems that shout out "Pull up! pull up!" should do the same for any large vehicle approaching monty. With narrow streets and -soon- 20 mph limits, we've lost this part of the city.
The final question about the showcase bus route proposals is will the removal of a zebra crossing at the bottom of Cotham Hill and a dedicated turning lane help school run parents turning off at Cotham Hill?
Not if this video of a weekday morning is consistent. There's a jam all the way up the hill from Oakfield Road.
Sometimes there is less of a jam, and then parents can safely pull over onto the bike lane without their fear of their children being hit by a cyclist as they drop them off at one of the local schools (St Peter and Paul's RC is the closest), then carry on to the parent's final destination without any detour.
This is safe, provided the cyclists don't interfere. Today you can see that our secretly-instrumented tax-dodger swerved out of the bike lane, into the tax-payer's lane, forcing the car W153KDA to pull out aggressively to avoid being stuck behind them.
We are secretly recording cyclists through the city, then buying them beers and finding out how their day was -as a result, we are starting to understand their (invalid) reasoning better.
Here is Stokes Croft of a morning, the cyclist is waiting to turn right, and watching the two incoming lanes.
Note how two cars get their lane choice wrong and decide to go straight on in defiance of left-turn signs for that lane. Yet still some tax-dodger decides to RLJ their left turn onto Stokes Croft.
At 1:00, the cyclist gets their turn in, skids left onto picton street, passing a van on the pavement to their left. Some people think parking blocking the pavement is wrong, but in this part of the city it is that or block the road entirely. At 1:14 you see someone doing that, and you see the bicycle proceeding to the left of the van, despite the fact that in our post-mortem we can see the door opening, and the passenger forced to retreat by the passing bicycle.
We understand why you wouldn't wait for the van; in monty that could be a few hours waiting. But why not go up on the pavement, the way most tax-dodgers would do.
The answer to that becomes clear on a later video. You can be sure that a van isn't going to veer into the parked cars, but you can't be sure that they aren't going to swerve up onto the pavement and drive along for a bit. We see this hear on the "Richmond Road shared space", an area to the side of roads that would elsewhere be called by its old name, "the pavement"
The van graciously waits for the parent and pushchair blocking this pavement, and once gone gets up on it and carries on, before eventually parking. The cyclist then passes them, continues down to Bath Buildings and Cheltenham Road, where we can watch the chaos with bemusement. The first cyclist, the BMX-er dodging a turning car probably just ran orange, or was past on red but, well, slow. The second one, the one that nearly takes our our tax-dodger as they ride across the road, he has had 10 seconds of red before he goes. That's three cyclists and three vans in our camera. All three vans are trying to find somewhere safe to park, which anti-car montpelier makes excessively hard. Of the three cyclists in the video, two of them seem blatantly oblivious to red.
Our last trip down Whiteladies road shows that on a weekend, yes, pedestrian shoppers did hold up through traffic. This implied that yes, the FirstBus/Showcase bus route plans to reduce pedestrian crossing options may benefit their schedules, but we were worried about the impact on us cars getting out from side roads.
This video is different as it's a visit by our expendable cyclist on a weekday morning, down the bus lane from Oakfield Road, and through the Triangle as far as University Road, where they head off. Commentary first, analysis later.
At 0:24 FH56CVV switches lanes early, but as everyone else in the RH lane who isn't turning right also goes left, they are forced to give way to the vehicles in front of them anyway.
From 0:29 to 0:40, a bike lane that even waltham forest would be proud of. Its worn-out nature hints that it's popular with larger vehicles, while the trees keep it bumpy.
At 04:40 A9VNG is in the ASL, but we suspect that it was in there when the lights change. Why the suspicion? One car in the pedestrian area and one in front in the yellow hatched "only enter when clear to exit" area stopping cross traffic from St Pauls Road and Tyndall's Park Road getting across. Incidentally, Tyndall's Park road (on the left) here is no left turn, St Paul's (on the right, into Clifton) is no right turn, so all congestion coming up from the Triangle is Whiteladies Road traffic. Note also this junction provides no time for pedestrians to cross when the traffic isn't actually allowed to drive -if only all major junctions in the city were like this, congestion would be much improved. The BBC offices are on the left, incidentally.
Following the cyclist who is commuting without helmet, body-armour or hi-viz clothing, we eventually discover what is holding up WL-road traffic, it's the "triangle" gyratory system, which our tax-dodger hits at 1:43. The underlying problem is that Whiteladies Road traffic is forced to give way to traffic coming from the right, which initially means traffic from Clifton. Further on, at 2:17 we get held up by traffic all coming into the city from the A4 or the Hotwells's Bridges and then up Jacob's Wells road.
