Showing posts with label hampton-house. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hampton-house. Show all posts

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.

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.