Tag Archives: Sustrans

EASTON ROAD RAGE

All Hallows

There’s still a lot of anger in Easton as the final phase of a council traffic scheme, designed by Sustrans, is implemented with the CLOSURE of All Hallows Road at the Bannerman Road School site.

Critics of the HAREBRAINED TRANSPORT SCHEME claim that in a ward of approximately 14,000 people, just 855 people – about six per cent of residents – were involved in an expensive £180k ‘consultation’ based on hookie stats such as the claim that “39,883… vehicles enter and/or leave the area during a 24 hour period” (by comparison, 60,000 vehicles use the M32 every day). However, since NO RECORDS of this consultation were kept, the council can’t confirm that the people who took part even live in Easton and they can’t deny that the same people attended multiple consultation meetings.

The closure of All Hallows Road is especially controversial as this “additional filtered permeability” didn’t appear until the final phase of the consultation which had less than 92 participants. So, even assuming every single one of them was enthusiastic, we’re talking about LESS THAN 1% OF THE POPULATION in favour. Residents say they were never offered any different ideas or plans. There was never any vote held nor public meetings to discuss options. There was just an announcement “WE’RE CLOSING THE ROAD“. The closure has been opposed at public meetings; opposed in a resident-run survey of over 1,000 people and opposed by local businesses, faith groups and the community centre.

Residents recently fought the Traffic Regulation Order (TRO) to close the road and requested evidence of how the closure would achieve any of the things being claimed for it such as a REDUCTION IN TRAFFIC, CLEANER AIR and SAFER STREETS? Indeed, they asked, how would the council even measure success since they made no effort to quantify their aims, goals or success level?

A resident says, “They are literally spending money with no way to tell if it has done any good. And you know that this is the case because they have REFUSED at every opportunity to address any of our concerns. Instead, at every phase we have been told “PEOPLE WANT THIS” and “IT MEETS OUR TRANSPORT OBJECTIVES“. Who wants this? Because I can find no-one outside of a tiny group of a dozen people who actually want it. How does it meet their transport objectives? Which ones? In what way?”

Residents continue to say there is an alternative. Close the road between 8am and 9am and 3pm and 4pm. Two hours a day and open on weekends. Simple. Straightforward. Protects the children, makes the area safer at the times when it needs to be safer and doesn’t disrupt traffic into well-known accident hotspots. The council and their councillors just say, “IT’S TOO LATE“.  

Welcome to democracy, Bristol-style.











POTHOLED!

A cyclist was involved in a nasty ACCIDENT on the Downs recently when he rode straight into a pothole measured as 8 inches deep, 68 inches long and 26 inches wide. It was also completely SUBMERGED in water and looked like a puddle.

The bike SNAPPED in two when the cyclist hit the pothole and he was hospitalised with head and face injuries including concussion and fractured cheek, nose and hand. NUMEROUS REPORTS had been made to the council’s ‘Fix My Street’ website, especially from cyclists reporting how dangerous sections of the Downs now are. There are a series of LARGE POTHOLES there, which the council is doing sod-all about.

Meanwhile, the council and their cycling consultants are resurfacing the cycle path on Baldwin Street for the THIRD TIME, even though no one uses it. All around the city, they’re building cycle paths a few metres long, when all the evidence shows that cyclists won’t dismount, get onto the cycle path, cycle a few metres, dismount and get back on the road again.

Why are the roads so much better in South Gloucestershire and North Somerset than in Bristol? Any potholes that appear are FILLED IN. Roads that deteriorate are RESURFACED. Meanwhile, Bristol has some absolute HORROR SHOWS, many where there is very heavy cycle use. The roads around Blaise Castle are another example.

And this is supposedly a ‘Cycling City’ where Sustrans chooses to locate its headquarters?

SUPER STUPID SUPERHIGHWAY

Crash! Victoria Park cycle path latest …

The latest effort by Sustrans/Bristol City Council Sustainable Transport Team to build a POINTLESS road through Victoria Park for cyclists as part of a ‘Filwood Quietway’ has even been slammed by Bristol Cycling Campaign for having “no noticeable benefits” for cycling!