There are four lanes here, one for parking, one turning right at the next junction, and two straight on, but that leftmost one is lost even to vans ignoring bus-lane signs, not just by the police car at 2:41 but by the taxi-rank at 2:53.
WN59UDP is held up by these taxis forcing them to wait with all the in-town traffic, so as soon as they can they cut left in front of the bicycle, through the pedestrians and up University Road -only to find that the Biffa refuse collection lorry is in the way and ignoring the important traffic being held up. Finally passing that, they can sprint up to Woodland Road, where as you recall the Evening Post was campaigning against two paid parking spaces going away, which we felt was overreacting as nobody parks their except arts students, and their tuition fee increases will eliminate that luxury.
However, today we can see that the paid parking area is also popular for parental dropoff outside Bristol Grammar School -and it actually makes for a nice, low-chaos dropoff area. Admittedly, there isn't enough of this short-stay parking right in front of the school, forcing some parents to stop in the double yellow lined areas, but the alternative would be parking on the other side of this (one-way) street, forcing the children to cross the road. Would you want your children to cross a busy road like this? Exactly. Parking on the double yellow lines outside the school entrance is the only safe place to drop your kids off and be sure they get to school alive.
Now, returning to the Whiteladies Road issue, what does the bus plan proposal change on this stretch? The Oakfield Road crossing will be moved further away from the road, so making it less useful to pedestrians trying to walk from Cotham to Clifton or bag. Plus one point. But, this makes it harder for cars to get out or over from these roads, so minus one point.
Heading in to town, the right hand turn to Clifton will be removed for all but buses. This will turn Oakfield road into the primary rat-run option, but as we've seen, the moving of the zebra crossing makes it trickier. What they aren't doing is extending the bus lane any further south, and they are leaving that toy bike lane in there. We say toy as its so half hearted that no rational cyclist will think they are welcome -what with the faded paint and tree roots, but its very presence implies that some people in the city do welcome cyclists. No, better to remove it and put a cyclists dismount sign up.
Entering the triangle is more informative. Congestion is caused here by traffic joining the road from other places (Clifton, Jacob's Wells Road), and whatever is slowing them down on their final journey. There are no pedestrian-only lights or zebra crossings to play with, so there's little that can be done to make pedestrians feel less welcome, no tricks to make the schedule more accurate.
And that's the key problem. The goals of the showcase route are faster bus journey times and a more predictable schedule. Removing and moving zebra crossings will only help with this out of hours, on weekends and midday, because on a weekday morning the problem is more fundamental: Erlang's Laws. Congestion is a result of the ingress rate of a queue being higher than the egress rate. The reason vehicles can't leave whiteladies road isn't that there are vast numbers of people struggling to turn up Cotham Hill (more on that another day), or any of the side roads, it is because the merging of multiple queues at the triangle creates a bottleneck which having one lane dedicated to bus stops and a taxi rank doesn't do much to help.
And do we care about mid-day firstbus schedules? No -and neither should anyone else. People using the bus at weekend and mid-day weekdays are either people who can't afford a car, people with bus passes, or people who have made some ideological decision to take a bus: passengers FirstBus can take for granted. If they want to make money, they need to get the commuter traffic, and quite frankly, changes to pedestrian crossings aren't going to do it. They may help us car commuters by reducing the number of pedestrians and cyclists, but given our dataset implies that the Whiteladies Road congestion is due to problems in the city centre, those crossing changes aren't going to help buses or our cars on whiteladies road at peak hours, which is when it matters to us as well as FirstBus.
Sorry FirstBus, but whatever datasets you have on congestion problems on Whiteladies Road, they were clearly collected by FirstBus or Council staff during their working hours, rather than during am or pm rush hours. This is the only explanation why your proposals don't just do nothing for us drivers while making pedestrians and cyclists suffer, they don't appear to help buses either.
That's the irony there. This proposal has already got the cycling campaign saying "oppose this it's anti-pedestrian and anti-cyclist", it's also anti-car, but we think it manages to be bus-neutral at the same time. That takes skill, that does.
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.
Someone posts us this (long and dull) video, with commentary.
They say:
You are always whining about bicycles in your way and how your road tax is wasted on bike lanes, but look at this. At 5pm I can get all the way from UWE to the Farm Pub, St Werburgh's, by bicycle, through fields, without using any tax-funded bike lane, public road or blocking any vans, fifteen minutes door to door. You try doing that in your white van. Apart from the 30s waiting for the lights to change on Muller Road so I can cross it, it's lovely and traffic free. So please, stop complaining so much.
