The AA street watch

Apparently the AA were doing some study last week, trying get some statistics on what people in cities do that is technically "illegal", despite the war on motorists being over.

We think their crowd-sourced approach, while clearly based on our own world-leading experiment, is valid, we do like asking the machines for the data too. It scales better in space and time, generates more defensible data,  suffers from less self-selection bias, and is easier to go through in bulk.

This is why we think the best way for the AA to gain some statistics of where drivers bend the "so called law" would simply be to collect the satnav statistics of their own vehicles, correlating vehicle speeds and parking events with the "legacy" speed limits, double yellow line map, yellow-boxed junctions, etc. This would provide a year-round source of data, completely independent of any selection bias of the reporters.

We invite the AA to provide the Bristol Traffic team with an anonymised copy of such a dataset. Even if our multi-terabyte distributed filestore lacks the storage and compute capacity, we are sure that our strategic partners like Yahoo!, Google and Facebook,  do, and we will apply our world class datamining and Hidden Markov Modelling techniques to show the AA we are pretty good at guessing where their vans and driving school vehicles will park (hint: double yellow lines and pavements, such as here, the double yellow lines of St Michael's Hill).

A lot of people dismiss the AA for being lost in time, pining for the 1950s when cars only made it ten miles before a breakdown, and you'd send a telegram to let your family know you'd made it all the way from Bristol city centre to Filton without a catastrophe. We criticise them for something else: inability to grasp the opportunities that modern technologies bring. Never ask the people, when you can ask the machines.

Facebook Issues

The Bristol Traffic team met many of our strategic partners in California, too many to mention. One thing we will flag up is our concerns about the Facebook visit. The Non-Disclosure Agreement prevents any discussion about what went on indoors, what their offices look like, or whether or not the team met The Man. It's not important; what matters is that two of the world's best datamining organisations got together to discuss areas of mutual interest. And the Bristol Traffic logo (a stylised version of Southwell Street) is now on graffiti wall on the right past security.

What we will raise is this. The entrance, of 1601 California Avenue. HQ.

This in the head office, the developers all work here, with Mark in the private room in the middle. Someone worth many billions of dollars, hosting Obama shortly after our visit. But where is the fancy parking area? There is more prestigious parking are outside the UWE vice chancellor's office than here, where the vehicles that can get closest to the entrance are a shuttlebus and bicycles.

It is trends like this -giving bicycle parking pride of place in the foyer of the global web companies- that worry us.

At the junction of Google and Ampitheater

Over in Waltham Forest, Freewheeler has been expressing some concerns about google.

We too have issues, which, during the teams visit to our strategic partners in California, also cause us to question our long term relationship with them.

Ampitheater Parkway. Like the Bristol M32 Parkway except less congested, and there's a bike lane in the hard shoulder for pickups to sideswipe. All is well.

Ahead, the centre of Google-land, with a little "google maps" pin to show you where the Google maps team is based. All is well.

But what's this we see from our SUV?

That's right: it's a Google employee, on a Google staff bicycle, cycling between offices, while holding a phone.

This is Google, not just encouraging their employees to ride bicycles, but to check their email as they do it. And they aren't even wearing a helmet!

It is unacceptable, and concerns us deeply. Is Google really on our side. We know Microsoft are, because they gave the internet the Comic Sans font, the official font of the Association of British Drivers, Drivers Protest and the like. But Google? By encouraging such reckless behaviour by their staffers, we now have doubts.

Queries that Bring visitors

As part of our "watching you, watching us" series, here are some of the keywords that brought visitors to the site. Stokes croft was the main bringer of visitors, more about the riot than the wonders of Slix. Comments appear after the "-" symbols.

