RAC visiting the White Bear

We like coverage of pubs, today, the White Bea, which:

1. is in the student quarter
2. has free wifi
3. has a big white bear statue in front of it and one painted further up the wall.
4. has an RAC van up on the pavement in front of it next to the "no parking" signs

What's interesting about the RAC van VN07KYA is it is parked over new double yellow lines, as this area becomes residents parking in three weeks time. This will make driving to the White Bear trickier, except that as you can park free for 15 minutes in the zone, if the bar staff are nippy you've got time to park, grab a couple of pints, then carry on.

Tolerance

Contrary to public opinion and the comments pages of the Bristol Evening Post, it appears we are not a tolerant society.

Here we see a poor motorist occupying the cycle lane on College Green. With a flat tyre.

Notice how both he and the car V638HAA are effectively blocking the entire cycle lane, in both directions whilst the driver texts someone important. It seems he's not about to move out of the way for an intolerant cyclist that happens to be remonstrating with him for parking here.

This is obviously an inconsiderate cyclist. After all, he could easily have dismounted and walked his bike around the obstruction instead of making a fuss.

Luckily the cyclist eventually manages to squeeze past and calm returns. But only for so long.

In the half an hour that it takes to buy and learn to ride a fixed wheel bike on the pavement, the RAC van VN09GNN turned up to the rescue. Parked half on the cycle lane, and half on the zig-zags the driver is being very considerate to the drivers about to power up Park Street. But ignore that, cycling on pavements is wrong.

We don't approve of cycling on pavements, because we're not very tolerant. Yes cyclists may be able repair a flat tyre on the go, but changing a wheel on a car is a difficult and challenging process for a driver and requires the use of an Emergency Service.

So we had a word with all the cyclists trying get around the obstruction by cycling on the pavement.

We made them walk and be tolerant of pedestrians. We're drivers, and we have clout.

The St Michaels Hill Zebra Crossing

After the RAC coverage of our city in their road pricing waste of paper, we felt we ought to nip out St Michael's Hill and document the zebra crossing at work at 09:25 one weekday morning.

After parking our Bristol Traffic van on the zig-zags, we waited for some pedestrian and who should come along but this gentleman. Damian, he said his name was. We immediately stopped him and demanded that he pay a road use tax which he refused on the basis that if he was going to pay to use the pedestrian facilities he'd like the BRI to re-open the pavement on soundwell street. Apparently he felt that turning one pavement into parking and then closing off the other to reduce the risk to turning cars was somehow wrong, had complained to the council and got fobbed off on the basis that it is hospital grounds.

Hmmm. Troublemaker there -worth keeping an eye on. But he does raise a point. If we do start billing the pedestrians and cyclists, they may want value for money.

Next, some tax-dodging pedestrian crosses below the zebra crossing. Visibility for cars descending at speed here is pretty bad, so this person is selfishly risking some vehicle's bodywork.

Shortly thereafter, someone walks their bike over. keep an eye on  the two pedestrians on the right by the cars.

This really annoys us, cyclists who on a whim just jump off their bicycle and wheel it along, as if rules like stopping for pedestrians apply to cyclists pushing a bike. They don't. The car WP03LHW breaks the bad news, as it goes straight over the crossing without waiting for the cyclist to finish crossing.

The car does have to put its brakes on for those two pedestrians who have now slipped out. You see that? Even if the car doesn't have to stop for the cyclist on the zebra crossing, it it is forced to by the suicidal pedestrians who would otherwise damage its paintwork. Lucky there's a hospital nearby.

The RAC: missing the elephant on the room

The RAC. The fourth emergency service. Or is that the AA? Either way, they come out for us, and will park on zig-zags by a pedestrian crossing -below on Muller Road- to handle our breakdowns. But expensive. RAC roadside assistance for two drivers with at home support, recovery and euro-breakdown comes to £283.50. That's a lot. If you are one of those wimps who don't drive a group G road-tax car, it's way more than your road tax. So you need to make a choice, don't you: Tax and MoT or breakdown cover? One you need, one you may be able to get away without, providing the DVLA don't catch you.

Fortunately, the RAC have seen a solution: abolish road tax.

The RAC has put up a paper on Road Charging, that encourages replacing road tax and fuel tax with pay to use fees.  We initially thought that the BBC had accidentally used the phrase "road tax" to cover vehicle excise duty, and completely ignore the fact that group A vehicles pay nothing, so if you drive a small hybrid car you pay no VED and discounted fuel duty due to its increased economy. But no the RAC, they don't represent the little people. They represent us: the big cars, the white vans, the V8 range rovers coming in to london from oxfordshire. So the RAC used the term "road tax" in their key points, and the BBC radio and web site naively believed the report was somehow independent, rather than a plan to free up money for RAC breakdown cover. 

Now, what about the actual report? We like the idea of abolishing fuel duty and road tax, but we think the idea of making people pay-per-mile-driven misses the elephant in the room: pedestrians and cyclists. How can we make them pay-per-mile walked or cycled -and without that, how can they be made to bear a realistic proportion of the congestion they cause? Every pedestrian who uses a zebra crossing or pelican crossing may hold up traffic, and should be charged at least for the lost time of every driver. Similarly, a bicycle pootling along at 15 mph shouldn't just be billed for using the road, they should pay a congestion charges of the row of cars behind which have been forced to also drive at 15 mph.

We don't understand why the article missed this -it's so obvious. They even showed the problem at work in bristol. Go to page 47, look at the photo on the top. That's the zebra crossing on St Michael's Hill, looking down to town. And there are some happy students gaily prancing over the crossing -probably holding up the photography team.

We don't currently have the photo from that exact same location, though we have one from slightly further back on some winter day when drivers were forced to swerve round road closed signs.


Slightly further down the hill, almost aligned with the zebra crossing, you can see the view of the city that the RAC use in their paper. Yet despite the photo, the RAC miss the elephant in the room, or more precisely, pedestrians in the road. In our way. In the way of the road-taxy payers, or, in the future, road-use-tax payers.

Unless a pay-to-use road system also bills all pedestrians and cyclists for the congestion and pollution they cause, even indirectly, it will be anti-motorist.

There's only one thing about the RAC using photo of our St Michaels Hill in their otherwise missing-the-point article that cheers us up. Every person walking over the zebra crossing from left to right in these photos has had to come from Southwell Street. And what's so special about that? It's the one where the hospital blocked off the pavement to force the pedestrians into the road. But even there, do the pedestrians get billed for holding up BRI hospital cars? We doubt it.