Final possible candidates: Dave Dobbs and Phil Plover

The election is here today, and it is everyone's duty to get down there and vote for someone.

One option is Dave Dobbs, who cites is place of residence as a van in Stokes Croft. That's his key positive feature. If you've seen the flyer about how he believes a great flood came from Mars, well, he's clearly barking mad. But so is Gideon Osborne! And Michael Gove! And they have even more power and influence.

Being totally off your rocker should not be a barrier to holding political positions.

Anyone else: Phil Plover.  He's the candidate from the Waltham Forest party.

We had a look at his transport "ideas", as it's the one we care about.

"It might be good if Bristol gets some sort of rapid transport system – maybe trams or some sort of monorail. "

A monorail. People would laugh at as. Has never tried the one at Birmingham Airport?

" Open up bus-lanes - these are typically empty most of the day whilst the lane next to them is chock-full of slow-moving congestion, spewing pollution out for twice as long as necessary!
  Trams never needed a whole lane to themselves, laying empty 99.5% of the time. So, treating car drivers as sensible people who do care about the environment for them and their children, I would like to suggest a deal with Bristol motorists: when you see a bus behind you, pull in and let it pass - like you would an ambulance. It adds only seconds to your journey time!
  That way, we don't need to waste roadspace on separate bus lanes springing up all over the place, and ALL lanes can be available to ALL traffic, ALL of the time.   Simple, safe and sensible. 

This is good. the exclamation marks show him as one of those evening post commenters who can solve the city's issues with the word "simple!!!" at the end of every sentence.

His key idea here is that people should drive down a bus lane, but when a bus comes up behind them, to get out of the way. It's an interesting idea, let down by his naivety

1. Bus lanes are for short stay parking; you can't drive down them for that reason. This is why buses are usually in the car lane.
2. If you've ever seen an ambulance trying to get up Stokes Croft to Cheltenham Road in the evening rush hour, you'll see that people don't get out of the way for it. When they do, each lane pulls to one side, the left hand side half up on the pavement. Nobody is going to do that for a bus, unless it too has sirens and flashing lights.

"Make junctions more efficient ("1 in – 2 out") - to avoid delays and make travelling more efficient for everybody, where there is room, divide traffic approaching a junction into two lanes."

What he seems to mean here is actually have two lanes approaching a junction -as this will make it more efficient.

unfortunately, he appears not to understand basic queue theory -not even the wikipedia article. For Mr Plover then:

1. A queue develops whenever the number of items leaving a channel (i.e a road) is less than the number entering it.
2. Widening the approach to a junction is simply "making a wider queue". It does nothing to the overall throughput.
3. With a wider queue, the jam may not appear as long, but it has the same number of vehicles, the same egress rate -and hence the wait time is the same.

Or to summarise: making the approach to a narrow road wider makes no difference whatsoever to your journey time -unless it encourages more people to drive that route in the belief it will -which will then make things worse.

People complain that politicians have no understanding of maths and science -this person is, sadly, an example.

"Where pavements are excessively wide, reduce them to 4-6 feet and create free parking space, where possible (except where large pavements are used by the community eg Gloucester Rd)"

We don't know where he lives, but in the inner city we view all pavements as parking spaces

Increase free parking wherever safely possible - I believe there are a lot of parking restrictions (double yellow lines and meters) where they don’t need to be – consequently, that roadspace is often underutilised while motorists drive round and round, increasing congestion and pollution, seeking an alternative.

We love this "its the restrictions that cause pollution" -theme, we'll have to use it ourselves. It implies that we do care about pollution as we drive our diesel van with the broken exhaust round the city, leave it running while we deliver some special toys to our customers -and it's all down to the fault of the council that small children die of asthma.


  Open up as much roadspace as possible so people can do what they need to do and go home again

we find parking restrictions like double yellow lines no barrier to "doing what we need to do:
 

Controlled Parking Zones (CPZ) – personally, I would find the idea of having to pay to park in my own road very frustrating. It’s mainly a problem where parking is very badly restricted. If parking were freer, it might not be a problem at all. 

No, this is one naive little bunny. Those residents of the expanding CPZ zone aren't paying 30 quid a year for the right to park outside their house -they are paying for the right to use their car during the day -because they can be confident there will be somewhere near their house when they come home. As for the "problem where parking is restricted", no -is where there isn't enough room for all the residents and commuters, even when the pavements are fully utilised (e.g. montpelier)

There' s a risk here that the "motorists drive round and round, increasing congestion and pollution" theme could come back to haunt him here -in a CPZ, there is no point driving round. Hence the pollution and congestion falls.

