A brand new Urban Village

We are keeping an eye one some newly proclaimed subversives, the People's Cycling Front of South Gloucestershire, whose goal is for S Gloucs to have cycle paths that the Dutch won't laugh at.

They have denounced the new cycle paths of the Tailspin housing estate between Lockleaze and the MoD as something the Dutch will laugh at, which apparently they did.

Well, let's drive out and see, as we were worried that this estate may be encouraging alternative transport instead of the joys of the A4174 ring road of a weekday evening.

Next to the sign advertising a new way of live in a Brand new Urban Village, we see a photo of a family all cycling without helmets on the path beside the estate. There are no houses in the photo as it was taken "before". There is some text in the advert about how wonderful it will be, but the ageing VW Polo hides it.

Nearby, it has that Urban Village flavour -maybe even a taste of Montpelier- as a VW Golf parks up on the pavement, some student cycles by, and the 20 mph roadsign has been twisted to one side by a passing truck.

Round the corner, as the subversives noted, yes, there is a new cycling path which is about 40 cm higher than the old one.

What has changed since last week's denunciation is the give way signs for traffic crossing this cycle path have been removed.

Nothing to fear here then. Business as usual. No happy families will be using these paths to get to the city, or even as far as crashing into the bollards by the MoD.

We hear the Cycling Front are planning a kind of competition one lunch time next week to see who can ride the path, mountain bikes with or without suspension recommended. Keep an eye on their @cyclingfront twitter feed for news.

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Adien visit Abbeywood

After last week's shocking photographs of militant cyclists trying to reclaim their cycle paths, it was reassuring to see some of the city's van drivers striking back

Who is up on the bike paths of Abbeywood Today, making it clear what the North Fringe cycle paths are for? The white van FY04UYB

On the back, Adien, whose web site states their sustainability goals:

• We will ensure that procedures and attitudes are in place to deliver an incident free working environment for our employees and those who come into contact with our operations.
• We will endeavour to minimise the impact we have on the environment by use of sustainable material and processes.

Well, parking this far in ensures no driver-side wing mirrors will get clipped, so they pull that off, though the risk that a cyclist or push chair may try to get past on the other side -5 or 10 cm further in would have sorted that out. 

As mentioned before, we are conducting an experiment to make sure that this area remains van friendly. "Trust, but verify", as they say.

South Gloucester Council have denied responsibility for enforcing the double yellow lines on this, so we checked to make sure that Filton police are on message, that they know the war on motorists has been lost. I think we can conclude from the fact that the Filton police hotline has an answering machine at the end of it that yes, some government changes have made their way to that part of the system.

We have won the war! Nobody will stand in our way!

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South Gloucestershire bollards: who are the subversives?

Yesterday, we showed photographs of militant cyclists taping reflective strips to camouflaged bollards by the MOD Abbeywood site. Today we see some more photographs, showing hi-viz tape going up too!

Like we said, we don't suspect anyone associated with the Bristol Cycling Campaign to have done this, as S Gloucs council has a process for dealing with those people:

1. There is a monthly cycling forum, to which the activist cycle and the area's cycling advocate drives.
2. The cycling campaigners complain while the council staff nod and draw doodles on their notepads.
3. The campaigners' complaints get ignored.
4. The council staff drive home to their nice houses, laughing.
5. The cyclists pedal home in the rain, wondering what went wrong.

No, this was done by criminals out there, acting without control, without checks and balances, without morals. 

Who could it be?

According to the anonymous supplier of the photographs it was the People's Cycling Front of South Gloucestershire

They are not to be confused with the South Gloucester Popular Cycling Front, who was shopping at the Sainsbury's superstore nearby at the time.

We are disappointed that such clearly dangerous people could get close to an MoD site without being arrested.

Have any other subversives been taking to the street in our fair city, harassing motorists, taxi and lorry drivers on their important missions, parents trying to get their children to school by car safely, street designers trying to improve the streets for all these people? Reporting of such outrages to the Bristol Traffic site are welcome, so we can document the fall of our city into lawlessness.

