Downhiller Commitment on Marlborough Hill

Marlborough Hill is 25% gradient zero visibility at the bottom. When the council was asking for places to put in contraflows for bicycles, this was one where even the tax dodgers consensus was "no, too dangerous" -though as they have ninetree hill as their secret cut-through, they have less need of it than us motorists. Usually.

This rider is brave, and descends at a speed where there would be no opportunity to steer out out the way or stop were something big to come out of a side road.

You can see it in the video -and hear it to; the sound of hign-end knobbly tyres on wet tarmac. tyres which offer less surface area on tarmac that slick tyres, and hence can sustain less braking force in the wet. Mud, they work, but on road, not so useful.

We've covered the rules for aggressive downhill work before: runout, align, commit! This MTBer is aligned, and 100% committed, but the runout looks dubious. All it takes is a vehicle to pull out from the upper of the two road, the one he turned into, and it's game over.

What's also interesting here is the sheer number of people walking up and down this hill. Walking and cycling activists could make the case for downgrading this from a road to a pedestrian/cycle path. We're against that, obviously, because it would eliminate a secret rat-run from Kingsdown to Dighton Street -one used by cars, cyclists and pedestrians alike

Selfish Parents

The same time we were getting a video of one driver, X108YDY, prepared to fight the anti-car city and use the secret rat-runs of Kingsdown, we were also getting some shocking footage of parents walking their kids to school.

Some were clearly going on to cycle to work, so instead of driving their children to school in comfort and safety, they were being forced to walk alongside a bicycle -while the parents push them without even a helmet on!

Others were actually encouraging their children to cycle to school.

Such actions not only endanger the children, they threaten the bodywork of those of us who drive the wrong way down one-way streets as an alternative to traffic lights. Can't these parents see that we are in a hurry!

KTT86LT takes the easy direction on Marlborough Hill

The Bristol Traffic Project is a Big Society project, a community database of those people bold enough to stand up for their rights in an anti-car city. Today we are pleased see it at work.

This is Marlborough Hill, "nominally" one way. We say "nominally", as it is wider than most two-way streets in nearby areas. While over in Waltham Forest, Freewheeler complains that one-way streets increase traffic speed, our niggle with it is that it increases the expectation by cyclists that they should be on the road.

Look at this video of the polish-plated BMW KTT86LT heading doing a bit of contraflow on Marlborough Hill.



The driver is giving way to cars coming up the hill, on the narrow one way bit he even slides to one side to let the bicycles up this 1:5 hill. Yet are the cyclists grateful for his generosity? No, they abuse him. At least he is generous enough to laugh politely while shaking his head, but then he is probably in a hurry. Why else take this contraflow rat-run on a Sunday morning?

Returning to our community database project, note how we always omit spaces in registration numbers. This makes it easier to index them in large distributed column tables and other fancy servers, which makes it easier to find them in the search engines of our strategic partners, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! included. Today we can see that KTT86LT has already been seen in Stokes Croft. We are slowly building up our dataset on who is prepared to stand up against the oppressors -and who the little people are.

If you have not yet had the honour of being on our site -you are probably one of the little people.

Hail the Rebel! X108YDY

We celebrate people who stand up against oppression, who fight an anti-car council in and anti-car city. This why we are proud to celebrate the driver of X108YDY as he drives down Marlborough Hill, from Kingsdown to Jamaica Street.

For some reason he didn't seem to appreciate that he was on camera and thought it was a stokes croft weird person who had come up the hill, rather than a member of the Bristol Traffic reporting team. The parents walking their kids to school through Marlborough Hill Place and then the hospital car park were giving funny looks too, hence the explanation at the end that it's on camera.

It is only by driving the wrong way down this street that motorists can get rapidly from Kingsdown and without getting stuck in traffic on Horfield Road. It should be made two way. Admittedly, there isn't room for two cars, but it's wider than your average Montpelier street, so why the problem?

M5 work

"Paul N" sends us this video of what the M5 was like on October 26 between Bristol and Cirencester.

As people say, where were the police? Yes, there was an accident up the road, but surely one or two could have been diverted to direct people to drive up the hard shoulder and then U-turn up the slip road? Without that, vehicles doing that -such as the skip lorry- are taking their lives into their own hands. We pay our taxes so that we can drive the wrong way up a motorway slip road safely!