Hot off the presses comes pics of the council planning committee visiting the railway path, to see whether it will need traffic calming once they run steps down to the tarmac. It is hard to tell if it is better that they chose a quiet period rather than the morning rush hour, or not. Peak period would have shown how daft steps would be, but that may have just encouraged traffic calming. While this picture was being taken, the council staff were saying that they don't want me interfereing as this is not a formal site visit and it would not be fair for me to make representations without the architects being present too. This is a good point, and one we in Bristol Traffic agree with. Henceforth, when David Bishop has a meeting with George Ferguson without any minutes being taken, we expect to be invited and given equal talking time.
At the end of Somerset Street, Kingsdown, a van with a police parking ticket. Why? Keep clear signs are just hints. It may be difficult to turn the corner, but you can go round the square if you have an issue with that. Someone is picking on vans.
A short distance away, on Montague Hill, another car has been ticketed. Yes, there is a sign saying that cars parked on the pavement will be ticketed, but it's never been done here before, according to our records. What has happened? Why has the local police started persecuting innocent motorists?
It could be Bristol is now officially anti-car, and it is a conspiracy from the council. But there is another possibility, one to strike fear into every law-abiding motorist who wants to exercise their right to park where they need to. Subversives are infiltrating the Police community groups. Last year: a righteous campaign to fine bicycles on the pavement. This year, at least in Kingsdown, the rules are suspiciously different:
1. Speeding vehicles - Dove Street.
2. Speeding vehicles - Cotham Road/Cotham Brow.
3. Environmental issues:
- Rubbish, various locations
- Dog fouling, especially King Square area.
- Discarded needles, especially King Square area.
4. Contravention of one-way systems:
- Nine Tree Hill.
- Nugent Hill.
- Marlborough Hill.
Crackdowns on vehicle speed and contraflowing. Anti-car priorities. Some drug problems. Nobody complaining about the quality of service in the Stokes Croft Massage Parlours .
Agreed 5th February 2009
1. Match Day parking problems around the Memorial Stadium.
2. Inconsiderate cycling, Gloucester Road (A38) / Failing to stop at a red light, at junctions with Ashley Down Road and at junction with Sommerville Road / Pavement cycling / Cycling at night with no lights.
This is better. not just pavement and red-light cycling, but inconsiderate cycling. Presumably that means failing to get out of the way of cars, or refusing to stay in bus lanes, even when there are parked cars in the way.
People round the city need to keep an eye on their local PACT meetings and make sure no anti-car enforcement of petty rules gets encouraged. Push the real problems, like lack of parking, inconsiderate cycling and the lack of value for money we get in the city's massage parlours.
The VW Tuareg WR57FJJ is taking full advantage of the parking space offered on St Michael's Hill. It does say "Bus Stop", and any vehicle this size is half-way to being a bus, so it should have the right to park here.
It is sticking out a bit -perhaps the risk of banging the inconveniently positioned bus stop sign prevent it from using the pavement. There's no point criticising this car; there's nowhere else in the area to park a car even for a minute on a weekday, especially not something big like a 4X4. It's not like there is a side street just round the corner with an empty stretch of double yellow line and pavement, where you would at least be letting buses get by when you parked there.
Witnessed a jaw-dropping piece of pig lazy parking a couple of nights ago but, alas, no photo as I didn't have my mobile with me at the time (slapped wrist from Steve L!). I popped down the street to the local shop for a can of beer. The shops have a lay-by for parking in front of them and it's usually empty on a sunday night. Drivers who park legally have about, oh, 3.5m to walk to the shop door. Imagine my reaction when, on leaving the shop, a driver mounted the pavement and casually drove along it so that his car door was level with the shop door. On opening the car door it almost touched the step of the shop. He could then step out of the car and straight into the shop thus saving the energy required to walk about 3 metres. He wasn't elderly or disabled, just an average guy like me. Now that's what I call pig lazy parking!.
