We don't need to say anything other than repeat the quote this commenter on the Sun's article, who knows it is safer to park on the pavement than inconvenience fellow drivers.
i'd rather force a mother into the road, where she can stop, look, listen and navigate carefully than park my car obstructively in the road.
nonsense, total nonsense, will they make extra spaces in places where they have to enforce such rulings? like hell they will, they'll just coin it in whenever someone gets sick of the inconvenience of parking half a mile down the road
See that? The government makes us pay to drive, and they make us pay when we park too.
Meanwhile, here in Bristol, the Evening Post is horrified to discover that Bristol comes in the top ten cities in Britain for parking charges. We are not shocked as we know something else: Bristol comes in the top ten cities for Britain, and has a far higher percentage of motor vehicle commuters than central London. There may be some correlation there.
Our coverage of cycling families endangering car paintwork created some feedback from one Tony John Cooke, who expressed some concern that some of our claims (helmetless cyclists are uninsured troublemakers) lacked proof. Tony, the fact that cyclists are threats to our city and its motors are Axioms; we don't need to prove it, it is self-evident. We -and the rest of the media- work forward on that axiom, just like most of mathematics works on Euclids set without worrying about whether or not parallel lines ever meet.
Our goal when we set up this project was simple:
Timely coverage of the city's real transport issues.
Project the motorist's point of view, not the watered down stuff that the Evening Post and Daily Mail pushes out.
To check we are meeting these goals we benchmark ourselves against the competitors and the cycling press. Tony -your very complaint re-inforces our conclusions that we are being strongly consistent with our messaging, so it cheers us up no end.
But is a complaint from one person enough? No, of course not. Which is where benchmarking ourselves against the mainstream press comes in:
We check that we are ahead of AA and RAC foundation thinking by looking for their press-releases reprinted unquestioningly by the BBC and other outlets.
We verify that we are consistent with the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph.
We verify that we are ahead of the local newspaper by reading it sometimes.
We compare our coverage with comments in the on-line press, to make sure we represent the real opinions of readers.
In particular, we keep an eye on our competitor, the Bristol Evening Post. For those readers out of the city, know that it is the city's premier daily newspaper, although we find that the South West Big Issue does tend to have more in depth coverage of economic and political issues. What the B.E.P. does have is a local news remit, though the reduction in staffing means that it is generally reduced to reprinting press announcements or criticising the council. Those press releases from Tesco, Bristol City Football Club and other major revenue sources are always welcome, but they do support some local pressure groups where their campaigns don't conflict with the needs of the supermarkets or BCFC.
On Thursday Sept 9, the coverage was on Snuff Mills and the proposals to replace the dirt track with a cycle path. This would be the continuation of the one which runs through Eastville Park, one we are aware of but haven't bothered to denounce.
Here a path runs along that bit of the Frome river which is not under the M32 flyover, providing somewhere for pedestrians and cyclists.
It looks like it might be a nice place to walk or cycle. But it doesn't really go anywhere right now, not until a link to UWE has been sorted out.
Which is where the Snuff Mills connection comes into play. Now, as metric of how up to date we are - success metric #1 -, we covered this issue on 8 july 2009, when we expressed our concerned that the improvements may degrade from the wilderness experience of the park. That is a whole fourteen months before the Evening Post heard of it. This shows the advantage of our reporting tactic: getting out and about in the city, versus theirs: waiting for press releases from organisations like the Snuff Mills Action Group.
Now, this is where things get complicated. According to the Snuff Mills people:
we reached a compromise with Cycling City following a meeting on site a few weeks ago. They agreed a narrower path and other changes to the scheme, but then emailed us the following week to say this was no longer acceptable because of the needs of the 'disabled community'.
We don't know anything about that, but we do encourage readers to go to the Snuff Mills Group, look at the proposals, come to their own conclusion and contact the council. We suspect that even the cyclists may be despairing about the effort being put into creating bike/pedestrian conflict here, while inner city troublespots -like Stokes Croft- have been abandoned. There's an obvious reason for that, nobody wants to take on the motorist.
Anyway, returning to our benchmarking theme, we checked out the comments. Remember how we are campaining for a new dual carriageway to be built across purdown to provide a fast route from an expanded Lockleaze to the M32? Some of the green party people in the city think this is some kind of joke. Sorry, but if you look at the comments of the Snuff Mills article, you can see that we are merely slightly ahead of the mainstream press.
