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What do the Southwell Street changes mean? It'll be hard to tell until next term. Already, though, it seems to create the (false) impression that people on foot are welcome, and the zebra crossings appear to act as traffic calming too.
The restored pavement is in use. This will reduce car/pedestrian conflict, so actually be beneficial
That said, it also reduces bicycle/pedestrian conflict, while increasing bicycle/car conflict. This puts the blame on us, not them. Of course, put a van in front of these bollards "Only 15 minutes, guv", with another van on the pavement, and the old regime will be restored.
You can also see that the bollards are set up for a hard right turn into the pay and display car park. This makes it important to keep people off that pavement. It also makes us suspicious that the bollard placement was explicitly designed to remove the short-stay parking option on that side of the bollards. You can't park there without blocking the car park. Yes, you may be able to park the other side, but it's a ten minute journey round the block to get there.
Overall then, the bollards, the pavement and that deviously moved row of bollard don't appear to help us much. It's interesting to compare this with the original proposal, which was very much van-friendlier. Drive-in/back out parking spaces instead of pavement, room to park for delivery on both sides of the bollards. Assuming they dont' actually enforce parking in front of the bollards in the spaces currently in use, the physical parking capacity has been reduced by four. That's going to create tension, and making the bollards "opaque" to people on foot or pedals will create more. Now they will be upset if we park there, whereas before we could do it and not feel bad.
The key tactic here will be to set everyone's expectations up now. During the university holiday. We can take over the bollard area for parking, nobody will get used to cycling through it, and when term time begins, it will stay that way.
The gate has been removed and replaced by bollards.
Yes, you can still park a van against them, but as they are the people doing the roadworks, that may change.
More shockingly, the "ex-pavement" that was to still have NHS vans echelon-parked over it, has been reinstated as public pavement! This goes against the whole "shared space" theory, or, as we van drivers call it, the "our space" road design. It's all ours, see.
The car exit is as before, except the signs blocking off that pavement have been replaced with less bent ones, and anyone walking down that road gets to get in the way of cars pulling out -as you can just make out here through the windscreen of the beetle.
We think that zebra crossing is new. It's hard to see why they bothered.
Interesting they chose the phrase "hit by a car"; in London they tend to describe the bicycle as hitting the car, before going on to discuss whether they had a helmet on.
The location was describe as the junction of St Michael's Hill and Horfield Road. We've noted how this isn't that much fun in a car. This collision happened at 22:22 on a Friday, so congestion would be minimal -and there is more chance of cars driving around fast.
Judging by the signs, the collision wasn't with Park Row, it was further up the hill. There's no further details yet on what happened.
Some possibilities:
Car and bicycle heading down the St Michaels Hill, collision.
Car and bicycle heading down Horfield Road, collision.
Bicycle heading up St Michaels Hill, collides with car also going up St Michaels Hill
Those are the normal two vehicles in the same-direction incidents. This junction adds some more, all of which tend to lead to side-on collisions:
Bicycle heading down St Michaels Hill, collides with car going down Horfield Road, or up St Michaels Hil.
Bicycle heading down Horfield Road collides with car pulling out St Michaels Hill and heading downhill
Bicycle heading up St Michaels Hill towards Horfield Road, gets hit by a car going straight up St Michaels Hill
Nobody rational turns from St Michaels Hill into Horfield Road; its too tight. There are other options further up the hill.
The highest risk actions on a bicycle are probably
Heading down from St Michaels Hill, where you are exposed to vehicles heading in either direction. Gravity works in the bicycle's favour here, it pulls the bicycle forward and minimises the time side-on to traffic.
Heading up towards Horfield Road, where the bicycle rider is curving right and pushing slowly up something steep -any vehicle heading up St Michaels Hill in a hurry may turn over them. It's like a left hook only without the car making the left turn, it just goes straight on (hence faster), even though the road lanes turn rightwards.
On a bicycle, before the building works started, heading up through the BRI car park (the former Terrell Street) was apparently a lower hassle option. Follow the signs to A&E from Park Row, then head out to Horfield Road, or turn right to Marlborough Hill and a final bit of climbing.
We have no more details than the BBC article -and wish the cyclist a speedy and full recovery.
We see this video of Bristol on a weekday last week.
It looks to us like old market to counterslip lane then down to the St Mary Redcliff roundabout, a loop back towards queen's square, along the harbour front then up Prince Street towards Baldwin Street.
For visitors from out of town, Eastville park is the park to the east of the M32 flyover.
At least today. A large chunk of the park was given over to that flyover, with nothing but a Glasgow-style concrete picnic bench underneath as a memory of families coming down there for picnics.
We find it amusing that only now are people complaining about bits of the park being turned over to transport rather than greenery, rather than, say, 40 years ago.
More importantly, we worry that if the Friends of Eastville park have their way, they may not stop at the bicycle access. They may start asking for the bit of parkland that is known as the M32 motorway back. This would not be good. We hope, therefore, that the Friends of Eastville park are regular users of the M32 and can see the tangible benefits of it remaining in-situ. Be believe this is likely, given that they clearly don't cycle. And as nobody takes their dog for a walk on the flyover, the liability issue there isn't important.
The tax-dodgers are complaining about Shared Streets this week -that they really mean "streets mostly for cars and vans". Exactly. Given a choice between a pedestrian area and a shared street, we'd go for the shared street. Once you get a hang of the chicanes they can be quite fun.
Southwell Street, our unofficial logo, is being "improved". We know that, as the vans to do it are parked there this week. Expect photos soon. But before that, the plans.
