Pembroke Road parking opportunities

Driving further north on Pembroke Road, we come to an area where all the parking spaces are taken. But it's still a wide road, and you can easily get up to 45 along it. No junctions, no zebra crossings, no mini-roundabouts, nothing to get in your way. Perfect. Admittedly, there's one or two bicycles to swerve past, and few schoolkids sprinting to the safety of the traffic islands, but a quick tap on your horn sorts that out.

Look in the other direction, towards the city. The roads are wide, but now there's a bus stop, a pedestrian, and a cyclist.

And everywhere: double yellow lines.

This leads us to our real metric of "where is there room to remove double yellow lines?" It's obvious, when you think about it.

Wherever there is room for people to cycle without getting in the way of important people in cars, there is space to add more parking.

There you have it. A nice simple metric of where we can put more parking. And its important to do this, because otherwise, the pedalling and walking factions, who are secretly defying the Waltham Forest faction in the council, would love nothing better than to put in bicyle lanes along stretches of road -and in a road this wide, they could even try segregation. Because of the double yellow lines, nobody is going to fight back to say "No! This removes the place where we have parked our car for years!"

This is why we need to Walthamize this stretch of Pembroke Road -because it is the only way we, the important people, can resist the so-called "progress" of those subversives, a progress that is really the continuation of the War On Motorists in a different disguise.

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

Downfield Road: Clifton's secret 20mph zone

While doing our Clifton research we discovered something the area had been keeping secret -there is in fact a 20mph zone up by the Downs, between Pembroke and Whiteladies Road.

The entrance is on Downfield Road

With the 20 mph signage, parents will be as safe with their pushchairs in the middle of the road as they would be in Montpelier. Except of course, there aren't any pedestrians, this being Clifton. It's a neighbourhood watch area, and anyone walking is worth calling the police about. Presumably the 20 mph zone is to protect wing mirrors when paveparking isn't sufficient.

Looking at the school warning signs people may think that its for the kids, and the double yellow lines for the parental 4x4 dropoff

Except since our last visit, the school keep clear markings have been removed, leaving it for residents.

Overall then: odd. The area is too windy to be a decent rat-run, there's nobody on foot or bicycle to push for it. Residents wanting quiet or wing-mirror protection have to be the only reasons. Even so, it's selfish. Imagine if everyone wanted 20 mph zones! And this one is in Clifton, making it the thin end of the wedge. As far as we know, this is the only 20 mph zone in the quarter of the inner city from Cheltenham Road to the A4.

Breaking news: parking restrictions encourage higher vehicle speeds

The new "neighbourhood funding" schemes are great for us, the drivers, as we can use our money to get what we want: parking, without any city-wide initiative like public transport, sustainability or cycling getting in the way. This is why we are delighted to cover the "DEVOLVED TRANSPORT SCHEMES FOR 2011/12" for Clifton and Cliftonwood, which will be up for discussion on Tuesday at 19:00 above Jack's Brasserie behind the waterfront TSB building.

The important people in Clifton have been successful in adding one-way streets by Clifton-college, so making easier to do Range-Rover and Volvo XC60 dropoff, and held up the provisioning of bicycle parking on the grounds that it degrades the listed buildings. However there still aren't enough places to park our important cars. How to add more parking, without appearing blatantly selfish? The answer is obvious: push for it on road safety grounds.

This is the tactic planned for tomorrow, with the following proposals in the set.

• Lay-by at the bottom of Hope Chapel Hill: Existing parking restrictions encourage higher vehicle speeds
• Pembroke Road (St.Pauls Road end). More on-street parking would reduce vehicle speeds.

These claims are far better than the ones for Clifton Park and Princess Victoria Street, both of which just say "existing parking restrictions are too extensive", by which they mean "the bit by the side of the road where people cycle could be used by important people".

We hope all our local supporters turn up for this, and support the proposals and so make sure that we outnumber any cycling/living street troublemakers who sneak in and start calling us selfish gits who are more concerned about having somewhere to park our third car outside our houses than doing something to fundamentally improve Bristol's liveability. Those people don't realise that having somewhere to park our third Landrover -it's more than just a car- does improve Bristol's Liveability. Certainly it makes it easier to walk from the Landrover to our house, and by saving us driving around, reduces pollution and the CO2 emissions from our 3L V8 engines.

Futhermore, once that parking is in, it will be that much harder to put in bike lanes, so any ideas for adding some segregated route up Pembroke Road -our secret high speed alternative to Whiteladies Road- would be killed forever. It's important to do this now, before alternate transport plans progress.

Yes, those troublemakers will say "if we want parking we should have voted for the RPZ", but they miss the point: that would have restricted the number of vehicles we could own. Furthermore, by reducing the number of vehicles parked on the roads on a weekday, vehicle speeds have increased and Clifton is now a more dangerous place to walk. We have a spreadsheet we've just made up to prove it!

Note also that a large number of the other schemes (Ambrose Road, Cliftonwood Road, Alfred Hill, Westbourne Place and Redcliffe hill) are complaints by people about how parking is interfering with pedestrians. It is important to attend to stop this, otherwise the troublemakers will pick up on the complete hypocrisy of pushing for extra parking to calm roads in some parts of the area, while having to introduce bollards and dropped kerbs in other parts. We want parking everywhere, and no RPZ in our way.

Walthamize the planet, and have a nice day.

WX02UNH and critical sections

In computing a critical section is defined as something in which only one entity can have exclusive use of at at time, such as, say, a stretch of road or a single-lane railway track. The different bits of the system need to cooperate to gain access to these areas. One way of co-ordinating this access is the semaphore, a concept from the Dutch Computer scientist, Djikstra, based on the old railway notion of flag waving.

Of course, if a French or Italian person had come up with the idea, they'd have used a different name, like "l'indicateur", the car indicator. Because in these countries, to gain exclusive use of an overtaking area, you put your indicator on -way before you are ready to pull out. In the Alps, to put your indicator on before the turn has finished, before you can see if it is safe to pull out, tells everyone else that you intend to, that you have acquired exclusive use of the oncoming traffic lane.

This is why we have one little criticism of the Corsa WX02UNH on Pembroke Road.

We aren't going to criticise it for overtaking the bus on the wrong side of a traffic island. Yes, you aren't meant to do that, but if the anti-car council is going to conspire with Firstbus to put a bus stop in a traffic island, how else are you going to pass it.

Yes, it may be between 8 and 9 am, peak school run hours, but it is also peak commute hours, so the driver may be in a hurry.

No, what we are going to criticise them for is failing to indicate when they pulled out. They just assumed that nobody else was going to be aggressive and take the overtaking opportunity, when in fact any driver in front or behind could have -and because WX02UNH didn't indicate, they would have no warning that the other car was about to pull out. If two cars had collided while trying to drive the wrong side of a traffic island to overtake a bus -now that would be a complex one for the insurance company.

This is why our driving strategy is "Signal then commit". Your signalling is not a hint "I'd like to pull out", but a warning "Here I come", something people should see. But if you don't do such a signal, you don't help others to get out of your way.