What do the Southwell Street changes mean? It'll be hard to tell until next term. Already, though, it seems to create the (false) impression that people on foot are welcome, and the zebra crossings appear to act as traffic calming too.
The restored pavement is in use. This will reduce car/pedestrian conflict, so actually be beneficial
That said, it also reduces bicycle/pedestrian conflict, while increasing bicycle/car conflict. This puts the blame on us, not them. Of course, put a van in front of these bollards "Only 15 minutes, guv", with another van on the pavement, and the old regime will be restored.
You can also see that the bollards are set up for a hard right turn into the pay and display car park. This makes it important to keep people off that pavement. It also makes us suspicious that the bollard placement was explicitly designed to remove the short-stay parking option on that side of the bollards. You can't park there without blocking the car park. Yes, you may be able to park the other side, but it's a ten minute journey round the block to get there.
Overall then, the bollards, the pavement and that deviously moved row of bollard don't appear to help us much. It's interesting to compare this with the original proposal, which was very much van-friendlier. Drive-in/back out parking spaces instead of pavement, room to park for delivery on both sides of the bollards. Assuming they dont' actually enforce parking in front of the bollards in the spaces currently in use, the physical parking capacity has been reduced by four. That's going to create tension, and making the bollards "opaque" to people on foot or pedals will create more. Now they will be upset if we park there, whereas before we could do it and not feel bad.
The key tactic here will be to set everyone's expectations up now. During the university holiday. We can take over the bollard area for parking, nobody will get used to cycling through it, and when term time begins, it will stay that way.
The gate has been removed and replaced by bollards.
Yes, you can still park a van against them, but as they are the people doing the roadworks, that may change.
More shockingly, the "ex-pavement" that was to still have NHS vans echelon-parked over it, has been reinstated as public pavement! This goes against the whole "shared space" theory, or, as we van drivers call it, the "our space" road design. It's all ours, see.
The car exit is as before, except the signs blocking off that pavement have been replaced with less bent ones, and anyone walking down that road gets to get in the way of cars pulling out -as you can just make out here through the windscreen of the beetle.
We think that zebra crossing is new. It's hard to see why they bothered.
Interesting they chose the phrase "hit by a car"; in London they tend to describe the bicycle as hitting the car, before going on to discuss whether they had a helmet on.
The location was describe as the junction of St Michael's Hill and Horfield Road. We've noted how this isn't that much fun in a car. This collision happened at 22:22 on a Friday, so congestion would be minimal -and there is more chance of cars driving around fast.
Judging by the signs, the collision wasn't with Park Row, it was further up the hill. There's no further details yet on what happened.
Some possibilities:
Car and bicycle heading down the St Michaels Hill, collision.
Car and bicycle heading down Horfield Road, collision.
Bicycle heading up St Michaels Hill, collides with car also going up St Michaels Hill
Those are the normal two vehicles in the same-direction incidents. This junction adds some more, all of which tend to lead to side-on collisions:
Bicycle heading down St Michaels Hill, collides with car going down Horfield Road, or up St Michaels Hil.
Bicycle heading down Horfield Road collides with car pulling out St Michaels Hill and heading downhill
Bicycle heading up St Michaels Hill towards Horfield Road, gets hit by a car going straight up St Michaels Hill
Nobody rational turns from St Michaels Hill into Horfield Road; its too tight. There are other options further up the hill.
The highest risk actions on a bicycle are probably
Heading down from St Michaels Hill, where you are exposed to vehicles heading in either direction. Gravity works in the bicycle's favour here, it pulls the bicycle forward and minimises the time side-on to traffic.
Heading up towards Horfield Road, where the bicycle rider is curving right and pushing slowly up something steep -any vehicle heading up St Michaels Hill in a hurry may turn over them. It's like a left hook only without the car making the left turn, it just goes straight on (hence faster), even though the road lanes turn rightwards.
On a bicycle, before the building works started, heading up through the BRI car park (the former Terrell Street) was apparently a lower hassle option. Follow the signs to A&E from Park Row, then head out to Horfield Road, or turn right to Marlborough Hill and a final bit of climbing.
