Priorities Made Plain

However much Bristol City Council might talk up how important they think walking and cycling, their true priorities are laid bare for all to see when the snow falls. Here we have a view of Queen's Road, Clifton, from 1 p.m. on 21st December, a little more than 12 hours after the snowfall. The main roads are of course clear and operating normally but the pavement in the foreground at the junction with Richmond Hill, the main walking route from Clifton, remains untreated and walkers are already sliding around as the snow is compacted to ice.

This location is notorious for becoming treacherous for walkers after snow falls since it is heavily used, slopes markedly and is shaded from the winter sun by the adjacent block of flats. Yet there isn't even a grit bin at this location. One of the nearest grit bins is located on a traffic island by the Victoria Rooms (visible as a yellow lump in the distance below), convenient for use on the road but hopelessly inconvenient for the footways. Even four days later no attempt had been made to deal with the ice, other than to wait for a thaw, and the pavement remained treacherous.

 Down at the Docks it's a similar story. The south side quays are largely shaded by adjacent buildings from the low winter sun and by 25th December the snow had turned to an almost continuous sheet of ice and remained so for days afterwards. And this at a time of year when a walk, jog or bike ride around the Docks would be a very popular and necessary recreation. But the ice has clearly put so many people off, not to mention those who've ended up in hospital with sprains or fractures. Should it not be part of the duties of the Harbour Master to ensure that quay sides are kept safe for walking, jogging and cycling, the main ways in which most people interact with the Docks?

The Council's policy appears to be to grit and clear the main road network, but not including footways or cycleways, however important they may be. That is simply inconsistent with their new rhetoric about encouraging cycling and walking. This coming week, with sub-zero temperatures forecast for every night and some sleet and snowfalls, will see many more 'accidents' as people follow the Council's exhortations to walk or cycle to work. We have the right to expect strategic walking and cycling routes to be identified and treated in the same methodical way as the strategic routes for motor vehicles.

PS - It seems the Evening Post take a similar view.  Oh dear.

The Centre - Alternative Routes

The proposals to restrain general traffic passing through the Centre will inevitably have knock-on effects for other parts of the road network and it will be the capacity of the wider network to absorb displaced traffic that will limit what can be achieved in the Centre. That is not to say that all the displaced traffic will have to be accommodated elsewhere. Some displaced car trips will be made by other modes instead and some will not be made at all, but a proportion of displaced trips, particularly those made by vans and lorries, will still need to be accommodated somewhere.


View City Centre changes - Dec 2009 in a larger map

The map above attempts to identify the alternative routes that will bear the brunt of the displaced traffic. As well as taking out the option of linking from Baldwin Street to the Centre the map shows Prince Street Bridge as closed to motor traffic as is already planned to accommodate the Ashton Vale BRT. The net effect is that journeys by car, van or lorry between the Clifton area and the south of the city become very constrained compared to what is currently possible. There will be almost no practical means of passing between those areas between the Cumberland Basin to the west and Newfoundland Circus (Cabot Circus) to the east.

In the south to north-west direction it appears that a couple of other routes will remain open (shown light blue on the map) along sections of one-way street, via Union Street in Broadmead and via Small Street and Nelson Street (although this latter is very circuitous). Union Street is frequently congested anyway and is an important bus route so it's unlikely that extra traffic can be accommodated there. In the other southbound direction one or two routes are possible but so circuitous as to be impractical, except perhaps the Bridewell St - Pithay route shown yellow which I suspect will need to be closed off to prevent it developing into a major rat run.

Elsewhere we can see that Park Street will become less attractive as a through route since it will lead only to St Jame's Barton, which can be reached more directly via Park Row - Marlborough Street. Indeed this might pave the way towards closing Park Street itself to motor traffic and diverting traffic via Jacob's Wells Road, but that's another story. Clearly Park Row - Marlborough Street will take displaced traffic and given how congested that corridor already is that must present problems.

From St James Barton round to Newfoundland Circus, Old Market (above) and Temple Circus will also take displaced traffic. In addition this is the planned route of the BRT going anti-clockwise around the city centre so there are more capacity issues there. Something has to give if these changes are to be pushed through. That something should not be the economic vitality of the city and we have to recognise that motor traffic, particularly commercial van and lorry traffic, has an important role there.

