If you are one of those losers who actually buys a parking ticket for the city centre, you will see a warning on the back saying "people who park in bus lanes will get ticketed now", as the buses have CCTV and can photo cars for ticketing later. Whoever came up with the idea of these adverts must have thought "We want to communicate the news with people who park in the bus lanes, what better way than on council paper they get when they buy parking tickets?" Sadly, whoever thought that missed the point: one of the benefits of parking in bus lanes are that you don't have to buy parking tickets. It's cheaper, as well as more convenient.
Presumably they will have to come up with some alternate plan, such as issuing tickets. For now, warnings.
Question is, will it work? The first step would be for the council to collect a month's worth of parked car data (registration, timestamp, location), then try a month of adverts and no enforcement to look for changes, then try actual enforcement. We aren't going to help with the data collection, -not rigorously-, but having a suitably anonymised dataset would be interesting to play with, and we may help with the analysis.
For now though, a legal question. Here in Lewins Mead on a Saturday morning, the bus lane is blocked by a parked vehicle. Passing buses -you can see two here- are forced into the main traffic lane, and the bus picking up passengers behind the parked vehicle will be forced to wait for them to get past before it can pull out. This selflishly parked vehicle is impacting on bus timetables, as well as the flow rate of all motor traffic in the city: not only can the buses not use their lane, they take up space in the open lanes.
We have a question then. Is it legal for FirstBus to park buses in bus lanes? Because by doing so they are not only impacting their own schedule, they are impacting all other road user's schedules too?
Whenever you monitor humans, you have to worry about The Hawthorn Effect; the fact that people behave differently when being watched. This is notorious for skewing the results of many experiments, and you should always ask experimenters how they compensated for it, to make sure they knew what they were doing.
We solve this problem by not telling the cyclists that it's a camera. They think its a light. Of course, having the bicycle with lights on would effect the experiment too, so to avoid that it doesn't actually work as a light.
By monitoring without them knowing, we get to see the world from their point of view, hear their complaints, then dismiss them.
Today's video: Dove Street Kingsdown to Broadmead, by way of the Marlborough Street Bus station.
Notice that in Dove Street, those vans parking 3/4 on the pavement ensure that passing bicycles do not get hit by open doors, and make it easier for passing vehicles to get by them.
The Honda LG57XPV that appears to pull out without indicating before veering across the road is not victimising the cyclist, it would behave the same regardless of whoever was behind it. While driving along, had its brake lights on, "tourist lights" as we call them, which warn the vehicles behind that it is planning something.
Pulling in to Dighton Street at 1:00 we see a line of bicycles using this road to avoid the St James Barton Roundabout/Bearpit options, or to head over to Clifton without cycling over the big hills. [Incidentally, we hear a rumour that the Bristol Cycling Campaign, as well as promising free drinks at their EGM on Thursday, are planning a Bastard-Hills-of-North-Bristol ride that will not avoid those climbs].
At 1:20 the instrumented cyclist and another cyclist both slide past a taxi to occupy the remaining half of the ASL. This does not leave room for the two other cyclists following. What will they do?
At 1:28, the cycling-chic woman passed earlier appears to be having braking problems, as her bike only stops after she has shot halfway over the junction. Notice how she stops by putting both feet on the ground. That means fixed-speed or broken brakes. Given that cars are still heading across this road from the right hand side, only three sets of lights/two junctions from the M32, everyone anticipating a bit of speed, this is a brave things to do, she has earned her ghostrider label.
At 1:35 we see that the vehicle waiting to turn right is in fact a police car. Presumably our little ghostrider was too busy looking for cars from the right to worry about what cars were waiting to turn.
At 1:41, the police car pulls forward, and by 1:45 is parallel with the rider. Is she going to get told off?
No, it turns right, as do the vehicles behind. Even the lorry at 1:57 doesn't clip her, despite her being positioned on the inside of the bend
At 2:02 the high speed sprint of a van through the lights tells us that they have just gone red for that lane, and that the bicycles will now get a green light, which kicks in a couple of seconds later.
At 2:06 our camera enhanced cyclist sets off and never sees the ghost rider again. She had not only tried to cycle across the red light and the lanes of traffic, she had positioned herself so she could not see the lights, and so missed them changing.
Our cyclist uses the bike lane until it ends, and is then forced to turn off the road, to go down Whitson Street to the bus station. There then follows 30 seconds of dullness.
Where things get entertaining again is 2:44, where the bicycle is in the bus and bike only lane heading towards Broadmead. They have a red light. Will they wait? Or has the previous junction given them ideas?
They wait for three seconds, then veer over to what appears to be a pedestrian crossing -but actually has a bicycle on it. Therefore we must sadly conclude that this bit of crossing on bike is legal, and we can not report it to the police.
We are not so sure, however, about the pavement riding they do afterwards. They do not go straight on, where they would encounter the car, but instead veer left past some phone boxes, over the bus lane and then on some more pavement. We were beginning to get hopeful again, but then saw that they were actually riding up to some bicycle specific traffic lights -which were going green- and then they set off again, into Horsefair and hence Cabot Circus.
As you can imagine, we are unimpressed by the cyclist who ran the first red light. Not only was it dangerous, it didn't gain anything. At least when we speed in a car we get something in exchange -the feeling of speed, reduced journey time. She got nothing, and forgot to keep an eye out for police cars. The second junction though, leaves us confused. The bicycle clearly went up on the pavement, over a pedestrian crossing, on some more pavement and then up to some lights. We do not whether to be
Upset about the behaviour of the cyclist
Upset that an anti-car council added these features
Confused by the fact that these features seem to not be at all rational. Surely to make it easier to get from the bus station to broadmead, the crossing lights would be on the left of the junction, so the bicycle would not have to zig-zag everywhere? We suspect the lights were put in on a budget to help tax-dodgers head the other way.
We have decided to go for all three options. Bristol Traffic: confused and upset.
When we software engineers do a live functional test of a system -as you have to do from time to time- then there are two options.
Do the test at a time that causes least disruption to users of the product. Based on your system's known use pattern, you schedule the operation for a quiet time -like a Sunday morning. If the test works, few people notice. If things go wrong, well, damage is minimal and you have the rest of the day to roll back. The main inconvenience here is to the development team, who get phone calls from the operations team once -not if- the system fails.
Do it during working hours when it is most convenient to the development team. This is best for the developers, but generally worse for end users, more of whom discover the system is down
You can determine what philosophy a team is operating on by when they run their functional tests on the live system. (photo taken in central Bristol on Friday afternoon, 2:04pm)
Ghost Rider: someone on a bike who has chosen a path of action for which the outcome may tangibly result in death. Here we see someone cutting across the lanes of the inner ring road/lewins mead while cars approach. The cars are moving pretty fast here. And he's across, alive. All hail the brave!