The original plan – that had to be hastily pulled by former Labour transport boss Mark “Dead Duck” Bradshaw after HUNDREDS of locals and park users objected – proposed a pointless five metre wide road through the park that provided priority for cyclists commuting through the park.

Now, following another poorly publicised local consultation, Bristol City Council has put a new plan before a Bristol City Council planning committee proposing a pointless three metre wide road through the park with pedestrian priority. This too, following a planning consultation in August when we were all away, is HUGHLY UNPOPULAR with locals and park users who know a shoddy compromise when they see one.

As do the Bristol Cycling Campaign, it seems. Last time around they created a torrid and aggressive public row with park users after they accused them of being part of a mysterious CAR LOBBY operating out of Windmill Hill.

This time around the cycling campaign seem to have finally noticed that this is a plan for a ROAD TO NOWHERE that concretes over one of the city’s finest parks so that cyclists can arrive at a dead end half way down York Road on the New Cut. From where there’s NO MEANS of crossing the river to get to the Quietway’s stated final destination in the centre.

The reality slowly dawning on everyone is that this section of “quietway” is a sloppy VANITY PROJECT from underemployed and unskilled sustainable transport hobbyists at Bristol City Council who are desperate to spend government grant money by March next year regardless of whether it benefits the city.

Scrap this stupid path through our green space now and send the money back to the government.

REES AND BRADSHAW: A WARNING FOR THE FUTURE

It’s been announced today that the council is withdrawing its plan to build a 4.5m wide road through Victoria Park for the benefit of posh cycle lobbyists in West Bristol.

This is the article we intended to publish in the next issue of The BRISTOLIAN on the issue. We leave it here as a warning to the Reverend Rees, and his idiot cabinet sidekick for transport, Mark “BEAR” Bradshaw, and any other Labour Party vandal who think they can fuck with our open space.

Try it and we will make you pay …

VICTORIA PARK: DIRECT AND TO THE POINT

There’s dark mutterings about “direct action” emerging from Windmill Hill and Totterdown if the Rev Rees, Mark “BEAR” Bradshaw and the cycle lobby fanatics running their transport department go ahead with their plan to build a road for cyclists through Victoria Park.

The economics of this are pretty straightforward. How much extra money is the Rev Rees prepared to throw at a pointless £500k cycling project to secure it? Five per cent? Ten Per cent? £50k doesn’t go far in repairs and security these days does it? Metrobus has reputedly spent more than £1m securing their Stapleton allotments site from protestors.

And remember, while the £500k for the road may come from central government, Rees will have to find any overspend on the project from his own shot-to-fuck council budgets. So if Rees wants to take the piss out of local residents; local residents can easily take the piss back and hit him where it really hurts – in the wallet.

To the barricades park lovers!

VICTORIA PARK PLANNING: FUNNY BUSINESS

Dick Ed: road builder-in-chief

There’s some FUNNY BUSINESS going on with the Bristol City Council’s planning application to itself to build an inane cycle superhighway through Victoria Park.

The application appears to be a joint effort between Sustrans and the council’s Sustainable Transport Team headed up by “DICK” Ed Plowden, a career civil servant. Although many of us struggle to tell the difference between the local civil engineering outfit for cycling and Dick Ed’s department.

When Dick Ed’s minions originally uploaded the planning documents for their road on 28 November for comment by the public prior to a planning decision later this month, there were NO REPORTS relating to the impact on the ecology or biodiversity of Victoria Park. However, this was rectified last Thursday when these documents miraculously appeared.

Even more miraculously, the date listed for the uploading of these the documents that only appeared on 6 January was November 28. Creating the impression that the documents had been available to the public for SIX WEEKS when they hadn’t. How has this sleight-of-hand been allowed to happen and who authorised MISLEADING THE PUBLIC and a quasi-statutory planning committee in this way?