The whole theme of this manifesto is that the author doesn't live in the city -he lives in one of the suburbs and gets really frustrated sitting in a traffic jam by an empty bus lane, when he gets into town gets angry the only free spaces have double yellow lines, or you have to pay to use -and that his secret near-centre parking zones are being made residents only in a deliberate attempt to make his life harder

Remove large slabs of concrete - Surely squashing vehicles closer together can't make sense. If there's room to keep vehicles further apart, that reduces the risk of collision and means you have somewhere to go in case of emergency (eg a child or elderly person falling into the road).

It turns out this means "remove the build outs that force you to slow down entering quieter roads"

There's some interesting maths here; a mix of game theory (conflict and reactions to collision risk), and probability. Specifically that "somewhere to go in case an elderly person falls into the road"

With a wider buildout, there is more pavement for the elderly person to fall onto, so P(fall-into-road) is reduced; with the reduced cornering speed the energy in the collision is also reduced. Phil's assertion "you have nowhere to go in an emergency" implies that swerving is the tactic, not braking, and that there is no oncoming traffic, so swerving is a viable action.

If you do swerver, not break, then the original amount of energy going into a person falling into the road depends on the probability of you hitting them

e = P(falling)*(1-P(swerving))*mass*velocity^2

In  the new layout
e' = P(falling')*(1-P(swerving'))*mass*velocity'^2

We'll leave it to the readers to work this out -the quick summary is obviously that the velocity-squared variable is the main factor in damage; the probability of swerving out the way would have to get four times worse to result in the same damage reduction as cutting vehicle speed in half.

Sadly, as Phil Plover doesn't get queue theory, probability and statistics will be beyond him too.

There we have it then. The candidate for the evening post commenters. Someone whose entire world view is based on "obvious" answers, yet without the basic mathematical underpinnings to recognise that his obvious is, to us, obviously wrong.

Dave Dobbs it is then!

B.T. nearly-approved Candidate: Owain George

As we fear that Cllr Gollop will betray us, our next favourite candidate is Owain George, candidate for Clifton

.

He says clearly

• I will recognise that cars are the preferred means of travel & free up the city so they can move about again
• Stop the extension of bus & cycle lanes where they do not work, are counter-productive or actually dangerous
• Deal with problems affecting the flow of traffic in the city
• Welcome businesses with staff who need to park at work
• Create more on street parking so that independent shops & businesses can compete with shopping centres

We actually suspected that he was some spoof candidate, as he's almost the opposite of George Ferguson.

• George Ferguson: red trousers, runs a brewery, praises cycling
• Owain George: blue trousers, runs a pub, praises driving. Poses for a photo with his hand on his "tender parts" to show how sensitive he is.

Our real concern is something different: Owain George owns the Albion Pub, Clifton.

Albion Clifton used to be nice pub in Clifton to which you could drive, leave the engine running, pop in to have a swift 8 pints and then carry on with your HGV delivery schedule. Used to be.


Today, the has council needlessly blocked Boyce's Avenue to parking. Here we have a mayoral candidate that can not even stop the council taking away the parking spaces from outside his own pub. How can this person claim to be able to push back the anti-car actions of our city!

Worse than this though: today the Albion is a gastropub.

Gastropubs are a plague upon the hard-working delivery drivers in the city. Before, we could nip into places like the Albion, the Pump House and many other destinations, to take the edge off a tiring job. If you were really hungry: go to a cafe and have bacon and eggs.

Now those pub owners refuse to serve you unless you sit down and order veal with your quails eggs, and make you pay five pounds for some "authentic" beer.

Similarly, he offers to create more on-street parking. It's a nice promise, but where? Clifton has even run out of corners to corner park on -which would leave the zebra crossing between the Albion and Clifton Village proper -but that's where tesco's HGVs park for deliveries.


 


There we have it. The one openly cyclist hating, car parking advocate for the mayoral elections turns out to be a gastropub owner who can't even prevent the street in front of his gastropub becoming pedestrians only.


This is why we think that even though his opinions may be aligned with ours, his inability to execute on them renders him worthless even as the #1 'disposable' vote.


Who does that leave? Spud Murphy, who appears to have left a Wurzels concert after too much cider -and frankly would make Bristol's reputation for being provincial worse -or that traveller who cite his address as Stokes Croft and judging by the manifesto has clearly imbued too much of the Stokes Croft retail pharmaceutical portfolio. No, not Chris Chalkley -someone else.

20 mph! for the whole city! Disaster!