We have no more details than the BBC article -and wish the cyclist a speedy and full recovery.
The tax-dodgers are complaining about Shared Streets this week -that they really mean "streets mostly for cars and vans". Exactly. Given a choice between a pedestrian area and a shared street, we'd go for the shared street. Once you get a hang of the chicanes they can be quite fun.
Southwell Street, our unofficial logo, is being "improved". We know that, as the vans to do it are parked there this week. Expect photos soon. But before that, the plans.
As people will recall, the concerns by the non-drivers about this area were
uphill pavement turned into NHS parking, possibly illegally.
no way for bicycles to get through except on the pavement
the pavement was blocked to give priority to staff cars
both dead ends were used as short stay parking for vans
Overall then a van-and-staff friendly area, with pedestrians as an afterthought, and one of those deliberately created bike/walker conflict zones to divide the opposition, all on the premier walking route from Gloucester Road to Bristol University, and hence full of students. By creating such conflict we could discourage people from trying to do this.
We were initially worried, then, when this draft plan hit our inbox, "a shared space".
Then we saw some emails from Ben Hamilton-Baillie, who we thought would approve of this fusion of walking and driving. Yet he seemed unimpressed
Most residents in Kingsdown feel, as I do, pretty insulted to be presented with a sketch of such pathetically poor quality for Southwell Street.
If the UHB really believes that Southwell Street and other streets in and around Kingsdown can be treated with such contempt, we should not give them any support. I have seen work experience students aged 16 produce more intelligent work than AECOM’s output for UHB. I only hope the hospital trust is not having to pay them fees as well....
Finally, we saw this video from a tax-dodging pavement cyclist who encounters the designers, and provides some feedback.
At 00:10 the Ginster delivery van does a U-turn without indicating, at which the troublemaker engages in discussion with the driver about, that and the fact that it isn't making any beeping noises. Well, the lorry pays more road tax, and isn't of a size where it needs the beeps. That shuts them. Remember that lorry though.
At 1:02 they execute the highly illegal "pavement bypass" option, so endangering pedestrians.
At 1:16 they meet the a hi-viz'd person planning the traffic calming area -and say to them the plan sucks, because painting a bit of pavement, whether it's in coloured paint or some cobbles down the middle of the road is utterly meaningless. They mutter on a bit, and we think their key point is that taking one pavement off for car parking and closing the other off for safe car park access is somehow wrong.
At 1:38 the cyclist, who is standing in the middle of the "person on the road" lane is actually forced to wheel their bike backwards to let a car out of the staff carpark. This shows to us how the "shared space" design will have no effect on our daily lives, so may as well be permitted. There is a risk of some benefit to people trying to cycle here -as they won't be quite so discouraged by having to hop on and off the pavement, but if we block the bollards with vans often enough, they'll be discouraged differently.
At 1:48 the troublemaker demands some of the pavement back. We'd hoped to have some good news there, but based on the building work it looks like these people have got their way. Somewhat. Wait until tomorrow for the specifics there.
At 2:02 they express concern that the dropoff area in front of the hospital is chaotic, and it will remain so. Well, that's why it's called a dropoff area, isn't it? If people were expected to do dropoffs and pickups on St Michael's hill, there'd be an area there instead.
at 2:20 their rant finishes and they finally head off, presumably to the relief of the site team. They then proceed down a road that clearly has room for parking all down one side, yet lacks it. And there are an oddly large number of pedestrians, given the effort the NHS has gone to here to discourage walking.
At 2:43 you can see some people trying to cross Horfield Road. Notice the wide five-junction crossing here. It's a dangerous exposed crossing and people shouldn't attempt it, not when there is a zebra crossing further up the road, as the video shows at 3:07. If people aren't prepared to cross the road where a crossing has been provided, well, it's like people on bicycles not using the bike lanes.
