The plebs of Stokes Croft

The shocking thing about plebgate is not that a Tory MP called the police plebs, but that the police failed to arrest him while shouting "you are a pleb" -because irrespective of what school he went to, he was on a bicycle and should know his place.

We are also shocked by the many such plebs cycling round Stokes Croft this morning.
Whole families going down the road itself.

At the base of nine tree hill, families pulling over to buy their children baked snacks & sandwiches, while others use the new contraflow to get onto the croft itself.

Looking up the hill, a row of pedestrians, many dismounted cyclists on account of the 20% gradient.

One such dismounted cyclist was on the phone, even while a small child was on the back of the bicycle.

Where are the police when you need them?

FA54OEF -truly impressive parking

It's not often we have to call out someone in the Stokes Croft area for actually parking in a way that even we think is selfish and lazy, but today we have to say this little mini, FA54OEF, manages to pull off a parking option that overwhelms even us -and as a regular parker in the area, that's hard to do.

Notice the mini is parked vaguely near a corner -"cornerish-parking", on the wrong side of the road, here at the junction of Dove Street and Nine-tree hill



It's got its hazards on, though as it didn't move for the ten minute period needed to get through or Sunday morning breakfast (Breakfast at Cafe Kino washed down with some White Lightening at Turbo Island), this is more of a long-stay than a quick pause.

 
By parking with the lights on, it gives anyone cycling down ninetree that fear that the car is about to pull out and turn over them, especially with the position right on the corner.
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For anyone heading up the hill, it's the same. This car looks like it's about to come out, and it also destroys all visibility of anything coming up. It's  a single parking decision that makes it tangibly more threatening to cyclists going up and down ninetree, which apparently is popular because the "safety" outweighs the 25% gradient. Lucky that FA54OEF is here to set the record straight.


One little complaint though. The way the car has parked makes it impossible for important people to get their car into Dove St without swerving into the opposite lane, a lane which has reduced visibility from the car itself, as all cars are of course approaching from downhill.

This is why we think the person who parked this car is, well, selfish and lazy. There's room behind the mini to reverse and park; there's room on the proper side of the road, there's an entire lane on the northern side of ninetree. It's a sunday -no parking will be enforced, so why park exactly on the corner?

On a weekday, we'd understand, but on a weekend? It doesn't make any sense and doesn't take the needs of other people in cars into account.

Impressive, but fundamentally stupid

Stokes Croft for visitors

A Visitors Book briefly appeared at the bottom of Ninetree Hill last month, dangling from a tree

'

Some people think it's cute, but we know different. It's a new way to catch rioters.

If every hour the police come up and put their name in along with the time, then if there's a riot all they need to do is go to the book, look at who signed it during the riot, and put them away for five year. It's the physical version of facebook. Indeed, it even has the work "book" in there, which is one of those concepts the Daily Mail want to ban, or at least burn.

Fortunately YA55VDY is wise to these police tactics, and doesn't sign the book.

For those readers who don't live in our fair city, it's about time we gave them a view of Stokes Croft, one that shows how it is the areas leading artistic and cultural quarter. Which it is.

At least, provided giant grinning skulls painted by 3dom and Rowdy are things you can cope with. We feel for the people on Dove Street, who have that staring at them out their bedroom windows. How long do you have to live there before it starts talking to you?

Riots, Root Causes and Random Opinions

It became clear during the week that even Boris Johnson was out of his depth. After some final words of advice from Sarkozy -whose strategy of containment doesn't actually work when we have to drive through the areas of unrest, we finally jetted home. And then drove down to Stokes Croft

Tesco is boarded up. It's not clear whether this was due to attacks on it, or the supermarket chain accepting the inevitable and adopting this as their decor. It is still open, providing a reason to park in the bike lane, as KT04TWZ has done.

In the distance there's a woman pushing a fixie along the pavement. Given the abuse of bicycles in the English Riots (to separate them from the Ulster Riots and the regular Scottish "fixtures"), she and the cyclist heading into the city on the road should be pre-emptively arrested.