So that just leaves the private car, the elephant in the room that we all know is the root of the problem but few will dare criticise directly. Yet the relative ease with which cars pass around the city must change quite dramatically if any real improvements in the quality of the urban environment are to be achieved. Politicians like Jon Rogers have the unenviable job of trying to persuade a population, wedded to a myth of personal freedom through car ownership, of this simple reality.

All Change at the Centre?

We've been hearing rumours for a while of plans for some radical changes to traffic patterns around the Centre and Bristol City Council decided to slip the controversial announcement out in the doldrums between Christmas and the New Year. Both the Evening Post and BBC picked it up, followed by a story on bike news site Road CC. The Post story attracted over 200 comments which is pretty good for the middle of a national holiday so they've run it for two more days. The proposals are shown in some detail on the map below (click to enlarge).

 The essential elements of the proposal are that Colston Street and Baldwin Street will be closed to general traffic (except buses and cyclists) at their junctions with the Centre (St Augustine's Parade, Broadquay and Colston Avenue) and the only route through the Centre for general traffic will be north-south (shown east-west on the maps) from below College Green through to Lewin's Mead. Movements via Baldwin Street will not be possible except by circuitous local links. In addition the ends of Denmark Street and St Stephen's Street will be closed off to all traffic to eliminate potential rat runs and further improve the pedestrian realm. The effect of the proposals is more clearly shown on this map.

The Council are consulting on the proposals and to their credit have adapted their 'Ask Bristol' site to become what is in effect a Wordpress blog enabling comments to be posted, viewed and even commented on in turn, in the familiar manner. So far the response to the blog style approach seems to be positive and it's certainly far more engaging that Ask Bristol's previous highly controlled nods towards public engagement.

Comments on the proposed Centre remodelling are predictably mixed and often polarised. Some think the Centre should revert to a glorified traffic roundabout as it was in the 1980s while others think the current proposals far too tame and unambitious. My view is that these are basically sound proposals that strike the right sort of balance between the need to reclaim more of the public realm from the car and the need to accommodate a reasonable level of vehicular access.

Of course there is much more that can and should be done but in reality these things need to be carried through incrementally so that they can bed in and we can all adjust. Too much change in one go will provoke a backlash (and we get a taste of that from the BEP comments) and undermine the longer term objectives. We want to make as much progress as possible but there are limits to how much change people will accept before things get nasty and I suspect these proposals are pushing at that limit already.

The closure of Colston Street in front of the Colston Hall (above foreground) will allow for the creation of a kind of Piazza and complement the work to upgrade the Colston Hall itself. The closure of the end of Baldwin St will remove much of the existing traffic in Baldwin St and even in Park St since Park Row will generally provide the most direct route towards the south and east of the city. Pedestrian movements from the Centre towards the Old City (Corn St) and Broadmead will be much less interrupted by traffic flows into Baldwin St.

The Closure of other streets that currently connect to the Centre, like Denmark St and St Stephen’s St will improve pedestrian permeability and safety and bring those streets into the Centre 'ambience' and perhaps improve trade for businesses in those streets. Restricting the main north-south St Augustine’s Parade traffic to two lanes will allow for reasonable access but discourage through traffic and so minimise the impact of the remaining traffic. This could be complemented by making the whole Centre area subject to 20 mph limits to reduce potential conflict with pedestrians.

There is clearly much detailed work to be done to refine the proposals, for example in terms of accommodating cycle movements and providing priority crossings for pedestrians, but the big battle is to get the main thrust of the proposals accepted. As with the 20 mph proposals, we can play an important role in bringing that about. The Ask Bristol site gives us a suitable platform so let's all give Jon Rogers the support he deserves in trying to bring these much needed changes forward.

Global Warming - The Solution (Part 1).

Firstly apologies for the long gap since my least blog. Unfortunately the real world occasionally intervenes and drags me away. There have been so many things to blog about too, what with Bristol City Council's capitulation to 'business-as-usual-only-more-so-and-stuff-the-environment' with their decision to pursue the football World Cup bid. That I will hopefully come back to anon, but with Copenhagen fast approaching it seems timely to launch my own modestly titled 'Solution to Global Warming'.

