Southwell Street: the consequences

What do the Southwell Street changes mean? It'll be hard to tell until next term. Already, though, it seems to create the (false) impression that people on foot are welcome, and the zebra crossings appear to act as traffic calming too.

The restored pavement is in use. This will reduce car/pedestrian conflict, so actually be beneficial

That said, it also reduces bicycle/pedestrian conflict, while increasing bicycle/car conflict. This puts the blame on us, not them. Of course, put a van in front of these bollards "Only 15 minutes, guv", with another van on the pavement, and the old regime will be restored.

You can also see that the bollards are set up for a hard right turn into the pay and display car park. This makes it important to keep people off that pavement. It also makes us suspicious that the bollard placement was explicitly designed to remove the short-stay parking option on that side of the bollards. You can't park there without blocking the car park. Yes, you may be able to park the other side, but it's a ten minute journey round the block to get there.

Overall then, the bollards, the pavement and that deviously moved row of bollard don't appear to help us much. It's interesting to compare this with the original proposal, which was very much van-friendlier. Drive-in/back out parking spaces instead of pavement, room to park for delivery on both sides of the bollards. Assuming they dont' actually enforce parking in front of the bollards in the spaces currently in use, the physical parking capacity has been reduced by four. That's going to create tension, and making the bollards "opaque" to people on foot or pedals will create more. Now they will be upset if we park there, whereas before we could do it and not feel bad.

The key tactic here will be to set everyone's expectations up now. During the university holiday. We can take over the bollard area for parking, nobody will get used to cycling through it, and when term time begins, it will stay that way.

We look forward to NHS support for this plan.

Southwell Street: the changes

As discussed, the changes are happening.

The gate has been removed and replaced by bollards.

Yes, you can still park a van against them, but as they are the people doing the roadworks, that may change.

More shockingly, the "ex-pavement" that was to still have NHS vans echelon-parked over it, has been reinstated as public pavement! This goes against the whole "shared space" theory, or, as we van drivers call it, the "our space" road design. It's all ours, see.

The car exit is as before, except the signs blocking off that pavement have been replaced with less bent ones, and anyone walking down that road gets to get in the way of cars pulling out -as you can just make out here through the windscreen of the beetle.

We think that zebra crossing is new. It's hard to see why they bothered.

Kingsdown RPZ parking opportunities

Good to see that there are still some parking places hiding away in Kingsdown, like on Fremantle Square.

Although there are double yellow lines on each of the corners with Thomas Street, if you park your car right in the middle of the bollarded route, as BF02FVK has done, you aren't on any. It appears to be legal to park here. Why the bollards? Its a cycling city route, see.

Incidentally, for anyone who thinks that Kingsdown is now upmarket, what with the residents parking, we disagree. The Cotham Porter Stores pub is its very own bit of darkest Somerset, while Thomas Street boasts its very own Banksy. Here it is, framed.

Opposite, on a side of road that will soon apparently get yellow lines, that other sign of city life: someone has broken the window to steal something.

Question is, was it the classic -satnav- or was it one of the new resident permits?

South Gloucestershire bollards: who are the subversives?

Yesterday, we showed photographs of militant cyclists taping reflective strips to camouflaged bollards by the MOD Abbeywood site. Today we see some more photographs, showing hi-viz tape going up too!

Like we said, we don't suspect anyone associated with the Bristol Cycling Campaign to have done this, as S Gloucs council has a process for dealing with those people:

1. There is a monthly cycling forum, to which the activist cycle and the area's cycling advocate drives.
2. The cycling campaigners complain while the council staff nod and draw doodles on their notepads.
3. The campaigners' complaints get ignored.
4. The council staff drive home to their nice houses, laughing.
5. The cyclists pedal home in the rain, wondering what went wrong.

No, this was done by criminals out there, acting without control, without checks and balances, without morals. 

Who could it be?

According to the anonymous supplier of the photographs it was the People's Cycling Front of South Gloucestershire

They are not to be confused with the South Gloucester Popular Cycling Front, who was shopping at the Sainsbury's superstore nearby at the time.

We are disappointed that such clearly dangerous people could get close to an MoD site without being arrested.

Have any other subversives been taking to the street in our fair city, harassing motorists, taxi and lorry drivers on their important missions, parents trying to get their children to school by car safely, street designers trying to improve the streets for all these people? Reporting of such outrages to the Bristol Traffic site are welcome, so we can document the fall of our city into lawlessness.

Criminal Attacks on the Abbeywood Bollards!

We've been watching the Egypt uprising in fear. Pedestrians, taking over the flyovers, pushing vans and arguing with tanks. They do not know their place.