Some of our team members also enjoy the fine beverages served by the farm pub; indeed, one of those white vans may be ours. We also agree, that at 17:00, to drive from UWE Frenchay to the Farm pub will take 30 minutes minimum, by either route:
A4174 to M32, round St Pauls Roundabout to Mina Road and then that new 20 mph zone to the pub.
Down to Stapleton Road then traffic lights and traffic jams to Mina Road.
Does this want to make us get out or van and start cycling? No. What it does is reinforce our demand for a new road from UWE to Lockleaze, and a re-opening of Boiling Wells Lane from Muller Road to St Werburgh's. This will stop both Lockleaze and Ashley Vale from being forgotten parts of the city.
We sent our expendable cyclist on downhill run of Whiteladies Road on a Saturday afternoon. Note people with the orange bags. That means small-revenue-sainsburys shoppers, either locals or students. The supermarket relies on a high turnover of these poor pedestrian people to compensate for a lack of parking. However, these people then get in way of us who are driving to or from proper supermarkets.
Put differently: the pedestrians who walk and shop locally not only take up space in the supermarkets they go to, they slow down shoppers who shop elsewhere.
What this video does shows is that at off peak weekend times the congestion is caused by people walking around. Therefore, the GBBN proposal to remove the zebra crossing seen at 1:32 (and implicitly, crank back the crossing time allocated on the lights at 1:28, because now there will be a full sequence scheduling right and left turns as well as straight on) may benefit at this time of the week: the off peak times.
But rewind a bit. Note how all the cars pulling out from any side road rely on the goodwill of cars on Whiteladies Road to get out. Because you may as well while you are waiting -you would hope someone else was as generous back- and because it costs you nothing. If the pedestrian crossing options were cranked back, then not only does it make it harder for pedestrians and cyclists to cross the road -which clearly we are happy with- then it will also be harder for cars to cross the road, unless someone added more traffic lights at these side roads. And we don't want that, do we?
This makes us think that part of the FirstBus GBBN schedule is not just to improve scheduling by removing pedestrian/cyclists holding up cars and buses, its secretly trying to stop cars getting across the road too, because we take advantage of the stopped traffic. There's a price see. And, because the parked cars will be removed, it's harder for you to edge out when making a turn. Instead of being safely protected from bicycles by the first row of parked cars, now you either need to hang back in the side road (as if) or pull out in front of the bus/bike lane and have people whine at you for being in their way.
Returning to the video, note at 1:40 the car double parked on Cotham Hill forcing the other cars past it. Sometimes you need to do that, park next to your destination, nothing wrong there. But if the proposal to remove the zebra crossing goes away, vehicles turning into Cotham Hill from Whiteladies Road, especially those coming down the hill, would pull in faster. The zebra crossing is a form of traffic calming. Without it, it would become more dangerous to double park your car in a popular shopping street, or to overtake such double parked cars.
Again, this is why we are in a moral dilemma regarding the Proposed Bus Route. The key benefit for us would be if it reduced the number of pedestrians in our way, but even we recognise that a limited number of pedestrians actually helps cross traffic.
"Paul N" sends us this video of what the M5 was like on October 26 between Bristol and Cirencester.
As people say, where were the police? Yes, there was an accident up the road, but surely one or two could have been diverted to direct people to drive up the hard shoulder and then U-turn up the slip road? Without that, vehicles doing that -such as the skip lorry- are taking their lives into their own hands. We pay our taxes so that we can drive the wrong way up a motorway slip road safely!
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.
Our secret instrumentation of cyclists, with some followup chat, shows us how these people endanger pedestrians and patients on Southwell Street.
Look how they
Cycle along the "pedestrianized" bit of road on Southwell Street, so endangering anyone forced to walk along this bit of road by the no-pedestrian barriers around the car-park entrance.
Pop up on the real pavement to get around the gate completely blocking the road.
Stay on the pavement to get past the van V722LAE parked in the no parking area by the gate.
Leap onto the road and endanger pedestrians crossing the road, the delivery vans, and the cars dropping staff off.
Swerves into the oncoming lane to get past the Ginsters cornish pastry lorry.
In the past, someone suggested to us that we should make Southwell Street the official logo of Bristol traffic, as a combination of a gate to block bicycles and a pavement closed to pedestrians represented our city. Well, it does -these cyclists ignoring the hints that the NHS gives them -that cycling to school, work or the nearby university is wrong- show us the problems we face in our city. What else can we do to ban them?
