Bristol's Balloon Problem

Sometimes the congestion in the city is so bad that people take to the air, but if you try that in a helicopter you soon discover that not only is the cost of fuel excessive, everyone on the ground assumes that there's trouble on the ground and comes out watch. You could create a riot just by hovering over Bedminster on a Saturday night.

What else then? Obviously: balloons.

But here there's still heating bills to run up, and the fact they tend to only go west to east.

This is why inbound commuters from the west of the city use them in the mornings -maybe even to Bath- but other mechanisms are needed to get home. We propose allowing ballonists to get towed by the trains from Bath to Bristol, but we think some of the bridges may cause problems. Experiments are required.

Incidentally, this post-RPZ photo of Cotham Road shows some consequences of the actions. The bus- only parking area is now only used by buses; school-run parents have many free parking spaces, and, interestingly, bike/car conflict is reduces, as now the bicycles can get to one side of the road. Admittedly, there are a couple of build outs and the odd car for them to swerve round, but it is actually easier to drive along -at least until you get to Cotham Brow. For everyone but the commuters who wanted to park here, it's better.

Which causes us to worry about these Clifton proposals to add more parking "For traffic calming". We don't want calmed traffic. We want to drive round fast without bicycles in our way. Yes, we'd like more parking, but it shouldn't be at the expense of slowing us down, or providing short-stay parking areas marked in yellow lines.

We'll be looking at "the Clifton proposals" more next week.

Kingdown RPZ and the school run

The government still pushes out its lie that the war on motorists is over. How can that be while the cost of oil is so high -and the exchange rate with the dollar so bad? The only way to end this war is for the price of oil to come down, which could done by  revaluing the pound -regardless of its consequences to industry or the economy. After all, that's what Thatcher and friends did in the 1980s, back when they were on our side.


Yet not only are Cameron and his cronies in London secretly cycling round, laughing as they pedal past petrol station, here in Bristol, the libdem allies in the coalition are making it harder for commuters to drive to work, by not providing enough free parking -and taking it away from the park-and-walk zone nearby. Kingsdown was ideal for this, not just because it was somewhere where your car would probably still be there in the evening, mostly unscraped, but if you drove in from the western end of town, you could void the anti-car features of "the triangle" and "park row".

Now, one interesting consequence of the RPZ zone is up here at the western end of Cotham Road, looking at Cotham School.

This area here is going to be mixed resident and pay to park - with 15 minutes free parking. This is actually going to make school dropoff easier, especially for people within the zone, who will also have the ability to park near their home after doing the dropoff. Until now, nobody in Kingsdown could drive their kids 500m to Colstons, Cotham, St Peter and Paul or St Michael's schools, because some commuter would steal their space while they were gone. Not now. With space at both ends, the school run just got easier by car than by walking.

It's also easier than cycling, on account of the hills. Here we see a couple of cyclists who have struggled their way up the hill, in the cold. Do they look happy? Not to us.

They are just getting on with their suffering while a whole new short-stay parking area awaits us, the important people.

We'll keep an eye on this area to see how it pans out.

It's only once the university students are back that we'll see the full consequences.

One thing we are worried about is the BRI physio department at the end of the road, because its paveparking area (yellow lined) is now a paveparking area in a resident parking zone. Will the pavement by the dropped kerb at the mini roundabout no longer be a staff parking area? This we will watch.

Roundabout work #3: WR08ADK pays the wing mirror tax

Here's the next in our St Michael's Hill Roundabout series, this time looking at how a single cyclist trying to use the route can cause mayhem and destruction.

Normally when the bicycle/wingmirror collision is discussed, it is the cyclist complaining about how they get hit by a car in a hurry. Nobody ever looks at it from the motorists perspective. We may have damaged a wingmirror, but do the cyclists ever compensate us? Most aren't even insured.

Take this scene from a video of our secretly instrumented cyclist, apparently as the car squeezes past them at the traffic island, the car's wing mirror bashes against their handlebars.

The vehicle WR08ADK is lucky to escape from the enraged cyclist, who will probably commit more acts of violence against their Toyota Aygo, and again, without cyclist insurance, it'll be the motorist who picks up the bill.



We would say the motorist's insurers, except for one small detail: WR08ADK doesn't appear in the insurance database. Askmid denies it, while the AA refuse to give it a breakdown quote, "the car is not in the database", they say.

By not being in the database that this car driver not only has to pay for their own vehicle damage, be they wingmirrors or that caused by pedestrians, they cannot even get breakdown cover from the AA. This is unacceptable.

(Incidentally, this isn't a case of misreading the reg #, the car was seen cutting in front of a bike on Cotham Hill last week. It's a car whose # isn't in the database, a "ghost car").

(update: replaced Toyota Auris with Toyota Aygo. Nimble round town, though the wingmirrors and body coloured bumpers put it at a disadvantage when parking or working narrow streets).

Roundabout work #2: 08:17

Once the mercedes that blocked vehicles getting off the roundabout had cleared it, vehicles wanting to get onto St Michael's Hill could pull out, and here see the correct tactic: stop cars getting onto the roundabout. It's the only way to reduce demand, and so ensure the junction clears.

Which vehicle do we see here? Yes, its YA55VDY, the cult van of Bristol Traffic

Notice how the vehicle following this car is also in the mini-roundabout, but it hangs back to actually allow pedestrians to cross at the traffic island. Of course, this will prevent vehicles turning right to pull out, which is a bit selfish, but it does allow the roundabout to clear by reducing vehicle ingress rates to match that of egress rates.

The key point here is that it shows that those fellow-motorist-activist groups who advocate removing traffic lights are either missing the point or hiding the truth. On a junction without lights -like this one- the only way to get through is to be aggressive: drive the big vehicles, the 4x4, or even better, the battered big-vehicle, such as the white van. Now we, as  white-van drivers, are happy with this, but we think the harsh truth should be discussed in the open, not discovered once they remove lights from the city centre: whoever values their vehicle least wins.

Roundabout work #1: 08:15

08:15 to 08:16 on the top of St Michael's Hill.

First a car with a Montpelier-MOT wingmirror duct-taped into place. Someone just horned it as to get to this part of the junction (see on the dashed lines) it had to sprint up the oncoming traffic lane.

But by doing so it gets to pull out where the mercedes stuck in the middle of the mini roundabout has left a gap, follow the van through to the right and hope that there isn't anyone crossing the zebra crossing, which would block up the roundabout some more.

It does clear, the gap allows a car coming up Cotham Hill to pull out and turn right into St Michael's Hill.

Or it would, if the Mercedes hadn't stayed where it was.

Do you see what's wrong here? By staying back on the mini roundabout, by allowing cars out of Cotham Road, the school-run-driver is, sadly, making things worse. All the vehicles who are held up on Cotham Hill will see this and drive more considerately.