The Elf Kingdom and its rains

Somerset got its name from Sommer- Sett; the land only inhabitable in Summer, In winter it flooded.

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little change then.

West End of the Long Ashton Route

At the west end of the Long Ashton road, there's a double mini roundabout.

Classic cycle paths marked in fading paint provide a safe off-road route between the junctions where the plebs of the 47% are rightfully denied rights of way.
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Due south, a nice segue into the A370 as the Dual Carriageway begins. That 40mph sign is one of those "pretend" signs; the curves on that approach road are designed to help you accelerate up to speed.

This is why we don't want to encourage cycling, cyclists will only get in the way on the left turn here, expose themselves to risk, get run over, and then blame innocent motorists. They say there is safety in numbers, but there is only one number that is safe: zero.

 

Some people may say "this is classic unplanned mediocrity", They are mistaken.

as you can see from the signs at the mini roundabout, the Elf-Kingdom's Highway Laboratory is adjacent to these junctions, these roads, these cycle paths.
  
These roads, these bike paths, these junctions are not accidents. They are by design, and the designers drive along here every day, looking at their work and being proud.

We in the Bristol Traffic Team salute the Highway's Laboratory Staff! The roads outside their offices are a great experiment in how all of Somerset's roads could be! The sooner the better!

The Long Ashon Path

In the elf kingdom, we visited the road where the campaigners campaigned, sheep like, for an off-road alternative to the 50 mph road -probably involving some pavement widening.

They are being greedy. Look, there is already some space for them under the hedgerows!

Yet despite these facilities, they cycle in the road! No wonder the elf-folk complain!




At the end of the route, we see exactly the pedestrian/cyclist conflict points people discuss, as a piece of white paint demarks the route where cyclists can get onto the pavement by a roundabout, with 5 metres of traffic free cycling.

Yet again, some of the tax dogers use the roundabout! Despite the money spent on paint!


While we agree that there is no justification for a bike path, here, we will point out is that the claim that this is for pedestrian safety is bogus. Nobody walks here.

Where they do walk is on Yanley lane, Long Ashton, There is a school behind this blind corner where the speed drops from 60 mph to 30 mph, yet the entirety of the pedestrian safety here is a sign saying "school" and "look out for pedestrians" -signs too small to read when you are doing 60mph.
 
There is no way that the residents of Long Ashton to say that they care about pedestrians being hit by cyclists when they don't care about their own children being hit by cars except to spend 50 quid on a road sign.

No, that's a totally bogus argument and they should feel embarrassed to be so blatantly hypocritical, "We would rather have a risk of schoolkid/car collisions than accept any traffic calming or pavement on yanley lane", destroys the argument "we can't have a cycle path on a widened pavement that nobody ever uses".

No, they should stop lying and come out fighting, the way the elf-king himself has done. This cycle lane should be stopped because the tax-dodgers are undeserving plebs who are never grateful for anything.

A trip to the Elf Kingdom

our range rover went out to the Elf Kingdom in a follow up to the Long Ashton Saga.

It has this strange kind of terrain, that is all green, with roads that finally justified our ownership of a 4x4 that rarely leaves clifton.

If Somerset is the Elf Kingdom, what is that whiteness in the far distance?

Yes, it is a shining city, the last bastion of the Men of the West -Gondor

Here we can see the fortresses on the hill, Dun--st-Michael, home to the fabled white tower, the "Chimney of St Michael's Hospital". Behind the city, the green hills of the Shire of South Gloucester.

When Tolkien introduced the elf-lands and Gondor to the masses, one thing he failed to discuss was how the Elves commuted into Gondor down the A370 every day. For that is truly how the Elf-folk visit the city of men.

Elf-King Ap-Rees: get the sheep-like cyclists off the roads

There's a BBC Radio Broadcase in which Elf-King Ap-Rees, Deputy-King of the Elf-Kingdom of North Somerset, denounces cyclists as arrogant as the "cyclists use the cycle ways instead of arrogantly ignoring them and cycling on adjacent roads".

The issue was a petition"ill-judged and unnecessary" that stirred up people to sign a petition that demanded that the council actually approved of the cycle path by the 50 mph road from Long Ashton to Cambridge Batch. It was always going to be built, just "a bit of a quibble" with Long Ashton Parish Council. Like the way they slowed down the provisioning of a cycle route alongside the A370 by Ashton Court -there were concerns that the council would reject it the way they rejected the Ashton Court stretch of the route -the bit that would cut across the newly-expanded Ashton Court car park.

"We're spending all this money on cycle ways and yet I'm always getting complaint that say the cyclists don't use them -they use the roads instead!"

 Why is his language so inflammatory?

"I'm glad it is! I want cyclists to realise that other people see this money being spent on cycle ways and actually object when the cyclists don't use it. Especially when we have 60 mph roads, and we have a cycle way absolutely adjacent to it -and yet you still find cyclists using that (ed: the road?). They cycle through pedestrian areas, you know, which they're not supposed to do..."

why have you approved this then?

"We want to encourage cycling. We want to encourage cyclists to use the cycle ways. What I'm hoping is that as a result of this...and it's not everybody, you just get a few cyclists -just as you get a few motorists doing things wrong. The trouble is they set a bad example -erm- to everybody else"

People who don't live in the vicinity of Long Ashton have no influence over the decision as as they "have one sheep-like point of view "

Elf King App Rees is the one politician who will stand up and say the prejudiced ill-informed views that we live by! Only he is the one not afraid to call cyclists sheep-like. Indeed, he's proud of it!

"I'm always getting complaints from people about the behaviour of cyclists..."

That said, we don't like this idea of saying "local decisions only". Because that's going to come back to haunt the commuters of N Somerset when Bristol City starts rolling out anti-commuter strategies like speed limits.

Similarly, we worry about the quote : "North Somerset Council has to consider all road users and the decision will be made with that in mind, not to just satisfy a cycling lobby."

This surprised us as we didn't know there was a cycling lobby in N. Somerset. That phrase "all road users" scares us. Why should we -the tax payers- care about the cyclists? If he's going to start taking their interests into account, what will this mean to  features like the new Portishead/M5 junction, where the Elf King said "the misery of prolonged hold-ups for motorists in this area should be a thing of the past.". See that? No need to acknowledge the existence of cyclists there, let alone the need to consider them at a new junction. Similarly, when he's considering parking charges in Portishead, will he actually worry about the needs of tax-dodgers who may want to cycle there rather than all the people who petitioned against the charges? We hope not!

Finally, "sheep-like". Again, that could equally well be applied to most of the people who write to him complaining about tax-dodging cyclists being in the way on the roads or on the pavements. That's the same class of insult as one of the two groups on the Evening Post comment pages calling the other lot "inflexible and narrow minded". No, you don't want to go there.

Elf-King App Rees does like those emails complaining about cyclists, so feel free to contact him on such topics, or where he stands on the battle of Mordor.

While we know he doesn't accept emails from cyclists outside the Elf Kingdom of Long Ashton, we don't yet know if he loves getting message from outside the Shire congratulating him on being the first Evening Post commenter to get radio time on a regional station listened two by a double-digit audience!