Bicycles Harassing Drivers

A recurrent theme in the Evening Post web site is how bicycles harass cars. Finally we have collected evidence of this, from our instrumented cyclists.

First off, somerset street, Kingsdown. A taxi is waiting in the middle of the road. The cyclist cannot get past. This is not the taxis fault, it is the fault of the car that has chosen to park on the pavement to the right of the taxi. Together: no room for a bicycle.

When the tax dodger comes to a halt, the taxi/minicab waves their hand to point out that spring hill is to the right, the cyclist could back up and go up that road. But no, the cyclist stays put, and after a bit more hand waving the driver turns their engine on, backs up a bit. And the cyclist continues -then turns up Montague Hill, so making it clear they could have gone up Spring Hill, but were just being selfish and lazy. Think of the extra fuel wasted and pollution costs of forcing the car to turn their engine on and reverse -yet these troublemakers imply they are the "green" transport.

Another day, the Nugent Hill Contraflow. As usual, a car needs to run the one-way system so as to get to Arley Hill and the new tesco project on Cheltenham Road.

Initially the bicycle blocks the car by staying in the middle of the no-entry section, but then even when the tax-dodger deigns to get out the way to the driver paying for the roads, they get their camera out and harass the driver by threatening to photo them as they do "a bit of contraflow work". And who doesn't do that, from time to time? Yet now with these digital cameras built into phones, stuck on bicycles or helmets, anyone can take a video of an innocent motorist, send it off to the police and have someone get more penalty points on their license.

As the Daily Telegraph says, quoting the AA, "There is a wide range of new regulations waiting to catch you out." driven by NuLabour and their "new government road casualty targets". This nanny-state government went and made up new anti-car laws waiting to trap the innocent motorist, like "being involved in a fatal accident while unlicensed or uninsured" and "causing death by careless driving". As the Telegraph says, if you innocently kill someone while carelessly driving in an uninsured car -and how can you insure your car once the DVLA takes away your license from some minor drink-driving offence- it's now a prison sentence. In the old days, with their requirement for "reckless" or later "dangerous" driving, you could get a lawyer who went to the same school and participated in the same hunt as you and the judge show that you were only slightly careless when you ran your range rover through a zebra crossing full of people while talking on the phone. Now killing people through mere carelessness has penalties! This is so wrong. It is exactly the kind of thing we look forward to a new government fixing. Remove penalties for running red lights and contraflowing, ban the bicycles! Yet will any of the mainstream parties stand up for the motorist? We doubt it!

Save Double Parking!

Following on our campaign against zebra crossings, we find ourselves forced to start new campaign "Save Double Parking!". The anti-car council has come out against double parking as being dangerous and anti social. Maybe but for residents is the only way to park a car after the morning school run, and for commuters, its the only way to park a car with all the legal spaces taken up by those selfish residents who don't drive to school or work, so freeing up spaces.

Every cyclist who owns a car and goes round being smug, "I pay my road tax", is missing the point. The car they've paid the road tax for is on the road somewhere, that's the rectangle of tarmac they have rented, and by not using it they are inconveniencing not just the vehicles they hold up on their crawl round town, but those commuters who rely on the spaces they create.

Returning to the double parking problem, the BBC have an article calling it anti-social, an article that includes this road as an example:

We don't normally cover double parking, and when we do we never name the roads. Those streets where you can get away with it are secrets we do not dare share, as then we will have nowhere to park. Certainly this road looked familiar.

The buildings look Cliftony, possibly university area, the road is wide and quiet with an RV on the left, opposite a smartcar. Time to send a query off to our petabyte scale datacentre to see what shows up -and yes, we know this road. It's Belgrave Road, BS8.

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What's interesting about this road is why was it chosen? Did the council have to tip off the journalists that this road was trouble? Was in in fact staged purely to push out new CPZ/RPZ restrictions, our very own WMD-for-iraq claim?

We have a theory there. Belgrave road is right next to the BBC. The journalists just popped out for 30 seconds to get a couple of pics and then went back in, job done. Of course, that does not mean that the photo was not staged. More research is needed.

This is where our new experiment to instrument cyclists and pedestrians in the city has begun to pay off. By having them filming themselves, we can review exactly what they've done wrong, from their own position. This is a lot easier than filming them ourselves, as it is really hard to hold a camcorder steady while driving through Montpelier, especially when you are trying to text someone. We just let the bikes do the work, then later get the pics. Up until now most bike filming has been written by the cyclists, always whining about something or other, such as this Glaswegian Magnatom, who has taken up the classic sport of that city -starting fights with strangers- out of the bars, and onto the roads. We aren't like that. We will criticise the cyclists and any other tax-dodging subversives we see.

Here then, is our ride-by of this road, where we can say that yes, it looks like a good place to double park. Nobody seems to mind, and it's handy for the BBC. This is important if you are Noel Edmonds, on a visit to the competition to see if your latest idea for a Saturday evening show has got any interest. The video was taken ten days ago, in term time, so if the council staged the entire double parking scene, they kept it up outside the BBC for a long time -it probably is genuine.



Analysing this video, we see a number of events which concern us

1. At 0:06 a tax-dodging cyclist -correctly dressed in hi-viz and helmet- sticks her arm out to force a Mercedes to stop its manoeuvre, a turn into the bus lane. This was a premium car, and clearly belongs to someone important -possibly Noel Edmonds himself. All the cyclists should have given way, and not held up this car by being in front of them in the bus lane.
2. At 0:13 we see a skateboarder on the road. Again, another form of tax-dodging
3. At 0:31 we see a Vauxhall Zafira being forced to brake hard after overtaking the bicycle.
4. Throughout the sequence, we see pedestrians crossing the road -only one of them is wearing hi-viz clothing.

Event #3 concerns us, the car which has to put their foot down to swing past the bicycle, then cut in , apparently to double park right in front of them. If the cyclist had not been pootling up this double-parking-friendly road at 5 mph, the driver would not have been forced to take such action. It is not environmentally friendly having to accelerate and brake like this, showing that while bicycles themselves may not be polluting, they cause the other vehicles in the city to waste more fuel, to pollute the city more.

We can see then, in 46 seconds, how a couple of bicycles can hold up the journey time of cars, be they important cars who need to use the Bus Lane, or merely someone who needs to double park outside the BBC offices. It is bad enough that these cyclists are allowed to do this, that they do not pay any tax, let alone compensate us for our lost time -now we see that the council is trying to take away our right to double park. Furthermore, the video showed how pedestrians, cyclists and even skateboarders are trying to take our roads away from us. We must resist!

When will this anti-car oppression end!