Further down, the windows of the Croft and Rodak Polish Food at the bottom of ninetree are broken -you can see them behind the bike lane/paveparking van Properbread HK07UKR. If one were to view the riots as either a popular uprising against The Man or a mass looting by consumer-hungry troublemakers, it's hard to say why either establishment was targeted. These establishments are not The Establishment. 

There are other places boarded up, but the presence of quality art by Petro, Epok, Sepr and others shows that this is not recent. Overall then, for the area that is now associated in Bristol and the country's mind as "the first 2011 riot" is quiet and back its normal life. 

On that topic, can we point out that the graffiti covering Annabel's at No 9 actually predates the sex-shop art we covered previously. We apologise to the Annabel staff for this accidental neglect.

People have asked us who, given all the people like Max Hastings are writing bollocks, and David Starkey saying "it is because they is all black", why aren't we being paid to appear on television and spout some random bullshit about the causes of the riots and the measures that need to be taken?

Most of the shallow bollocks has already been written. You can blame thirty years of liberal thought, two years of government cuts, and then make up some opinions on what needs to be done next. When the Evening Post did ask for some opinions we provided some defensible data showing how civil unrest is strongly correlated with economic downturns -at which point they hung up the phone.

It seems that to get the TV and press coverage we deserve, and the appearance money- we need to have an agenda more outrageous, which blames the recent events to some downfall in society. The obvious events are, in no particular order

• Legalising same sex marriages.
• Banning slavery.
• The creation of the NHS.
• Making it legal for two men to hold hands in public.
• Allowing people of different racial groups to settle in the country (ignoring Vikings, Angles, Saxons, Romans, and all other pre-20th migrations except those from Ireland)
• Banning schools from being able to beat children.
• The end of capital punishment.
• The end of internment in Northern Ireland, rather than its rollout across the rest of the country.
• The end of National Service. 
• Rap Music.
• Jazz Music.
• Rock and Roll Music.
• Punk Rock.
• The rollout of 3G networks and the addition of TCP/IP protocol stacks to mobile telephones.
• The World Wide Web.
• Twitter and Facebook. 
• Television.
• The publishing press.
• Widespread literacy.
• The Human Rights Act
• The ending of the death penalty.
• The ending of deportation.

Many of these have been covered by other commentators. Even so, these are mostly symptoms. The root cause hasn't been addressed, namely that we aren't able to execute people based on verbal evidence from a single witness. If we had that, all the criminals would have been dealt with a long time ago.

That's right: since we stopped executing people for alleged witchcraft, Britain hasn't been the same.

Bring back Burning Witches based on hearsay! It's the only way to save the country!

The stokes croft bike lane: a new record!

You won't be seeing our white van today, as the team is all at home watching TV. Well, watching adult videos while drinking red bull and vodka, but it fits in with the day. However we do welcome contributions, as usual to bristol.traffic at gmail dot com.

Today we have received some lovely photos of what's happening down in Stokes Croft, showing that the police have finally stepped in and set a record for the number of vehicles that can park in a bike lane! We see you, Aberdeen Cars,


and raise you eight police vans!


We also have proof that Welsh vehicles are exempt from one way signs.



There, how you deal with that, friends of the north?

update: Gamu asked why we hadn't included the registration numbers. An error of omission, due to the rush to get this out. Here are the two from the photos: CN59DVO WX08DHE. As they say, Whose police state? Our police state!

Secret Stokes Croft parking

We're always looking for some secret parking places round stokes croft -and while we've often seen vehicles parked partially up on the Sydenham Road "anti car" feature, ever before seen a car all four wheels up, as K563ECY has pulled off

Lovely. Look, they even leave space on the bottom of ninetree hill for someone to push their bicycle up.

Equal penalties, see

One amusing consequence of the RPZ is that as the fine for parking without a resident permit in the "permitted parking" area is the as for parking on double yellow lines, if you aren't resident, you may as well park where it is most convenient to you.

Nice, though S826TAW could have pulled forward a bit more. We would have.

The front line of the RPZ

Freemantle Square, the council is happily making us pay even more for the right to park near the inner city, and ticketing those who resist!