As people will recall, the concerns by the non-drivers about this area were
uphill pavement turned into NHS parking, possibly illegally.
no way for bicycles to get through except on the pavement
the pavement was blocked to give priority to staff cars
both dead ends were used as short stay parking for vans
Overall then a van-and-staff friendly area, with pedestrians as an afterthought, and one of those deliberately created bike/walker conflict zones to divide the opposition, all on the premier walking route from Gloucester Road to Bristol University, and hence full of students. By creating such conflict we could discourage people from trying to do this.
We were initially worried, then, when this draft plan hit our inbox, "a shared space".
Then we saw some emails from Ben Hamilton-Baillie, who we thought would approve of this fusion of walking and driving. Yet he seemed unimpressed
Most residents in Kingsdown feel, as I do, pretty insulted to be presented with a sketch of such pathetically poor quality for Southwell Street.
If the UHB really believes that Southwell Street and other streets in and around Kingsdown can be treated with such contempt, we should not give them any support. I have seen work experience students aged 16 produce more intelligent work than AECOM’s output for UHB. I only hope the hospital trust is not having to pay them fees as well....
Finally, we saw this video from a tax-dodging pavement cyclist who encounters the designers, and provides some feedback.
At 00:10 the Ginster delivery van does a U-turn without indicating, at which the troublemaker engages in discussion with the driver about, that and the fact that it isn't making any beeping noises. Well, the lorry pays more road tax, and isn't of a size where it needs the beeps. That shuts them. Remember that lorry though.
At 1:02 they execute the highly illegal "pavement bypass" option, so endangering pedestrians.
At 1:16 they meet the a hi-viz'd person planning the traffic calming area -and say to them the plan sucks, because painting a bit of pavement, whether it's in coloured paint or some cobbles down the middle of the road is utterly meaningless. They mutter on a bit, and we think their key point is that taking one pavement off for car parking and closing the other off for safe car park access is somehow wrong.
At 1:38 the cyclist, who is standing in the middle of the "person on the road" lane is actually forced to wheel their bike backwards to let a car out of the staff carpark. This shows to us how the "shared space" design will have no effect on our daily lives, so may as well be permitted. There is a risk of some benefit to people trying to cycle here -as they won't be quite so discouraged by having to hop on and off the pavement, but if we block the bollards with vans often enough, they'll be discouraged differently.
At 1:48 the troublemaker demands some of the pavement back. We'd hoped to have some good news there, but based on the building work it looks like these people have got their way. Somewhat. Wait until tomorrow for the specifics there.
At 2:02 they express concern that the dropoff area in front of the hospital is chaotic, and it will remain so. Well, that's why it's called a dropoff area, isn't it? If people were expected to do dropoffs and pickups on St Michael's hill, there'd be an area there instead.
at 2:20 their rant finishes and they finally head off, presumably to the relief of the site team. They then proceed down a road that clearly has room for parking all down one side, yet lacks it. And there are an oddly large number of pedestrians, given the effort the NHS has gone to here to discourage walking.
At 2:43 you can see some people trying to cross Horfield Road. Notice the wide five-junction crossing here. It's a dangerous exposed crossing and people shouldn't attempt it, not when there is a zebra crossing further up the road, as the video shows at 3:07. If people aren't prepared to cross the road where a crossing has been provided, well, it's like people on bicycles not using the bike lanes.
At the zebra crossing they do a U-turn, and at 3:08 show what is paveparked over yellow lines round the corner: Ginster delivery van HN58LVK. Purely because Southwell Street doesn't support through traffic, that van had to do a 180 degree turn in a narrow drop-off street, turn right up St Michael's Hill, right again on to Myrtle Road, then onto Alfred place. One U-turn and two right turns -not just a philosophy for the coalition government, it's costing the company money. The DfT puts a financial cost on critical business motoring, and its clear that closing this road has tangible costs to that key part of the economy: the white van.
Therefore, although the proposals don't take much away from us, they don't deliver what we need, either -the removal of the gate and the re-instatement of Southwell Street as a van-friendly rat-run!
Do you remember those riot things in Stokes Croft in April?
It seems the Police and the Main Stream Media do...
We don't care about the non-existant petrol bombs, of course, as we bought the real, value Banksy posters instead and made a killing on eBay.
However... we are hoping Tesco will still be able to supply us with fresh milk next Sunday morning, after the St Paul's Carnival, before we drive around Bristol looking for Gorillas.*
*Bristol Traffic is not affiliated in any way with Bristol Zoo, but we do like Gorillas.
Here at the traffic blog we applaud the British stiff-upper lip and our relentless desire to carry on as normal in difficult circumstances. It's summed up at the end of Carry On Up the Khyber, with Sid James and the gang enjoying a dinner party whilst the natives attack and the building crumbles around them. So when the Bristol Evening Post had their old brick print hall demolished, we naturally thought it might signal the end of their hypocritical rants about pavement cycling whilst casually ignoring the car paveparking (and pavedriving) that went on under their very noses. Apparently in Bristol cycling on the pavement is the most heinous crime a cyclist can commit, and we should all be heavily fined,locked up and subjected to torture (eg having to watch the X Factor endlessly). But, it's okay to squeeze a car or two into any available pavement space.
So we can but admire this determined paveparker in the photo who managed to drive up the pavement without knocking anyone over and reverse their vehicle onto it's little platform. Well done!. The drab grey monolithic print hall may be gone, but paveparking space is still available. Pavement cycling is just evil, but paveparking like this is so cooooool....