Terrible news reaches us: the council has voted in 20mph speed limits on all residential roads in the inner city.

This is heartbreaking. It doesn't actually mean much as the only time you can put your foot down is in the 11pm+ "minicab hours", where 40mph is the defacto speed limit -but it's the thought that counts.

This proposal is clearly pandering to the people who live in the city, at the expense of the commuters from the edges of the town, from North Somerset and South Gloucestershire. Those people, the wealth bringers, need to drive in to the city in their status-vehicles, and now have to face a council even more war-on-motorist than before.

Why do the councillors choose such a short-sighted policy? It's because of the forthcoming mayoral elections. The wealth bringers outside the city don't have any vote in the election, so their needs can be ignored. Such a plan can only bring financial disaster to the region.

One councillor, Peter Abraham, has been bold enough to stand up against this, "it will cause frustration to motorists" he says, before slipping the code-phrase "driving at the right speed for the right conditions". This is the secret handshake of ABD, just as the phrase "indigenous people" is to the BNP.

Sadly for Peter Abrams, the ABD are as completely out of touch with a modern city as the BNP are. Look at our previously documented video of the 20 mph zone of Montpelier:

The frustation that YY03YGM, experiences is not the 20 mph speed limit, which they manage to get past while overtaking the cyclist. No, what is frustrating is

1. The cyclist with the camera doing 18-19 mph in the 20 mph zone.
2. The oncoming bicycle at the junction which forces the car to come to a complete halt.
3. The person walking their dog in the road at 0:56
4. The oncoming bicycle at (1:03)
5. The oncoming bicycle at (1:06)
6. The two children playing in the road on a pogo stick at 1:15
7. The bicycle at 1:25
8. The people walking the road carrying a box at 1:28
9. The car parked in the road with its hazard lights on at 1:30.

These are the problems. Not the speed limit, but the way it encourages people to walk, cycle, -even play in the streets. This is the real problem. It downgrades the residential streets from "rat runs where the right conditions are 30mph even through corners" to "quiet roads where people are walking, cycling and playing there as if it was 1908 and cars hadn't arrived; a country where people driving are viewed as unwelcome invaders instead of an essential part of the life of the city".

This is exactly what threatens us. When the council says "encourage walking and cycling", it means "encourage anti-motorist activities in the city".

As Peter Abraham says, "Are we going to harass the motorists every mile they drive?" 

If you look at Montpelier -that's exactly what they are doing. And it's exactly what the council is planning on rolling out across the entire city.   

The Mayor's Motor pays the bollard tax

According to the Evening Post (so it must be true), the Mayor's Car was driven into a bollard that should have got out of the way.

We extend our sympathies to the mayor -but at least he doesn't have to resort to public transport, as he has managed to sort out a replacement. We hope the bollard has third party insurance to cover this. If it was in any way damaged, it is the bollard's fault for being in the middle of the road and not being covered in hi-viz.

If the car really is written off, it may only be remembered in its two Bristol Traffic articles, one showing secret cabot circus parking, and another by a pub.

Let us mourn it. It shall not grace our pages again,



Regarding all those very unsympathetic comments where everyone seems to be against getting a new car on the basis that buying a second ford-fiesta with a non-personalised number plate and selling the AE1 plate off would actually earn money - fails to recognise the symbolic role of the mayor. Like the Crown herself, the mayor is a powerless figurehead whose role is to attend meaningless publicity events in vehicles that reflect the fact that the UK is a fading power.

As for the comments that the mayor should be riding a bicycle, remember that Cllr Gollup is the offical evening post spokesman of the Bikelash. He does not cycle.

WessexConnect: they block ASLs for your own good

There's a lot of complaint from the bicycle-troublemakers, the vocal ones, about vehicles stopping in ASLs. We think that it's exaggerated. Here is our proof.

[update]: It's apparently a Wessex Connect Bus. We praise them for their consideration.

It's a video from (an expendable) cyclist. As we've stated before, we don't video our own driving in case it is used in evidence against us. Even the soundtrack of us trying to touch-type facebook updates on the phone could cause legal issues. Hence we give these tax dodgers cameras "as gifts" and collect the output. Today we see the output from a shinier camera, which is helmet mounted for a bit more stability.

This video was shot going down Shaldon Road, meeting the lights at Muller road. As you can see the bus has its wheels behind the ASL, but the front of the vehicle is in the ASL. This is for everyone's own good -nobody should go into this ASL.

0:13. The bus gets a green light to turn left, taking up most of the lane as it swings round. A cyclist may have survived if far enough to the right, but the turning car would have dealt with that.