Lot's of SmartCar coverage this week, showing the value these vehicles have in the city
First, in Kingsdown Parade, the SmartCar shows how, when parking on double yellow lines at a corner, it manages to leave room were a second SC willing to park behind it, and if not, the junction retains some visibility and the dropped kerb is open.
Second, down in St Paul's, where Smart Car YJ04TLX has been smartly parked outside the CEED building on Wilder Street in St. Paul's.
Contributor Bristle KRS says "It was there for the best part of today and yesterday, till not that long ago when it pulled away from its perpendicular position to smartly cruise elsewhere. I didn't think to snap its profile, but it blocks half the southbound side of Wilder Street, hence forceing traffic to slow down and give way, creating a de facto HomeZone along the road. Smart."
Up on the downs, where the road across the park, Stoke Road, meets Ladies Mile, there's a sign post covered in flowers. The one at the top says "to my dear brother, taken too soon, love your partner in crime -your ever loving sister Nicky/Richard" What happened? According to the Evening Post, Mark Pointer, age 36, was on a motorbike which collided with a Vauxhall Vectra. The car driver was treated for shock; the motorcyclist didn't survive. The police have a sign up asking for witnesses. That's all we know.
Somebody died here. Mark Pointer's brother and sister are mourning him; so are his friends and the rest of his family. For the rest of their natural lives, they are going to remember him, and often think "if only..." -if only he'd not gone out at that exact date and time, if only he'd taken a different route, if only the car had done something different, if only Mark had done something different. Those regrets are pretty hard to cope with; there's no easy way to avoid them, and often its mixed with guilt -"if only I'd ..." Sadly, it's too late for any of them -someone died motorbiking over a park in Bristol, and regardless of the underlying causes, they are gone.
Bristol doesn't (yet) have a Ghost Cycle program in operation. We need one for motorbikes as well as bicycles.
The Chocolate Factory development includes money to traffic calm the railway path, and the speeding bicycles
That's right, not satisifed with turning swathes of the greenery that constitutes the parkland of the path, they now want to slow down the bicycles going past. Presumably that's their workaround for the problem that has been noted in all public consultations: having a row of staircases accessing the path is a stupid idea. Rather than fix the idea -access via a shared route, the architects want to retain the staircases, and then somehow traffic calm the cyclists.
Because there is no way to safely build cycle houses alongside a bicycle and pedestrian route, without doing something about all those pesky bicycles.
This makes a complete mockery of the cycle housing. Everyone who saw the plans thought the steps were two things: an attempt to enclose the greenery, and a stupid idea. This new plan is even more stupid, and an attempt to take over the path itself.
It's also another form of gentrification. That's always the problem. Take a run down area, turn the nice-but-abandoned factories, dockland housing, empty greenery into nice houses for nice people, and they start wanting to change details of the area. Some things are for the better -its nice to have pubs where you can survive a night without having to deal with two knife fights and a glassing. But some things are for the worse. That pub stops being your convenient place to buy your week's worth of cooking-ganja; it starts to be sit-down-meal gastropub. It stops letting you in.
Trying to traffic calm the bristol-bath railway path is an example of this. The designers loved the theory of an urban walking/biking path through greenery, but didn't like the details: the greenery made for good plots of building land, and as for the biking, well, its' too fast for people trying to live alongside the path. Presumably next the walking will become an issue, with the residents reporting suspicious looking people walking up and down the path. For resident's safety they will ban walkers and try and run a bus along it instead.
It's all very well chaining your bike to a Sheffield stand. Even if you lock both wheels and the frame to it. In fact it's essential in certain parts of this city, especially if you want to party the night away in the People's Republic.
But what happens when the stand gets half-inched along with the Bike?
Surely this is pavement parking at its very worst.
Regular site visitor Westfield Wanders points us to some of his winter pics, namely a car hitting some ice in Chipping Sodbury, and coming off the road This must have been pretty scary What is even scarier than hitting the wall is what is on the other side A 6 foot drop.