"I used to live in this part of town, and what that area really needs is a link road connecting Fishponds Road to Broom Hill, through Wickham Glen and Eastville Park. This would relieve the traffic around Blackberry Hill.
But will we, the law abiding, tax paying motorist get this perfectly reasonable request granted? No, of course not. We're not blathering cyclists.
James Carmichael, Highridge"
We see his point. The council is spending our tax money on paths, but no new roads have been added to our city for some time -despite the parkland being up for sale. We propose the DfT should buy the parkland and add the roads or city needs.
The fact that we came up with our vision, some weeks before the most vociferous of the Evening Post commentators proposed a new road through Eastville Park, shows that we really are setting the agenda in this city. We aren't just reporting on news months old, we aren't even following press releases or comments in news articles. No: we are laying out a vision for a new city, one with the ring-roads back.
There you have it. Our web site is upsetting cyclists and pedestrians enough for them to complain to us, we are years ahead of the B.E.P. in covering developments, and months ahead of their readers. The AA and RAC "think tanks" aren't even beginning to think at our rate, let alone on our agenda. We are in charge.
We close, then, with a video of what the completed bit of the Eastville Bike and pedestrian path is like. Look at it, and think how much lovelier it would be if you could use this as a ratrun alternative to Stapleton or Fishponds Roads? Bristol Traffic: more than just a news site -creating the new city.
We love this. Some people are probably expecting Bristol Traffic to be up in arms on the same topic, but we are too busy laughing at the naivety of the E.P. to bother. Here is why we aren't complaining.
1. We have had a copy of the plans for about a year. If the E.P. is surprised, it means they are out-loop.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Nick Pates"
To: "Alex Woodman" , "Mark Wright"
Date: Mon, 13 Jul 2009 12:25:43 +0100
Subject: Pay and Display cycle parking proposals - Cabot
Dear Councillors,
As part of the Cycling City project we are proposing to remove
10metres of pay and display parking at seven locations to replace with
cycle parking. I have attached a plan of all the proposed locations
as well as a draft letter that I intend to consult with.
I would appreciate any comments you may have.
Yours sincerely
Nick Pates
Cycling and Walking
Bristol City Council
Twelve months ago these plans came out. Where have the E.P. reporting team been? Probably hanging around with Bristol City people getting wined and dined to believe that after England win the 2010 World Cup then its a cert for England hosting the cup in 2018, for which we need a giant supermarket in Southville. Got some bad news there, folks.
2. We were consulted on the plans. We are Bristol's premier web site collecting data and reporting on traffic issues in the city. Unlike the rest of the motor lobby -the RAC, the ABD, the AA, we are rational. We don't just deny bad news or the entire process of science just because we don't like the answers. We collect data, and reach conclusions.
3. We support it! Really! This does not mean we have changed sides!
Why do we support it? Because they are taking away pay-to-park spaces, and nobody uses them as you have to pay. We much prefer zebra crossings, double yellow lines, traffic islands to a slot that demands money and which offers time limits on the parking.
3. The only people that park in most of the areas are students. Not tax payers. Students. We can see that by doing a drive by last week, out of term time.
Tyndall's Avenue: empty parking spaces. The university staff either have access to the car parks, they get the bus in, or they park+walk.
Round the corner, Woodland Road. Utterly empty. We, the tax payers, have paid road tax already, so we refuse to pay extra to park. We'd rather drive around for half an hour to find an empty corner in Cotham then walk in.
The only people who use this are not only students, they are the students with enough money to pay for parking, which is a small subset of students: the ones with lots of money. We feel no guilt about having their parking options removed, so they can't drive over the downs for one lecture, half an hour in the gym and then home again.
The argument here is therefore not "bike parking vs car parking", it is: how do you want students to get to university?
By car. Only parking in the paid bits if they can't get a free space nearby -our spaces.
By bus. Not ideal, but you can get a lot more students to one bus than 40 cars, and they don't take away our parking spaces, as we have been known to park in bus stops too.
Walking. FirstBus hates this at the zebra crossings, we don't like it on Cotham Hill, but you can usually swerve round them while making a phone call, though you have to shout out the window rather than use your hand on the horn.
By bicycle. Yes, we despise them, but if they are going to cycle in, they won't try parking on our secret places like Highbury Villas. They may even decide its not worth walking or cycling down to the uni for half an hour in the gym, so not even get in our way on a bicycle.
The best bit: if there is no option to drive in, some of these tax-dodging students may not bring their cars at all, which will free up more street space in Clifton and Redland.