0:22 The cyclist gets a green light and starts to head through while a car coming from the M32 runs the recently-red at speed.

If the cyclist had been using the ASL for its planned purpose "getting out early", they'd have been hit by that car. The FirstBus WessexConnect vehicle's positioning not only protected the cyclists from it's own left turn, it saved ithem from other road vehicles.

We think this is one of the cycle facilities which even the militant cyclists would be campaigning to remove.

Speaking of cycling facilities, we are disappointed to note that Lord Mayor Geoff Gollop will be in Stockwell to proudly open the new "pump track" put in for the local teenagers to cycle round. Why the disappointment? Well, that's only going to encourage them, isn't it?

We feel betrayed. Why? Cllr Gollop was the leading quote for the Bristol Bikelash. How can he rightfully take our side by denouncing the painting over of some parking spaces with bike lanes, then turn around and say "it's OK for people to cycle here". It's just hypocrisy. We know he's going to drive there, obviously, but will he stand up and say the truth -that he and his party are the only people prepared to stand up against cycling and public transport in this city, because they are the only form of transport for poor people, and we are not poor. Well, not poor yet, though his colleagues in Westminster have plans for that. But don't worry: the unemployed don't commute.

Pembroke Road: where should Barbara Janke remove the yellow lines?

Barbara Janke, leader of the council (at least for the next few days)- has taken on the challenge of ensuring that traffic safety "can be improved" by adding extra car parking in Clifton. Of course, we, the tax-payers, know that this is technically "bollocks", but we also know that anything which discourages walking and cycling does reduce the numbers of Killed and Seriously Injured, so provided you don't actually measure foot and bicycle traffic, you can claim improvements. This is the tactic used by central government to claim that the UK's roads are safer than ever, so there's no reason why the Clifton Councillors can't use it.

First, the bottom end of Pembroke Road as it approaches Queen's Road. Look at that -two wide bits of parking area, almost completely wasted. Only one vehicle has dared to pre-empt the proposed removal by doing a bit of paveparking -and they were only loading up.

In the other direction, a happy family walks over the zebra crossing.

Look how much parking space is being wasted here! Not only is there a zebra crossing -encouraging people to endanger themselves by walking- the zig-zags are taking up space for at least eight cars.

Some readers are thinking "more than eight cars", but this is Clifton, remember. Big cars, for important people, like Ranger Rovers, BMW X-series toys. Some of the students do have smaller cars, but Mini Coopers are acceptable -provided they are the new BMW version, not the old British Leyland editions.

If Barbara wanted to live up to the expectations of her local electorate, especially the Keep Parking Free team, she should remove not just all the yellow lines in these photographs, but the zebra crossing too. This would allow much more parking, and hence more traffic calming

pavement work in Southville

"MB" sends these shots of some vehicles in Greenway Bush Lane. Southville.

He notes that even the trucks are parked on the road.

Only one vehicle is showing how much they care about their paintwork and wing mirrors that they choose the pavepark option.

We don't see what MB is complaining about.The council owns the task of repairing all the pavements in the city, and, as such, have the right to park on it. The only unusual thing is why nobody else parks their either.

cycling city: removing pavement space from motorists

One thing that Cllr Gollop -the Official Bristol Traffic approved councillor - raised in his Bikelash speech is the space taken from important road users by cycling facilities. What's been taken away? Pavement parking opportunities

This pickup, Y66TAN, whose passenger is in buying something at Quiznos on Stapelton Road is forced to carefully squeeze between the new bike racks and the railings on the other side.

Those are the railings of the large empty car park for both Quizno's and the supermarket. Yes, the pickup could have driven in there, but that would have taken more time, and the thing about important people is this: they are in a hurry, and their time is more valuable than pedestrians, cyclists or bus passengers. After all, these are the slow ways to get around. Nobody in a hurry would use them.

The bikelash has arrived!

Over in New York, there's a fantastic power struggle going on, as important politicians fight troublemaking cyclists, to try and get a segregated bike path removed. There's a good summary online, by the economist John Cassidy. Sadly he, gets criticised not just by the usual activists, but by other economists. That worries us. If the people we trust to run the banks and get the global economy out of the mess the banks and the economists got it into can't even agree on how bad bicycles are for a city, well, it's not a good start. How can they come with a plan for the global economy that works if they can't even agree that bicycles and pedestrians don't belong in modern cities.