Fortunately, just down the hill, the zone ends, and on Springfield road, you can double park provided you stay far enough away from the yellow lines as to not infringe them.

Cyclists coming up Ninetree hill should be grateful for this considerate parking by V281MGO

Red Bull? We thought they were on our side!

A reader, "O.M.", tips us off with the breaking news that Red Bull are sponsoring a bike race up Park Street on Saturday night, Jan 29 at 19:00.

This sounds quite fun, we thought we could join in with the van. We swing past the racers, cut in and park on the uphill side of the road to do a delivery gambit, helping to get our main line of business -discreet delivery of sex toys to all parts of the city- a bit of publicity. But it will not be.

From 18:00, Park Street will be closed to traffic! 

This is so wrong. Not just because it denies Saturday night stretch-limos the opportunity to take stag parties up from the centre to whiteladies road, it gives the racers and the audience an unrealistic view of what Park Street is like without motor vehicles. Which then gives the audience an unrealistic view of what the city would be like without motor vehicles. Unrealistic, because all of us, from the parents driving their kids to school, to our white vans, discreetly delivering inflatable people everywhere from stokes croft to southville, keep the city alive. Have you ever tried to get a child to school on foot? Crossing the roads? Have you ever tried to get a matched set of official Sky TV presenter inflatable dolls (with the official presenters voices- its like having them on your own sofa) across the city on the back of a fixed wheel bike? It just doesn't work.

What galls us is, as  "O.M." points out, Red Bull were on our side. Their energy drink not only lets you stay up night drinking vodka until you have to drive home, if you only get three hours sleep a couple of cans of the stuff will wake you up and have you so buzzing that you'll be driving right behind the vehicle in front, flashing your lights, be they cyclist, commuter or even then avon and somerset police. There they are, doing the 20mph or 30 mph speed limit, and there you are, jittering so much you can barely text ahead to the office complaining that a police car doing 30 is holding you back and you'll need another five Jeremy Clarkson models as now he's the last remaining real man left on TV the fact that he looks like a run-over badger doesn't put the punters off.

Red Bull, whose side are you on? You sponsor a formula 1 team, the cars above, yet now you seem to think encouraging cycling will keep your business going. This fills us with resentment and fear

Also, and this is for the cyclists taking part:

We have given you Ninetree Hill. What more do you want?

Kingsdown RPZ, interesting, but too early to reach a conclusion

We've been driving round the new RPZ; watching. It's not until the students are back with their cars and their lessons that we'll see how it works, so right now it's in a transitional phase.

What is interesting is how much empty space there is. Here on Dove Street, the entire side of the road that you can park on legally is empty, though the Mercedes driver still wants to avoid the challenge of crossing the road.

Perhaps they didn't have a permit, and as the penalty for paveparking by a yellow line is the same as a non-resident in the resident area, you may as well park closest to your destination.

Elsewhere, the new restaurant Alfred's has space outside it in Alfred Place for lunchtime customers.

And along the road, a view of what the houses must have looked like in Georgian times, before modern inventions came along.

Most interesting was on Somerset Street, which is yet to be repainted. Look closely at the ground here, on Spring Hill

That faded paint implies there has always been a keep clear zone here. We never knew that -all we could see that it was an ideal place for wide vehicles to park. The markings on the ground imply the anti-motorist council will not just leave the obsolete signage to fade, they will be adding double yellow lines instead.

We close by sending our team cyclist round the area (sorry, but we did wait until a Sunday), to get a video. This shows us a number of things.

1. There are some interesting pubs in the area.
2. A loading zone is no substitute for zebra crossing zig zags if it involves more walking.
3. Someone has added parking spaces to Nine Tree Hill.

That final point is interesting. Until now, Nine Tree was lost space, you could park there, but then you could get a ticket. Now locals can park there. How do they get out of this dead end? Presumably by reversing down the road which today is only used by cyclists and pedestrians walking up the hill. Even so, four extra spaces there barely compensate for all the lost corners. Our footage of this area will have to be preserved for posterity, "Kingsdown before the changes came"