Fortunately, driver and passenger were able to walk away. A few more mph of speed on the approach to the bend and it might have been a different story.
Q. What does one do when all the parking spaces are already taken?
A. Simple: Park on the pavement. As the residents of Bristol know, and as the driver of CU04NRJ illustrates. This is in Redland, a genteel and sustainable part of the city.
Down in the Peoples Republic of Stokes Croft, however, cars have generally been banished from the pavements and now reside in the cycle lanes. This doesn't matter, though, as many citizens of this area are clearly ahead of the curve, having abandoned four wheels in favour of two. These right-thinking people are the Future.
So witness the Future:
To ask the question again, then:
Q. What does one do when all the parking spaces are all taken?
A. Simple. Park on the pavement. As the Present elite vanguard of Bristol's cycling citizens already do.
This, then, is the Future for the rest of us. Yet more pavement parking.
In the Past, no one would have thought that the two Sheffield stands near the Croft would ever be used at night, let alone be full by nine pm and result in such selfish nocturnal knock-on pavement parking by Bristol's gig-going elite....
By the way, the two stands on Nine Tree Hill provide effective parking for four bicycles. Or an incredible eight unicycles, for those with an eye even further into the Future!
There's a presentation up on Portsmouth's Web site, talking about their cycling town plans, in which they wonder why the money spent on adding a no cycling sign to every lamp post hasn't reduced the amount of sea front cycling. There are so many signs, it could almost become the logo of the cycling town. Yet, as Galileo is claimed to have said: E pur si muove! -and yet it moves, or in this case, and yet they move, they being the cyclists on the seafront path. Why do these pavement-criminals cycle down the wide seafront enjoying a pleasant conversation, when there is a perfectly safe road alongside? Maybe they don't percieve the road as safe? All along the seafront lies vast swathes of echelon parking, drive in-reverse out parking, here with a car showing exactly the problems it raises. This minivan managed to scrape its front bumper driving in, yet still poked further out the back than the other vehicles, and when it moved, even approaching car traffic had to hit the brakes.
Given a choice between a road with cars reversing into you without looking, and a wide, safe seafront, the only people who are going to choose the road are the fit ones who can go up to 20-25 mph and don't want to waste time swerving around dogs being walked.
The surprising thing for Pompey then, is not why the presence of some anti-bike signs and intermittend persecution of teenagers haven't stopped the majority of the seafront cyclists to stop cycling down the path, but
why some people don't cycle along the path, but choose the road instead.
why the cycling team were surprised that the signs had no effect whatsoever.
We love contributions, follow the instructions. We like funny ones the best. Hence a special mention to Montpelier correspondent KL, who sends in a lovely shot of a Herbert's Bakery van up on the pavement on Richmond Road.
It's actually been here a week, other people have seen it blocking the pavement, but this photo captures the scene best: a delivery van in a disabled slot.
Because it is appropriate. That shed to the right is the local garage. If the van is up by the garage for a week, rather than trying to get to Clifton in snow conditions, that is one seriously disabled vehicle.
This looking down Cotham Hill from the St Michael's Hill roundabout, a couple of days after the snow had turned to ice. bikes and pedestrians get the same experience: danger. Except that as bikes lose balance in such a spectacular manner, its pretty hazardous. Getting off and walking is good here; the alternative is to into the oncoming traffic lane.
Further down, the ice has a couple of melted patches: the drain and the manhole cover. Those are actually the two thinks to look out for here: you need to go between them, curve round to the left of the traffic island and plan for the not-that-unlikely event that any car approaching from Woodland Road to the left in a search for parking spaces will actually stop before the bike lane, and/or look in your direction before turning.
This is actually, believe it or not, an invaluable road traffic facility. Not just for bikes; it is the bikes going down here that creates the opportunities for cars heading the other way to pull out at the roundabout. The only other way to get out is to deliberately pull out in front of another car.