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Criminal Attacks on the Abbeywood Bollards!

We've been watching the Egypt uprising in fear. Pedestrians, taking over the flyovers, pushing vans and arguing with tanks. They do not know their place.

We've also been reading Cities and Insurrections, which covers the problem of how to design cities to prevent popular uprisings in them from working. You want distribution and better routes for police/army control than for the troublemakers. That's why we recognise that the goal for Northern Ireland's ongoing work to force cyclists to wear helmets isn't for safety, it's to stop the subversives being so mobile. NI has always been the cutting edge of UK policing, so progress here cheers up.

It's also why we understand the strategic goal of the North Fringe: a place so anti-walking and anti-cycling that no ukcuts projectors will be out hassling the shops here, or protesting anything. But to make sure, we have to discourage those people who do walk and cycle round here -for the safety of the state.

Which is why we were horrified when some anonymous person emailed us these shocking photographs of militant cyclists adding their own reflective and hi-viz markings to the new bollards at the MOD abbeywood site, the ones that achieved national fame after someone cycled into them in the snow.

Now on a flash photo, you can see that it (and the newly added blue bicycle marking) is visible. One query: why doesn't that sign properly say bicycles keep left?

Looking the other way, you can see at least a bicycle going up and down has been painted on one side of the pavement, and it is segregated.

And turning 180 degrees we can see how much less visible the old bollards were.

What to say? Just because you don't think the bollards are safe, doesn't mean people should take actions in to your own hands like this.

Since the crash and the negative publicity, S Gloucs council have put the blue signs on. Now if anyone crashes in to it it's their own fault for being in the wrong part of the path, going to fast, or not paying attention. 

Yet as these photographs show, some people, even up in the North Fringe -our part of the city, as you get a hint of from the vast MoD car park to the side of the photos- there are troublemakers out there trying to make cycle city facilities somewhere where cyclists actually welcome.

We suspect the Cycle Embassy of Great Britain, or one of their minions.

Who else would threaten the safety of South Gloucester and Filton Town councils, and hence the whole country?

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Abbeywood Station

While obviously we don't use in trains and resent the fact that after privatisation the amount of our road tax spent on subsidising this form of transport has actually massively increased, we were at least pleased to see that the signage at the MOD side of the Abbeywood train station is aligned with our needs.

There is a faded bicycle under the barriers, not maintained as well as the no bicycles sign.

Interesting that it has a ring round the bicycle and Cyclists Dismount, does that mean they are required to get off their bicycles and then, well, just stand there or something?

There's another no bicycle sign to the lampost on the right, and one further up in the sky, in case inattentive cyclists were looking up there instead. This is the kind of cycle city signage we approve of -very Portsmouth.

Then S gloucs council waste the entire effort by having a sign up just outside showing people how to walk and cycle from the station.

Ridiculous.

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Abbeywood week, a discussion

Yesterday we mentioned that one problem with parking on the abbeywood cycle paths was not just the new bollards, it was harassment from cyclists. Here, sadly, we have an example.

This is V134DYC, a lorry minding its own business, parked on one of the Abbeywood cycle/pedestrian paths. By getting almost entirely on the path it is not interfering with any passing traffic.

Yet our cyclist reporter felt that there was some need to criticise the driver, to take a photograph of them, "for the database".

Fortunately, our lorry driver sees their gambit and raises it by pointing out that they too have a camera in their lorry, and the cyclist looked pretty silly -which, coming from a professional hi-viz person, are pretty harsh words.

We aren't convinced that the driver saying that Hitler used to disappear troublemakers like our cyclist report actually wins the argument.

1. Godwin's Law implies that whoever reverts to analogies with Germany's National Socialist government of 1934-1945 automatically loses the argument.
2. It's not clear that that government did persecute cyclists except when their religious or political beliefs were not aligned with that of the government.
3. It's not clear how this possibly incorrect bit of history deals with the problem that now there is nothing to stop cyclists taking videos and photographs of vehicles in their way and sticking it up online.