• stokes croft riot -481 visits with the word stokes croft
• stokes croft tesco
• bristol stoke gifford riots -got some bad news for you there: nothing happens in S Gloucs.
• coronation road cycle path bristol -we call it the farm pub path
• bri parking -70 visits on this
• dropped kerb kingsdown-yeah, they ticket you for parking there
• vertical parking technique
• "the aa" -we are coming up in the first page of results here!
• cllr gollop cycling
• parking near cabot circus -walk from the stokes croft bike lane. 50 hits for this last month.
• parking near primark bristol -see above
• brunel ford -ooh, top five there.
• cabot circus free parking -not any more
• cheap parking near cabot circus -for shoppers, the big multistorey car park
• hack tachographs -always use a TOR proxy when planning to break the law
• hiviz fetish - still?
• aa driving school -top 5 there too
• bristol massage parlour extras - get in touch, we have a special on Keith Chegwin accessories
• british school of motoring how to park -if they knew, they'd tell us
• bus lane fine in bristol if dropping someone off - possibly
• can i turn right from zetland road to gloucester road -yes
• eric pickles declares war - we are #1 on google on this now
• free parking in bristol st michael's -yes, on evenings and weekends
• free parking near college green -only for councillors
• is it illegal to block a junction on a road in standing traffic -yes, but it doesn't stop the AA doing it, so it must be OK
• is stokes croft a bad area? depends: good for drugs and paid sex, some of the bars are OK.
• kingsdown parking permits for sale -yes, we found that out, didn't we?
• mr ahmadou spiritual healer - but can he fix speeding tickets?
• parking at abbeywood b&q - bills come in the post if you do this all day: the students learned this a while ago
• stapleton road bristol sex for sell -apparently so
• prostitutes and truck parking -see above
• ubht staff parking -lots.
• will my car get towed in st pauls bristol -try it and see
• can you get done for 30 mph in a 20 zone -yes, and we hear they are issuing tickets now

Remember: if you are researching illegal acts, always use an anonymising proxy server. We do.

Hello to Van Hire Bristol!

A quick hello to Van Hire Bristol who added a comment to our co-existence post, the one that showed a white van turning into Cotham Hill without bothering to look, because the driver knew that mostly only people on bicycles come down the hill, and any pedestrians crossing at that point are students and therefore liabilities on the state.

Whoever it was that posted the comment made some well informed comments showing their mastery of the the English language, and their complete failure to read the bit where we warn that anyone posting adverts will be publicly criticised, along with ignorance of the nofollow attribute hence the fact that adding comments to a high page-ranked site like ours does nothing for their own ranking:

Hey I like the post very much. This is really a very good post with very good information.


Thanks a lot for sharing the post very much. You know what I like the title of video very much which insist to watch the video to me. :)


Keep sharing such stuffs.

Well, we don't care whether you like the title or whether you think it's a really good post with very good information, and we shall keep sharing such stuffs without being asked. What we want to know is this? Is the white vanYB06BDO one of the Van Hire Bristol fleet?


Furthermore, if we rent a van from you:

1. Does it automatically come with pre-insurance cover for running over bicycles and pedestrians?
2. Will you be upset if comes back with scratches and blood on the bumper?
3. Does it have a tow bar to provide audible feedback when reverse parking (crunching sounds)
4. What driver training will you provide showing us how to drive and park such vehicles, especially while texting?

Regarding the comment itself, a few more questions

• Did you actually pay somebody to write such an atrociously badly written comment?
• What did they promise in return? 
• Did they read the warning notice before they commented, and did they understand the consequences of their action, namely that they consented to have your site discussed in a posting all of its own?
• How does it feel to have a web page making fun of you (as promised in the comment form) come back ahead of you in searches?
• Given that some people may view the video as portraying a mildly negative opinion of white vans in the city -despite our own view that they are an essential part of the national economy- do you feel that it is wise to have your brand associated with such incidents?
• Did you ask the person who promised to boost your page to read the pages first? Will you request this in future?
• Have you asked your outsourced SEO agent about nofollow tags and the fact that they mean that none of our google pagerank (5) transfers to yours (0) -and that the comments have at best no effect whatsoever?
• Are you aware that because Google own blogspot, there is the possibility that at worst they will use the URLs in postings downgraded as spam to actually penalise such sites in their search engine?
• Have you a way of asking for your money back?

Remember, the Bristol Traffic project is a data gathering and datamining organisation that views Google and Yahoo! as strategic partners; Game Theory  and Graph Theory key branches of mathematics to model traffic movement around cities. We do not yet see any value in strategic or tactical alliances with Van Hire Bristol, whoever you are, so will be forced to block any further attempts to add comments to our site.

