The team is being too lazy to do some serious reporting right now, but here are some news updates.
1. Crap Walking And Cycling in Waltham Forest is offline, along with all its artwork. While some people discuss why this is the case, and consider whether any of its comments about the Waltham Forest NHS or local council have, in some way, been considered libellous, we are pleased to provide the true explanation.
Waltham Forest acted as a control group in the Cycling England project. Some cities were funded to add more facilities to their city to encourage poor people to cycle. How would it be possible to determine if any increase in cycle usage was related to this work, compared to other trends like the rising cost of fuel? The answer: a control group. Waltham Forest, then, was encouraged to spend no money at all on improving walking or cycling in the city. To see whether motivational newsletters alone would suffice, Waltham Forest was funded to produce joyful "wouldn't it be better on a bicycle" leaflets and such like, things that could be stuck up at NHS hospitals that the staff and all patients would drive to -to see if this alone was sufficient. As the crapwalthamforest blog showed: it was not. With the wrapping up of the Cycling England project, Crap Walking and Cycling in Waltham Forest has been terminated. Note also that Waltham Forest itself will be terminated -however the lessons from the Waltham Forest experiment have been learned, and councils all round Britain will be encouraged to Walthamize their neighbourhoods.
2. An M4-A4174 link route isn't going to get funded, as noted by the BBC, "Hopes for M4 link to Avon Ring Road dashed".
We have some bad news for whoever in the BBC wrote that last article, with phrases like "Hopes for an M4 link to the Avon Ring Road near Bristol have been dashed for at least another four years" and "it could have an important impact on the Bristol and Bath Science Park".
Dear BBC provinical reporting team: there is an M4 link the Avon Ring Road; it is called "the M32". Please consult a map of Bristol before writing an article next time. There is also an option of getting to it from the M4/M5 junction and down the A38, and while a bit longer, it avoids the kingswood to M32 traffic jams caused by people trying to drive round the ring road from Bath to the North Fringe.
The article should in fact be titled: "Hopes for yet another M4 link to the Avon Ring Road dashed". It could then raise the fact that Chris Skidmore, the Conservative MP for Kingswood, doesn't understand the theory of induced demand any more than the head of North Somerset council. Specifically it isn't enough to add a new link road for today's demand; the new link road will encourage more traffic, more driving in, more people living out of Bristol and commuting by car to the North Fringe area. It would have been better to admit this and rather than push for a single extra link road, push for a new link road to be added every five years, so as to keep up with planned demand.
Walthamize the planet -and have a nice day!
Showing posts with label A4174. Show all posts
Showing posts with label A4174. Show all posts
Abbeywood: West Side Bollard Run
We sent our expendable cyclist up to Abbeywood again to see the other side of the MoD site/car park. Sadly, our fellow traveller, Kayla Maratty, would have been on her four week holiday, so if she's a UWE student, she wouldn't have got a chance to run this cyclist over.
Note how the cyclist swerves out of the cycle side before the first corner. After we took them into the MoD site where we got them to confess to being an enemy of the economy, we asked them about this. Apparently going round a blind corner on the wrong side of the path is stupid. Maybe, but S Gloucs has put the signs up, so follow it.
Further on, you can see the new bollards. Some now have coloured tape on, some reflectors. But it's moot. Their existence is now known and widely publicised. Nobody else is going to run into them, even in snow -unless the council moves them or adds some more -perhaps on that first corner?
Knowing of the existence of the feature, does our test subject obey the signs? Follow the approved lanes? No they don't! Instead they treat it as some kind of opportunity to go through them as if they were some kind of obstacle course, "practising singletrack manoeuvres at near-race-speed", they said, whatever that means. Such actions were wrong before the bollards went up, now that bollards are in, it should be a crime. And to think that the S Gloucs bollards actually encourage such action -that simply appals us.
Notice how we say S Gloucs bollards. We thought initially that these were MoD features, it being Ministry of Defence land and all (which is why cycle campaigner Terry Miller got detained by their site police for behaving suspiciously and taking photographs here last week). Yet as the video shows, the signs and bollards go on out of the site, right up to the A4174 Ring Road, one of the two proposed Ring Roads we actually got part of. That means it came from the council, presumably out of their cycling budget.
This is what introduces such a moral dilemma for us. It makes cyclists feel less welcome -good, and it doesn't take away any driving options -great. But is it enough? Apart from that one person who crashed into one, how many cyclists are going to give up their commute from this feature? And it stops us driving down the bike path here.
This is an ongoing topic and we will cover it more. Our experiment to see if anyone in S Gloucs is capable of reacting to reports of vehicles parked on the bike path is going well, so far, no reaction from anyone. But more research is needed.