Christmas is over, and the Credit Crunch may be bad for many, but for a few it is proving very good news.
On Bristol's famous Gloucester Road, for instance, there are some fantastic opportunities for saving money and beating the recession.
Every cloud, it seems, has a silver lining, and free parking is not to be sniffed at as the drivers of WR07ENX and V808LUK have found to their benefit.
On Thursday Feb 5, it was snowy enough for FirstBus to not come out. Some people knew this, and took advantage of the fact that bus stops were now parking spaces. But why is that woman standing forlornly at the bus stop? Ahh, it's the the afternoon, and the buses have started running. Too bad all the bus stops are taken.
This the flight of steps between Oxford Street and High Kingsdown, within the proposed RPZ, on a weekday. Car W424XUR is parked so close the steps that it is impossible for pedestrians to use. The mother and daughter are having to delicately traverse the lower step, then squeeze through the gap between it and the car in front in order to get to the kids playground and pedestrian-friendly housing estate of High Kingsdown Similarly, this well wrapped up woman with a walking-stick had to fight her way past this car.
Some people, would probably denounce this as a classic example of selfish car parking by car drivers who only care for finding somewhere to leave their car, rather than the safety of pedestrians. But that is wrong.
Under this car, there is in fact a very large, icy puddle. If the car was not completely blocking pedestrian access, the small child would end in it up to their ankles, creating a medium-priority cleaning problem for the mum (yes it's cold, wet and muddy, but no bodily fluids are involved). The ice round the fringes of the puddle are exactly the kind of place where someone who relies on a walking stick is likely to slip and injure themselves.
By parking where it has, this driver has selflessy managed to prevent at least one injury and one child cleanup incident. Thank you driver of car W424XUR! thank you for you contribution to child and adult pedestrian safety on our busy streets!
Like other news outlets, our word processor now recognises the word "snow" and automatically inserts "chaos" afterwards in all titles. Even though the snow is now gone, we dream of it returning and the increased traffic to the web site it brings.
In the absence of fresh snow, here are some pics of another vehicle, WX07WDT, that must have slid out of control in last week's snow, and ended up on pavement in Myrtle Road, just off St Michael's Hill Where the fire and rescue services could not rescue it for at least 24 hours This is despite the fact that it is a Western Power maintenance vehicle, which surely has a role to play in keeping the electrons flowing into our cappuccino machines. Incidentally, the chimney in the background, the BRI chimney, is the tallest structure in the city, and, being built near the top of St Michael's Hill, widely visible around the city. Other news outlets may claim that buildings in the city centre are taller, but this is untrue. For some reason this valuable industrial facility is not honoured and celebrated the way Brunel's Harbour and suspension bridge is.
Some cold but sunny days has left the snow on the ground, but turned into a nice layer of ice, with the meltwater freezing at night too. On those bike paths where no cars go, such as the UWE-Lockleaze path, it's pretty hazardous
Which means it is time to get off the bike, get on your feet and enjoy the winter morning. You may have to walk, but it is not raining, there is no headwind.
This particular cyclist is being very considerate and isn't getting back on his bike where there is a risk of falling onto the car WP53YMW.
Since the Tailspin housing estate sold this road to UWE, it's become a secret student parking place, which is starting to create bike/car conflicts. The cars could actually park on the road here, but there is that fear of wingmirror and bodywork damage forcing them into the main bike/pedestrian route between UWE and the city.
Above we see the usual inhabitants of the pavement down in the Cumberland Basin. The photo was taken before Christmas. Below, however, is the current situation. The cars have unfortunately been displaced, with nowhere obvious to go.
Except of course, for the traffic island (is that an oxymoron, or just another name for Great Britain?), where there is space for WU55CKJ, and a van. Of course, had they parked more tidily there would be even more parking spaces on the island.
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