Abbeywood Bollards: they don't help motorists

Having looked at the bollards, we are not sure whether we support them. Not because they can injure cyclists, but because they prevent motor vehicle access to the bike paths. We paid for them, we should get to use them!

Here, for example, is a South Gloucester Council lorry S764THY making use of one of the Abbeywood bike paths to park their lorry somewhere while they do some work on a roundabout.


If you look at this area, the double yellow lines mean that the shared pedestrian/bike path is the only place anyone can park. Yet bollards and harassment by cyclists -more on this another day- mean that the council and tax-dodgers are, together, removing our parking options.

Experiment #2011-1: we are using this path as an experiment to see if the war on the motorist really is over in S Gloucs, by reporting vehicles here to the authorities ( parklegally@southglos.gov.uk ) and making sure that nothing happens. If anyone gets told off or ticketed: the war on motorists is not over.

So far, we are pleased to see that S Gloucs parking services are happy not to care about this path, with this reply twelve days after we reported the issue:

Thank you for highlighting this problem to our department, however our Civil Enforcement Officers are not able to deal with (UNNECESSARY OBSTRUCTIONS) under the current Legislation Traffic Management Act 2004 (TMA04), this offence still comes under Police Officers or Police Community Support Officers who only have the powers of Enforcement for this Offence. 

I have also passed your complaint onto our street care department who are in charge of highways maintenance and asked them to investigate this issue and to please remove this vehicle from its obstructive position. 

Hope you find this information helpful and should you notice any other vehicles parked illegally with in South Gloucestershire please don’t hesitate to contact our department.

We are now continuing our experiment on new vehicles to see if S Gloucs police are on our side or not. The fact that Filton police station appears to be manned only by an answering machine bodes well.