Note how the cyclist swerves out of the cycle side before the first corner. After we took them into the MoD site where we got them to confess to being an enemy of the economy, we asked them about this. Apparently going round a blind corner on the wrong side of the path is stupid. Maybe, but S Gloucs has put the signs up, so follow it.
Further on, you can see the new bollards. Some now have coloured tape on, some reflectors. But it's moot. Their existence is now known and widely publicised. Nobody else is going to run into them, even in snow -unless the council moves them or adds some more -perhaps on that first corner?
Knowing of the existence of the feature, does our test subject obey the signs? Follow the approved lanes? No they don't! Instead they treat it as some kind of opportunity to go through them as if they were some kind of obstacle course, "practising singletrack manoeuvres at near-race-speed", they said, whatever that means. Such actions were wrong before the bollards went up, now that bollards are in, it should be a crime. And to think that the S Gloucs bollards actually encourage such action -that simply appals us.
Notice how we say S Gloucs bollards. We thought initially that these were MoD features, it being Ministry of Defence land and all (which is why cycle campaigner Terry Miller got detained by their site police for behaving suspiciously and taking photographs here last week). Yet as the video shows, the signs and bollards go on out of the site, right up to the A4174 Ring Road, one of the two proposed Ring Roads we actually got part of. That means it came from the council, presumably out of their cycling budget.
This is what introduces such a moral dilemma for us. It makes cyclists feel less welcome -good, and it doesn't take away any driving options -great. But is it enough? Apart from that one person who crashed into one, how many cyclists are going to give up their commute from this feature? And it stops us driving down the bike path here.
This is an ongoing topic and we will cover it more. Our experiment to see if anyone in S Gloucs is capable of reacting to reports of vehicles parked on the bike path is going well, so far, no reaction from anyone. But more research is needed.
Tiley of Bristol embrace Cycle City Hartcliffe Way
Hartcliffe Way, the southern bit of the A4174 ring road. Now, with the cycle city program, with a bike path along it.
How will the people use it? Well, we don't care about pedestrians or cyclists, because, well, they aren't real people.
What we are pleased to see is Tiley Motors of Hartcliffe Way recognising that anyone walking or cycling is deficient, but there is an obvious solution: get a car.
Tiley's have parked their budget vehicles on the bike/foot path, so attracting the attention of the underpeople, while clearly making the point that for just £795 the poor unfortunates could get themselves a motor and join the grown-ups.
Now, when the cycle city money turned out to only be 4X that spent on a single slip road to the Cribbs Causeway shopping mall, yet these new paths offer shopping opportunities, then even we cannot denounce this cycling city initiative any more. Tiley of Bristol! We salute you!
Breaking News: Abbey Wood goes to the Dark Side
As Bristol's Premier road traffic news outlet, we are saddened to bring some terrible news from the North Fringe, from MoD Abbey Wood. They are going to forbid anyone who lives within three miles of the site from driving in to work, by removing their right to park. They say it is due to excess parking pressure, but if you look at the parking area furthest from the entrance (i.e. the bit close to Lockleaze that requires you to walk afterwards), it's clear this isn't the case.
Therefore this entire plan is purely an anti-motorist conspiracy.
We received this memorandum by the "abbey wood motorists collective", who are trying to stand up for the British way of life, here in a government facility.
MoD staff demand car park action.If it is true, then it means that the MoD has joined the war against the motorist, just as the Department of Transport comes back onto our side.
Following last year's car park overload fiasco when the nearly 8,000 MoD staff at Abbeywood where forced to park on the access road to nearby Hewlett Packard, the site management team have announced that from January 2011 they plan to tackle the shortage of car park spaces.
You'd have thought that the MoD plan to do the sensible thing - use their diminishing Defence budget wisely - and build new multi-storey car parks over the entire (currently open site) single storey car park hence doubling the available spaces... But no!
Apparently the MoD has instead decided to revoke the car passes of those who live within 3 miles of the site!
This has understandably caused outrage amongst staff. How on earth do the management think people are going to get to work? One member of staff said "Someone dared suggest I could walk to work, I mean WALK, 3 miles. The furthest I've ever walked is 300 yards. It would take me hours". It has been suggested that the idea might encourage staff to think about using other means of getting to work other than their cars. Someone even suggested that there is a perfectly good bus service in the local area, or that they could ride a bike. "What on earth where they thinking, buses are meant for common people. Ride a bike? You must be joking" said one MoD mandarin climbing into his chauffeur driven staff car.
We await further news.
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