Obligatory smoking chimney pic

Let me say at the outset that I'm not the only person proposing this kind of approach and I'm not claiming it as some great leap in thinking. It is merely the simple application of free market principles (no, that's not an oxymoron) to the problem, an application of the 'polluter pays' principle and an example of an ecotax. It's simple in essence so easily understood by the consumer but would allow for the evolution of sophistication, entreprise and diversity in it's implementation (which I'll describe in Part 2). What's most important, in contrast to Cap-and-Trade, it would actually work.

The essence of the system is that the consumer of goods or services should pay for the environmental costs arising from the supply of those goods or services, including of course the cost of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. In the case of carbon dioxide the cost would be what it actually costs to neutralise or fully mitigate the environmental impact. So far so familiar. But then the final element is where it gets interesting. The environmental costs paid by the consumer must be used to pay for (and will be determined by) the environmental neutralisation or mitigation so that the impact really is neutralised/mitigated.

I'll describe the mechanism for doing this in some detail in Part 2 in due course but let's first consider how such a system would work in principle. Say Mr Consumer wants to travel to exotic climes. He looks at air fares, but finds that the incorporation of the environmental costs makes air travel much more expensive. He then has three choices.

1. Pay the higher air fare and fly (in which case his environmental impact will be neutralised/mitigated so no problem).
2. Travel by some other means and/or a shorter distance with a lower environmental impact and pay the lower environmental costs (in which case no problem)
3. Not travel (in which case no problem).

Freedom of choice but with responsibility. The same would apply to every single item of consumption because every good or service would incorporate its environmental costs. Even a cup of coffee or a hamburger would be more expensive precisely in proportion to its total environmental impact. So we would all inevitably adjust our spending to favour options with low environmental impacts and eschew options with high environmental impacts. We would find all energy costs much higher so we would need to travel less and invest in much better home insulation, meat and dairy products would be more expensive and vegetarian options less so and so on through the whole gamut of modern consumption.

Nobody would be denied the theoretical choice of flying, or driving an inefficient car, or whatever, but since such options would become so much more expensive only the relatively wealthy will have the practical means to choose (which is already true for most of the world's population anyway). The consequence would be a big shift in consumption patterns and the demise of many contemporary business models, notably those predicated on cheap air travel like, er, the World Cup (good choice Bristol City Council). Businesses would have to adapt and quickly to survive and prosper.

So problem solved? All the world's nations have to do in Copenhagen is agree to adopt such a system in good time and we can all forget about the worst of the Global Warming scenarios (unless it's already too late, in which case we can worry about our future survival instead on how to avoid Climate Change)? But of course they won't for the very simple reason that it would actually work. That is the last thing that powerful business interests want. Better for them to carry on with failing policies like Cap-and-Trade than adopt a policy that will actually work.

It's Total Twenty (well almost).

Bristol City Council have just issued a Press Release on their 20 mph proposals for south and east Bristol. The number of roads excluded from the 20 mph coverage has been pared right down. The south Bristol is now 'Total Twenty' with no exclusions except the fragments on Clarence Road and York Road along the Cut which are effectively outside the scheme area. The whole of the A38 (West St - Malago Road - Bedminster Parade) is now included as 20 mph.

In east Bristol the exclusions (shown red below) are the M32 - Newfoundland Way - Newfoundland St, Easton Way -Lawrence Hill Roundabout - Barrow Road, Lawrence Hill - Church Road,
Old Market - West Street - Lawford Street/Lamb Street/Lawfords Gate/Trinity Road - Clarence Road (the A420). No one ever expected the M32 and Easton Way to be included so effectively it's just the A420 that has been excluded. That will still disappoint some but the gains compared to the officers' original proposals are enormous.



The proposals will have to be the subject of Traffic Regulation Orders before they can be implemented and it is possible that there might be objections, but it looks as though the overwhelming degree of public support for 20 mph proposals has carried the day. Credit to all those who have contributed to the consultations and debate, especially to 20splenty4Bristol, Bristol Living Streets, Bristol Cycling Campaign and above all to Jon Rogers for pushing so hard for the minimum of exclusions. We must also recognise the willingness of the officers themselves to listen to the public and to reconsider their initial position