At the zebra crossing they do a U-turn, and at 3:08 show what is paveparked over yellow lines round the corner: Ginster delivery van HN58LVK. Purely because Southwell Street doesn't support through traffic, that van had to do a 180 degree turn in a narrow drop-off street, turn right up St Michael's Hill, right again on to Myrtle Road, then onto Alfred place. One U-turn and two right turns -not just a philosophy for the coalition government, it's costing the company money. The DfT puts a financial cost on critical business motoring, and its clear that closing this road has tangible costs to that key part of the economy: the white van.
Therefore, although the proposals don't take much away from us, they don't deliver what we need, either -the removal of the gate and the re-instatement of Southwell Street as a van-friendly rat-run!
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.
Someone cornered a team member a few weeks back and said "where are the secret plans for Southwell Street?". We forwarded them on, but are still waiting back for the note the police stuck through their door advising them on the rules for parking on pavements in Montpelier.
We are also trying to get permission to reprint one email from Ben Hamilton Baillie, Kingsdown resident and shared-space advocate, sent to the Bristol council denouncing the proposals. We need his permission, plus a review from the legal team, before printing. Legal? Well, it is somewhat critical of the plans.
In the meantime, here's what's happening as a video
and a photo of V984DNA
Why the increased number of vans on the co-opted pavement and over the pedestrian-in-middle-of-road paintwork? BRI parking changes. With the closure of most of the Horfield Road car park for building works, there's a deficit of patient parking. 75 spaces in the St Michael's Hill car park area (through the tunnel to the right, perhaps?) being opened to patients and their visitors. Hence less parking for staff -who have no choice but to park on the pavements or pretend pavements.
There's a notice up on a lamppost on Marlborough Hill discussing this. It also lets slip that staff parking permits cost £4/day. Not bad for the city centre, not bad at all. Given that once the NHS gets privatised in the next 6-12 months, the annual "consultancy fee" with our GP for getting a disabled sticker will probably go up to £200/van, this rate starts to look appealing for city-centre commuters, although it's not quite as flexible as the magic blue sticker.
Game theory divides games into those in which all information is visible to all players (like chess), and those where each side holds secrets (like poker). There are different tactics in each. In a game when the position and intent of all players is visible the Nash Equilibrium -the steady state reached when every player can predict the optimal moves of their opponents and act accordingly- is easier to reach.
In junctions, it comes down to "do you block the junction or not". Here on Cheltenham Road the taxi says yes.
Then, just before the lights change, it moves forward and another car makes the same decision.
Here in this video from the St Michaels Hill roundabout, you can see another taxi making the same decision.
In highway-code theory, blocking junctions is selfish and can lead to total gridlock.
In Game Theory, as applied to Bristol City streets, blocking the junction is the correct thing to do. why?
You know that nobody is going to penalise anyone who blocks a junction.
If you block a junction, when the road ahead eventually moves, you will get through.
If the other players in the game -the other vehicles who get time at the lights, block the junction, you don't get a chance to drive yourself, hence will never make progress.
You are therefore forced to pull out and block the lane -if you know the other players will do the same thing.
The other players know the same thing, -that your best strategy to make progress is to pull out and block the lane.
Therefore they will pull out and block the lane themselves, as it is the only way they make progress.
Therefore your best strategy, given your knowledge of their best strategy, is to pull out.
This is the Nash Equilibrium: the steady state where no player in the game has any incentive to change their strategy. If any driver at the front of the lights doesn't pull out and block the junction, all they will do is annoy the cars behind.
This is why drivers in the city don't get annoyed by other cars doing this. They'd do the same thing. The only way to change this would be to change assumption (1), that there is no penalty for blocking a junction.
Game Theory: the maths you can play on the commute. Even if you don't realise it.
There have -apparently- been complaints about this shared space. We don't know who, we don't see anything wrong with it except sometimes people get in the way of where we want to drive or park.
Whoever is complaining clearly must be walking or cycling, so not contributing to the national economy,
Yet they want things "improved". What improvements will help us? None.