Here in Bristol, Cllr Gollop is one person who has taken a public stance, denouncing the Cycling City program for spending money, not increasing the number of cyclists they promised, and for taking away road space from us, the important people.:

"The Cycling City initiative brought in match-funding which has delivered new cycling routes but these have largely been achieved at the expense of the majority of road users - by reducing road space or capacity.

This is why Cllr -soon to be Mayor- Gollop is in the lead for the 2010 Bristol Traffic "councillor of the year" award. He's our kind of councillor.

Some of the cycling troublemakers have been asking "where are all the bits of road that Cllr Glossop said had been taken away for bicycles". That's tough -we had to nip out and get one of those cycle bristol maps and do some research.

1. Bike lanes? Same as ever: short stay parking.
2. Keep clear zones at school? Same as ever, though some yellow lines are going in -lines we can't blame on the bicycles.
3. The Kingsdown RPZ? The locals voted it for it so they'd have the opportunity to park after going for a drive. Selfish actions by inner city troublemakers, but not cycling-city work.
4. Bike Parking? Yes, this has taken space away, something to cover later.
5. 20 mph zones? A topic for another day.

What about the dedicated routes? In the city, the Farm Pub Path (tm) and the Eastville Park to UWE route all go through parks. We'd like roads there, so you could say it's a wasted opportunity, but it's not really taking up space. For economists, that's "opportunity cost", what you could have done with the money instead. Still, every segregated bike path is a bus route in waiting, as we and West of England Partnership say. As for the Hartcliffe way route -we've found that provides extra parking.

It seems to us, the things that have got worse over the cycling city timescale then are

• The removal of paveparking opportunities
• The 20 mph zone
• The increased cost of driving
• The showcase bus routes.

None of the cycling facilities have directly taken away any roadspace from cars.

What then was Cllr Glossop trying to say -what did he really mean? He meant this

To us, the important people of the city, the Cycling City program is a failure because the number of people on bicycles and hence in our way has increased.

It doesn't matter that no direct road space has been taken away in the inner city apart from eight paid parking spaces --the mere presence of bicycles slows us down. The fact that these people pay nothing while the cost of driving continually increases makes us even more angry.

This is of course the Daily Mail commenter line, but everyone is afraid to come out and say it. Not us, not John Cassidy -and not a lot of Evening Post commenters, but they don't make the proper economic argument. We shall.

Every bicycle holds up traffic, so while the private costs of a bicycle are low, the external cost is high. A bicycle occupying a whole lane takes up as much space as a car -and because it's going at half the speed, it slows down the cars behind it more than a single car would. The congestion cost of a bicycle is therefore higher than that of a motor car!

That's the real issue with the Cycling City. Not the infrastructure, not just the parking -taking away our pavements. It's the increase in bicycles on what the cycle planners call the key cycle routes to the city, but for which we have a different name: the main roads.

We've been saying this since 2008. Us, on our own, sometimes with help a couple of times a week from the niche papers the Evening Post and the Daily Mail. The BBC, they're on our side with Top Gear, but that's relegated to BBC2 now, and in their news broadcasts they don't often have people that speak our language. Even the AA, the RAC and the Association of British Drivers don't come out and spell out the real costs that cycling imposes on our city. As far as politics goes, we have Glossop and the Ministers Hammond and Pickles on our side -but the only party that wants to ban bicycles from important roads was the UK Independence Party. Nobody else speaks our language.

This is changing. Welcome to the bikelash.

[For anyone wishing to congratulate the councillor, his contact details are online. Why not email him and congratulate him for being on our side!]

The Park selloff -creating a new batch of troublemakers

We drove over to the Council House on the day the parkland selloff was discussed, as part of our campaign for a dual carriageway from Lockleaze to the M32. Nobody else, no other  Evening Post commenters were there to support us and our van with it's "Make Muller Road an M-Way" sign on the side, and we didn't get into the local paper either.

There was someone with a horse who did, which gives us ideas for the future.

Nor were there any police FIT teams out recording these subversives, so we did their work. Welcome to the Big Society, where we are forced to spy on subversives without even the allowances the DDR used to give their reporters.

And who are these people we we were taking note of? Well on the right of the photos there some green party people already in the database for being potentially socialist ,but in the foreground, we were horrified to see the stockwood conservative councillor

These people should be on our side in the war of the motorists, yet they won't help us with our Lockleaze dual carriageway plans -no cash, they say- and are even starting to worry about parkland.

Looking at the video, it had a real 1980s feel to it. There's some union people up by the building entrance opposing cuts, people in the foreground shouting out against selloffs of council-owned assets. Ah, the old days are back again!