We look forward to better arguments in future.

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Abbeywood: West Side Bollard Run

We sent our expendable cyclist up to Abbeywood again to see the other side of the MoD site/car park. Sadly, our fellow traveller, Kayla Maratty, would have been on her four week holiday, so if she's a UWE student, she wouldn't have got a chance to run this cyclist over.



Note how the cyclist swerves out of the cycle side before the first corner. After we took them into the MoD site where we got them to confess to being an enemy of the economy, we asked them about this. Apparently going round a blind corner on the wrong side of the path is stupid. Maybe, but S Gloucs has put the signs up, so follow it.

Further on, you can see the new bollards. Some now have coloured tape on, some reflectors. But it's moot. Their existence is now known and widely publicised. Nobody else is going to run into them, even in snow -unless the council moves them or adds some more -perhaps on that first corner?

Knowing of the existence of the feature, does our test subject obey the signs? Follow the approved lanes? No they don't! Instead they treat it as some kind of opportunity to go through them as if they were some kind of obstacle course, "practising singletrack manoeuvres at near-race-speed", they said, whatever that means. Such actions were wrong before the bollards went up, now that bollards are in, it should be a crime. And to think that the S Gloucs bollards actually encourage such action -that simply appals us.

Notice how we say S Gloucs bollards. We thought initially that these were MoD features, it being Ministry of Defence land and all (which is why cycle campaigner Terry Miller got detained by their site police for behaving suspiciously and taking photographs here last week). Yet as the video shows, the signs and bollards go on out of the site, right up to the A4174 Ring Road, one of the two proposed Ring Roads we actually got part of. That means it came from the council, presumably out of their cycling budget.

This is what introduces such a moral dilemma for us. It makes cyclists feel less welcome -good, and it doesn't take away any driving options -great. But is it enough? Apart from that one person who crashed into one, how many cyclists are going to give up their commute from this feature? And it stops us driving down the bike path here.

This is an ongoing topic and we will cover it more. Our experiment to see if anyone in S Gloucs is capable of reacting to reports of vehicles parked on the bike path is going well, so far, no reaction from anyone. But more research is needed.

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Abbeywood Bollards: they don't help motorists

Having looked at the bollards, we are not sure whether we support them. Not because they can injure cyclists, but because they prevent motor vehicle access to the bike paths. We paid for them, we should get to use them!

Here, for example, is a South Gloucester Council lorry S764THY making use of one of the Abbeywood bike paths to park their lorry somewhere while they do some work on a roundabout.


If you look at this area, the double yellow lines mean that the shared pedestrian/bike path is the only place anyone can park. Yet bollards and harassment by cyclists -more on this another day- mean that the council and tax-dodgers are, together, removing our parking options.

Experiment #2011-1: we are using this path as an experiment to see if the war on the motorist really is over in S Gloucs, by reporting vehicles here to the authorities ( parklegally@southglos.gov.uk ) and making sure that nothing happens. If anyone gets told off or ticketed: the war on motorists is not over.

So far, we are pleased to see that S Gloucs parking services are happy not to care about this path, with this reply twelve days after we reported the issue:

Thank you for highlighting this problem to our department, however our Civil Enforcement Officers are not able to deal with (UNNECESSARY OBSTRUCTIONS) under the current Legislation Traffic Management Act 2004 (TMA04), this offence still comes under Police Officers or Police Community Support Officers who only have the powers of Enforcement for this Offence. 

I have also passed your complaint onto our street care department who are in charge of highways maintenance and asked them to investigate this issue and to please remove this vehicle from its obstructive position. 

Hope you find this information helpful and should you notice any other vehicles parked illegally with in South Gloucestershire please don’t hesitate to contact our department.

We are now continuing our experiment on new vehicles to see if S Gloucs police are on our side or not. The fact that Filton police station appears to be manned only by an answering machine bodes well.