Southwell street represents all that is inner Bristol. A road on a hill, old houses, the pavements turned into parking and barrier in the way to discourage people from walking and cycling. To attempt to change this is not just an attack on the hospital, it is attack on modern British society!
Just a few photos here to celebrate Southwell St, by the St Michael's Hill hospital. What was once a road has been successfully turned by the BRI into a useful hospital facility, with lots of staff parking.
The presence of paving stones under the cars above has created some tension with the residents association, especially as no evidence has been found proving the pavement was "given" to the hospital. We say there's nowhere else to park.
We also understand why blocking the pavement and forcing pedestrians onto the road was the right thing to do. It is for their own safety.
Furthermore, painting a little sign of someone walking along what was once a pavement makes them feel grateful -and ensures that if they do get hit by a car and were walking anywhere else, well, they didn't follow the signs.
Like we said, we have heard rumours of change here. We now have the documents and some of the emails -and very interesting they are too.
But before publishing them, consider this: this road will be the first sight of the city for all children born in this hospital. To try and make it friendly to pedestrians and cyclists would be an attempt to redefine our city, not just for the adults, but for these newborn. Therefore we want to be the first to say that we are glad that the hospital is attempting to do the least it can get away with, namely painting the bits where pedestrians are meant to walk in more solid colours. We could call them "walking superhighways".
Over in London, the Politicians tell the BBC that the war on motorists is over, and the BBC believes them, naively, unquestioningly, because they want it to be true. We know different. No, we aren't talking about fuel price rises, because we've seen the forthcoming price rises on trains and buses -which will go up more believe us.
No, we are talking about the war on motoring that is resident parking.
Today is the big day - the Kingsdown RPZ is live. We hear some of the locals will be going to a pub to celebrate -presumably now they can drive there and back again.
We also hear that for the first few days the council will be issuing warning notes, not tickets; we'll see how that goes.
It's going to reduce the value of those houses where more than 40% of the house volume is dedicated to parking, especially as the council only issues one RPZ permit if you already have an off-road parking option. Try to explain to the parking services dept. that your garage isn't for parking as you are growing a large quantity of high-yield marijuana there and see if they care.
This actually reduces the value of all houses who turned their gardens into tarmac. What was a feature is now possibly a liability.
What about the bicycle parking that some houses have? Where does that fit in here? Should we be able to impose a limit on the number of bicycles that a household in the area has?
How can the government say the war on motorists is over when there is no limit on the number of bicycles people own in the inner city?
Jan 3, 2011. RPZ-day minus one. Despite a majority of people outside the new KN RPZ zone being against it, kingsdown and the university quarter are going residents only plus guests tomorrow. We can see the changes, and compare it with previous coverage.
Before: a convenient place for art students to park to stroll into their early afternoon lectures.
Now: double yellow lines, even on the corners, and the bits without yellow are (mostly) for residents only.
Some bits are pay to park, and that's interesting as it adds much more short-stay parking behind the university than the proposed cycle parking area was going to take away. For that subset of students who have money to spend and only want to stay a maximum of two hours, this actually is beneficial. For those who have enough money for a car and fuel but not parking fees, the subset of students who were willing to get to this road before 8am weekdays, a secret parking area for them and commuters has been lost.
People ask what we in Bristol Traffic think about it, are we with the keepparkingfree people?
To be honest, no. Double yellow lines provide extra short stay parking for our vans, and there will be more legal spaces for those with disabled stickers, which, oddly enough, all our vans have. For us, removing the space occupied by commuters increases the semi-legal options for us, while reducing the number of people who will park across corners -people who never think about needs of us transit van owners when they park so insensitively. Then they get upset when we scrape them during the turns. This new zone will provide more parking options for us delivering special products to customers in the area, or nipping in to the newsagents for some more beer and cigarettes (there's a special loading zone there). We feel vaguely sorry for the commuters who will have to park a bit further away to walk in, and if there is an increase in pedestrians in our way, then we will have reason to complain.
We like coverage of pubs, today, the White Bea, which:
is in the student quarter
has free wifi
has a big white bear statue in front of it and one painted further up the wall.
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.