We've also been reading Cities and Insurrections, which covers the problem of how to design cities to prevent popular uprisings in them from working. You want distribution and better routes for police/army control than for the troublemakers. That's why we recognise that the goal for Northern Ireland's ongoing work to force cyclists to wear helmets isn't for safety, it's to stop the subversives being so mobile. NI has always been the cutting edge of UK policing, so progress here cheers up.

It's also why we understand the strategic goal of the North Fringe: a place so anti-walking and anti-cycling that no ukcuts projectors will be out hassling the shops here, or protesting anything. But to make sure, we have to discourage those people who do walk and cycle round here -for the safety of the state.

Which is why we were horrified when some anonymous person emailed us these shocking photographs of militant cyclists adding their own reflective and hi-viz markings to the new bollards at the MOD abbeywood site, the ones that achieved national fame after someone cycled into them in the snow.

Now on a flash photo, you can see that it (and the newly added blue bicycle marking) is visible. One query: why doesn't that sign properly say bicycles keep left?

Looking the other way, you can see at least a bicycle going up and down has been painted on one side of the pavement, and it is segregated.

And turning 180 degrees we can see how much less visible the old bollards were.

What to say? Just because you don't think the bollards are safe, doesn't mean people should take actions in to your own hands like this.

Since the crash and the negative publicity, S Gloucs council have put the blue signs on. Now if anyone crashes in to it it's their own fault for being in the wrong part of the path, going to fast, or not paying attention. 

Yet as these photographs show, some people, even up in the North Fringe -our part of the city, as you get a hint of from the vast MoD car park to the side of the photos- there are troublemakers out there trying to make cycle city facilities somewhere where cyclists actually welcome.

We suspect the Cycle Embassy of Great Britain, or one of their minions.

Who else would threaten the safety of South Gloucester and Filton Town councils, and hence the whole country?

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.

Abbey Wood Bike/pedestrian path changes

We've sent the team to the North Fringe for a few days, to see what the fuss is about regarding Abbeywood and Bollards. In order to cover this accurately, we have had to recruit someone on a bicycle, for which we apologise. If it makes the audience feel better, they think they are being paid to be a courier for paperwork. Normally we just pay them to carry old phone books around, as it slows them down, and about once a week they have to deliver high-strength home-grown Montpelier herbs, an action which would get them put away for 20-25 years if they were caught with them, a thought which always cheers us up when we send them out.


Returning to Abbeywood, some people may recall the fuss made last year when someone cycled into a bollard that S Gloucester council stuck in. These are white bollards with a white stripe, no hi-viz markings, and on a path that is only intermittently illuminated. Well, yes, a crash was inevitable. Yet we agree with some the comments made in the Evening Post and Daily Mail -while we sympathetic to the lecturer's injuries, they have only themselves to blame for being on a bicycle.

We actually saw some of the bollards going in, but didn't think it was interesting enough to cover. Now that we see it is, we can go through the back records and find the video.



Now that the bollards are here on the eastern side of the MoD land, we are disappointed to see that it does so little to discourage cycling. Instead our courier can travel down the bike path at speed, slow down for the road, where apparently off camera someone driving a car actually gives way to the bicycle, hinting this green paint is giving some mistaken impression about rights of way to MoD staff.



Last year, this path had a proper anti-bicycle gate, which the subversives used to ignore by going through the vegetation, forcing the MoD deployment of an anti-vegetation-cycling feature, before they went and removed it, eventually adding this new bollard.

The bollard does not stop people cycling to the North Fringe. The only way to prevent that would be to improve A4174 traffic by widening it and banning bicycles from the ring road, while downgrading any adjacent bike paths. We may have some good news there, in a week or two.

For now, this side of Abbey Wood does little to discourage cycling. We shall visit the other side, which was where the crash took place to see if it is any better.

Monty week: cyclists endangering our paintwork

Our Monty week has gone on a bit, but that is because there are always shocking things to cover.

Last month, we were celebrating the loss of a bollard finally re-opened Picton Square to important people in their 4x4s, giving you somewhere in this narrow-laned part of the city to park where you could be confident that your mirrors and paintwork would be safe.

But look at how this selfish cyclist endangers the paintwork of the parked 4x4 P334OWP. By trying to scrape between the remaining bollard and the vehicle, her child wagon may brush against the vehicle and so cause damage. And would any cyclist -who is no doubt uninsured- stop and leave their contact details were this to happen? We doubt it!

Note also that we have evidence this helmet-less mother lets her children play in the street! We have informed Bristol Social Services.

Picton Square open for 4x4 parking again!

We are pleased to announce that despite the best efforts of the local street activists, someone has knocked down one of the bollards on Picton Square, so providing somewhere for vans and 4x4s to park when visiting the nearby shops.

This is technically a bike path, but, well, who cares?

Update: Quercus claims that SC51MXS is their vehicle.