Our complainer from the past, "Slug" says they went to the PACT meeting to complain about some car on the pavement. Apparently the Police actually need to see someone obstructed before the vehicle is causing an obstruction.
This is a useful fact to know. From now on, whenever we park our car on the pavement -such as here BS51VDX does on a build-out by Cotham Brow, we shall wait for some family to get a push-chair past, and get a photograph of them as they pass.
With such a photograph, we can demonstrate that our parking did not cause any obstruction, hence is ineligible for any penalty.
Mid life crises. What do do? Sports cars? Mamils? Fixies. No: stalking. It's under-respected, and what the Internet, from Google to Facebook was made for.
We in the B.T. Project have taken up stalking one vehicle, and are pursuing it round the city. YA55VDY: the van that we are proud to have never ever seen parked even vaguely legally.
It's more than just a protest against anti-car, anti-van features, this takes dedication. Here, for example, you could park parallel to the double yellow lines, unload safely and pull out without having to back up blind into Picton Street first. But no, the driver has chosen to park 1m away from the kerb, echelon style, to make a statement. Deliveries matter.
We also have some footage from one of our secretly-instrumented cyclists going down Cotham Hill -you can see the distinctive shape of the van enables our tax-dodger to recognise the vehicle from a distance. This van is now famous!
Now, what's inside the
van? We couldn't be bothered to drive over and look, but one of the
cycle activists we were haranging here in Monty did -Captain Bikebeard
says "yoghurt". Now we know.
In fact, this van is now so famous it deserves its own Facebook fan
page. One van, one driver, prepared to stand up against an oppressive
state by refusing to park where they make him, instead always -even if
it means going out of his way- parking "illegally", as if the state gets
to decide where is and isn't legal to park your van.
A few days later, we see it now on the double yellows on Whiteladies Road.
The showcase bus route proposes changes here, so where the van is parked to unload will become a dedicated left turn into Cotham Hill, with its own light sequence. The Cotham Hill zebra crossing will go away, be replaced by some lights which will allow us to drive through while pedestrians wait to cross (as if we didn't do that already), while the addition of a new lane and pedestrian refuge will make walking across the road harder -and well-nigh impossible for any parent with bike plus child trailer or tagalong, which our secretly instrumented report appears to be doing.
This is why we have mixed feelings about the showcase bus route proposal.
Against:
Removes commuter parking from Whiteladies Road.
Encourages bicyclists to cycle up and down the road
Pro
Increases short stay parking on Whiteladies Road.
Removes a zebra crossing used during the rush hour by slow-moving children and students.
Adds a dedicated feed-in lane to Cotham Hill.
The feed in lane will suddenly abandon the cyclists from the safety of a dedicated lane to a situation where they have to merge right into the Whiteladies Road lane just at the same time that all the Redland Mum traffic turning left is trying to swerve left to get into this lane, so putting off the cyclists from every trying to commute by bicycle ever again.
One of our concerns here is that, in the age of austerity, we don't see why any money needs to be spent so that cars can cut in from Whiteladies Road to Cotham Hill. We force our way through the zebra crossing anyway, so all it does is actually increase the likelihood that we get held up by a red light; removes the option of turning right from Cotham Hill to Whiteladies Road, and makes it harder to get a lorry through the corner.
Up the top of the hill, we will lose all day parking, so the commuters suffer.
But in exchange, short-stay parking, so it's a trade off.
Where there may be a clear benefit for us drivers is at Whiteladies Gate, where we have common interest with FirstBus: not being held up pedestrians. Today, inbound traffic gets held up not just by cyclists and traffic, but by one or two cars turning left into Cotham Hill having their turn blocked by pedestrians on the zebra crossing.
Even on a quiet sunday afternoon, hordes of people just walking are stopping drivers getting to important places. Similarly, cars trying to head into town are held back from making progress to the next traffic jam by the pelican crossing, which schedules lots of time for schoolkids and other low-priority pedestrians to cross Whiteladies Road at a crossing we have covered previously.
This is unacceptable -so we are glad to see that the traffic planning department has recognised that the war on the motorist means putting the pedestrian in their place.
More subtly, given that our vehicles too have been known to hold up bus traffic, we are smugly pleased that these proposals seem more focused on pushing the tax-dodgers out of the way of buses than doing anything to make driving into the city by car hard. A lot of important people live up this hill, and they have to get in somehow.
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