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).
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.
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.
We are aware that we are the highest ranked site when you search blogspot for alloy wheels, and therefore that a comment with some banal chat and back links to your own site would help your page rank. However, as well as using nofollow links to remove them from google's PageRank scores, we have a policy that says if you spam us with attempted to links, we only make fun of you. Therefore, please accept this posting as a gift, but note that the nofollow tag above renders your link worthless and all that you will get is more spam to your email address. Sorry.
There is no point trying to push alloy wheel services to our readers, despite our broad readership in Bristol, because (a) you have a Southampton postcode and are therefore unimportant, and (b) we don't think alloy wheels have a place in the city.
Every driver who has alloy wheels values their wheels. Not only does this prevent them doing operations in the city, it holds up other traffic. Takes this video of the bottom of St Michael's Hill from last month.
The car in front of us is waiting to turn slide into the left turn lane -which has a green light onto Park Row. But it cannot do that as the car in front of it values their wheels too much to scrape against the kerb or to commit more aggressively and get both wheels entirely on the pavement, and they still have a driver-side wingmirror to lose. The selfish decision of the first car to have alloy wheels not only slows them down, it slows down the rest of the city's traffic. And this is on a Sunday! Imagine how much congestion one selfish alloy-wheel owning outsider would cause on a busy weekday morning!
Drivers who value their vehicle's bodywork and paintwork are as much an inconvenience to us locals as pedestrians on zebra crossings and cyclists pootling along. You may not realise this as you live in the provinces and dream of day trips to Portsmouth where you can see three cars in a row, but we city folk know the harsh truth: from a game-theory perspective, alloy wheels place you at a disadvantage. They are easily damaged and, as they are a visible status symbol, everyone else sees that you value your car, therefore are more likely to give way on high conflict roads, such as here, the Horfield Road/St Michael's Hill junction.
Please do not bother posting any more spam advertisement comments, as we will only continue to criticise you for your naive lack of understanding of modern driving techniques and issues, as well as your complete ignorance of game theory and its application in city driving.
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.
The ICO’s mission is to uphold information rights in the public interest, promoting openness by public bodies and data privacy for individuals.
If you are not the intended recipient of this email (and any attachment), please inform the sender by return email and destroy all copies. Unauthorised access, use, disclosure, storage or copying is not permitted. Communication by internet email is not secure as messages can be intercepted and read by someone else. Therefore we strongly advise you not to email any information, which if disclosed to unrelated third parties would be likely to cause you distress. If you have an enquiry of this nature please provide a postal address to allow us to communicate with you in a more secure way. If you want us to respond by email you must realise that there can be no guarantee of privacy. Any email including its content may be monitored and used by the Information Commissioner's Office for reasons of security and for monitoring internal compliance with the office policy on staff use. Email monitoring or blocking software may also be used. Please be aware that you have a responsibility to ensure that any email you write or forward is within the bounds of the law. The Information Commissioner's Office cannot guarantee that this message or any attachment is virus free or has not been intercepted and amended. You should perform your own virus checks. __________________________________________________________________
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.
Southwell Street, a road "enclosed" by the hospital for parking. It gets the pedestrian and cyclist activists foaming at the mouth.
But what about is drivers? Is it any good for us? Look at the signs.
ATTENTION These parking bays are not designated for public parking NO PARKING you will be fined if you park here.
Then look towards Kingsdown. The road is closed, the slipway chained off, and on the pavement, they've stuck up bollards and gate things to stop us parking there even if we could get through.
We don't care that you can't walk down a pavement because of the things they've stuck up, we don't care that the gate stops cyclists. But if it doesn't even help us, the motorist, what exactly is the point of all these features?
Those walking/cycling people mutter on about sixty years of post-war motor-vehicle-centric city design, they go on about institutionalised motorism, but look at this road. You can't drive through it, you can't park on it. The only people who appear to benefit are the three or four UBHT vans that park on what was formerly a pavement. That's not institutionalised motorism -or if it is, it's a pretty mediocre implementation.
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. 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.