Thank you for your participation in the Bristol Traffic Project.

A polite refusal

Sachin,

Sadly, we must decline your offer to write articles on our site in exchange for links back to some paying customer of yours for the following reasons

1. You have not spent enough time reading the articles, merely searched for driving school on blogspot, observed our pagerank and thought that you'd like some of it. If you had spent more time on our site, you would have realised that your underpaid copy-editors will not be up to the high standards maintained by our volunteers.
2. We have quite enough high quality content of our own, and more in the pipeline. The problem we have is not in getting photographs or videos, it is in coming up with prose that is entertaining enough to accompany it.
3. On our comments page, we explicitly say "No adverts, no spam, no requests for cross linking. We will only be rude." You have fallen foul of this clause, hence this online feedback session.
4. We like to consider Google and MSFT/Bing strategic partners, while also maintaining a good working relationship with Yahoo! and Facebook, with whom we share a common codebase for our data mining activities. Linking to tier-three Australian driving school web sites would damage these relationships.
5. Your SEO customer's web site -to which we graciously link to for free- appears to be smug bollocks. This gives us the impression that your driving instructors are the kind who witter on about he correct colour of driving gloves to wear, not today's problems of how to post a positive comment on Facebook from your phone about the woman on the crossing you nearly hit without crashing into the car in front of you in the traffic jam.

Rest assured, there is a special place for driving instructors on our site, and we look forward to the opportunity to cover your customers there at some point in the future. Perhaps one of our Australian readers can provide some photographs for the coverage.

Yours,

The Bristol Traffic Project

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Sachin sachin@webprofits.com.au
Date: 19 October 2010 08:33
Subject: We would like to write an article for your site
To: bristol.traffic at gmail dot com


Hey there,

We have been reading the articles on your website and are very impressed with the quality of your information.

We have a team of copywriters who specialize in writing articles on various topics and would like to write an original article for you to use on your website – this article will not be used anywhere else on the Internet.

In exchange all we ask is that we can have one or two links within the body of the article back to one of our sites. You can view a sample of the quality of our articles at

If you are interested in having us write an article for your website please just let me know and we would be more than happy to have one written for you within two weeks.

Kind regards,

Sachin

Bristol Traffic and your privacy rights

A while back, we documented how selfish pedestrians trying to squeeze past Hampton House hospital staff cars parked on the pavement forced the BRI hospital van WR58UMS to drive down a bicycle only contraflow and then park half on the pavement, half on the yellow lines, and keep the door open to reduce the risk of any bicycle damaging their paintwork.

Our reporter also says that the driver warned "if a photo of them appeared on the web site, they would be prosecuted".

This raised an interesting question, one we raised with the Information Commissioners Office,  namely what are the data protection rules surrounding photographs of vehicles in public places.

We now have a response

From:  casework at ico.gsi.gov.uk

Date: Thu, Aug 19, 2010 at 11:22 AM
Subject: Data Protection Query[Ref. ENQ0341761]
To: bristol.traffic at gmail.com

19th August 2010

Case Reference Number ENQ0341761

Dear Sir/Madam

Thank you for your email.

In order to fall under the provisions of the Data Protection Act 1998 the data concerned must be personal data; that is data from which a living individual can be identified.  Vehicles and their registration numbers in isolation from any other information are not considered to be personal data.

As such its seems unlikely that the Data Protection Act 1998 will apply to the situation you outline.  You may need to ensure that you do not include images of the drivers when these pictures are taken as this could lead you into the area of data protection.

Obviously there may be other legal issues you will need to consider but these are not matters that this office could give you advice on.

I hope this clarifies the matter for you

Yours sincerely

Louise MacDonald

Lead Case Officer

 ____________________________________________________________________


The ICO’s mission is to uphold information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals.

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So there you have it. Cars with registration numbers yes, people on their own, OK, but photographs of the drivers with the reg nos, maybe. Interesting. We shall have to consider this. Good email signature.