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Abbey Wood Bike/pedestrian path changes

We've sent the team to the North Fringe for a few days, to see what the fuss is about regarding Abbeywood and Bollards. In order to cover this accurately, we have had to recruit someone on a bicycle, for which we apologise. If it makes the audience feel better, they think they are being paid to be a courier for paperwork. Normally we just pay them to carry old phone books around, as it slows them down, and about once a week they have to deliver high-strength home-grown Montpelier herbs, an action which would get them put away for 20-25 years if they were caught with them, a thought which always cheers us up when we send them out.


Returning to Abbeywood, some people may recall the fuss made last year when someone cycled into a bollard that S Gloucester council stuck in. These are white bollards with a white stripe, no hi-viz markings, and on a path that is only intermittently illuminated. Well, yes, a crash was inevitable. Yet we agree with some the comments made in the Evening Post and Daily Mail -while we sympathetic to the lecturer's injuries, they have only themselves to blame for being on a bicycle.

We actually saw some of the bollards going in, but didn't think it was interesting enough to cover. Now that we see it is, we can go through the back records and find the video.



Now that the bollards are here on the eastern side of the MoD land, we are disappointed to see that it does so little to discourage cycling. Instead our courier can travel down the bike path at speed, slow down for the road, where apparently off camera someone driving a car actually gives way to the bicycle, hinting this green paint is giving some mistaken impression about rights of way to MoD staff.



Last year, this path had a proper anti-bicycle gate, which the subversives used to ignore by going through the vegetation, forcing the MoD deployment of an anti-vegetation-cycling feature, before they went and removed it, eventually adding this new bollard.

The bollard does not stop people cycling to the North Fringe. The only way to prevent that would be to improve A4174 traffic by widening it and banning bicycles from the ring road, while downgrading any adjacent bike paths. We may have some good news there, in a week or two.

For now, this side of Abbey Wood does little to discourage cycling. We shall visit the other side, which was where the crash took place to see if it is any better.

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Family Cycling vs S Gloucs

Shocking footage of an entire family's collection of bicycles, up in the North Fringe, at a secret (as in "official secret protected by the official secrets act") location.

What's surprising is that they managed to get there, despite the efforts of S Gloucs council, who strategically positioned a lorry over the bike path to stop anyone who wasn't bold enough to cycle along a dual carriageway from getting to the bike racks.

Come on S. gloucs, please try harder!

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Western Power Distribution: showing who has the power in Abbey Wood

We loves Abbey Wood, S. Gloucs. Our part of the city. The council provides those off-street bike lanes which the cycle campaigners demand, missing the point that their purpose is to provide parking

Here it provides it for the car RV10LZF apparently associated with Western Power Distribution -whose vans are parked off-camera to the right of the photo below. Everyone is apparently working on some electricity substation issues behind the MoD site.

Parking over a bike/pedestrian path like this is not just about getting your car off the road, or away from the double yellows, it's about making a statement. It says I am important, you are not. Which is why we are very worried about some worrying emails we are are being forwarded from the MOD-land. Very worried indeed. More another day. Today though, we, the motorist, are in charge. First we give them their bike lanes, their pavements, to get them out the way, then we use them too. Lovely.

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Keeping the Abbey Wood shared use paths in good condition

Drainage Services are busy up by the MOD Abbey Wood area in the North Fringe, keeping the drainage in a bit of S. Gloucs well drained.

Some people might think that it is somewhat antisocial blocking an entire bike/foot path when the dual carriageway alongside has almost no traffic, at least not until the tailspin housing estate sells some more houses.

But think about it. Badly drained bike paths force cyclists into the road, where they could interfere with us.

Furthermore, this particular path enables a combined bicycle and supermarket journey, in which the shopper cycles to the A4174 Sainsbury's and pushes both the bicycle and the shopping trolley home. This is not possible on on-road, vehicular cycling routes. These people should be grateful for getting such an open bit of pavement to share with pedestrians, even if we hate them on the other pavements.

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