Naturally Bristol Sutrancity Council responded ‘NO‘ to “Section 13 Biodiversity and Geological Conservation” on their application form as to whether there is a reasonable likelihood of [biodiversity] being affected adversely. Although, due to some CONVENIENT OVERSIGHTS, this isn’t really borne out by their limited (and late) report.

Hall: long term prat

“Dick” Ed Plowden the man responsible for making this application arrived in Bristol as a lower middle manager for John Prescott’s HOPELESS Government Office of the South West (GOSW). A bizarre provincial civil service outpost based at Temple Quay that mainly served as a  repository for lower ranking civil servants who couldn’t really make the grade in London. Another alumni of the department is the Green Party’s Red Trouser fan-in-chief, Darren “TAMMANY” Hall.

In those days Plowden’s specialism was in CRIME REDUCTION. Then he waltzed into a senior transport manager role at Bristol City Council, apparently thanks to his experience of making a stately cycle commute to work from his large suburban pile in Knowle every day.

Judging by his approach to planning applications, former crime fighter, Dick Ed, isn’t much interested in reducing crimes in low-level local government corruption. In fact he’s helping create it!

SICK COUNCILLORS PUT PARK ON ROAD TO RUIN

jon-wellington-1462720144

SPADstic and Lazy in happier times before they decided to fuck up one of the city’s parks and become objects of mass derision

We have an early entrant for our IDLE SELF-PUBLICIST COUNCILLOR of the year award. Please step forward Labour’s councillor for Windmill Hill, “Lazy” Lucy Whittle.

LIVID RESIDENTS of Windmill Hill and Totterdown – fuming over her and her politically ambitious colleague Jon “SPADstic” Wellington’s top secret plan to build a bloody great ROAD through their beloved Victoria Park – were desperately emailing Lazy Lucy in December only to be greeted by an out of office message.

“Thank you for contacting me, I am currently on SICK LEAVE but expect to be able to return to work within a few weeks, hopefully at the end of December,” bleated Lucy.

Fair enough. We all get ill and can’t work. But wait! What should pop through residents’ doors in late December/early January but a copy of the South Bristol Voice newspaper featuring a ‘Your councillors’ column written by none other than LAZY LUCY, merrily wittering away, without a care in the world, about the awfulness of the cuts she’ll be voting to implement this year.

What type of STRANGE ILLNESS is this that afflicted Lazy Lucy over the Christmas holidays? Too ill to reply to residents’ emails but well enough to write an article promoting herself and taking advantage of free PR in the local freesheet? Truly, an extraordinary condition.

Lazy Lucy and sidekick, SPADstic, may be trying to avoid residents after they supported a SECRET three month public consultation by cycling and concrete charity, Sustrans, into the so-called ‘Filwood Quietway’ through Victoria Park.

This is basically a plan – going to a planning committee next week – for a FIVE METRE WIDE ROAD for cyclists to SPEED through the park on. And, despite Lazy and SPADstic’s comprehensive three month consultation over the summer, virtually no residents knew anything about it!

Unless, that is, they happened to wander into a BICYLE REPAIR GAZEBO in Victoria Park on the afternoon of Wednesday 31 August or they were invited to a few mysterious PRIVATE, invitation-only meetings with the mendacious pair of Labour councillors and Sustrans’ posh engagement manager, Anais “Nincompoop “Leger-Smith.

To add INSULT TO INJURY, Lazy Lucy even used her South Bristol Voice PR column in October to discuss her road-through-the-park plan in vague terms, telling residents, “we are really interested in what the community thinks. So do let us know your thoughts,” a week after the consultation CLOSED!

Lazy Lucy also gave the road Labour’s SUPPORT in her column, telling residents, “[SPADstic and I] see this as an improvement to Bristol’s cycling infrastructure that will bring benefits to communities along its route.”

Now SPADstic, apparently alone and abandoned by sickly Lazy Lucy, and desperate to salvage his six-month car crash career is attempting a REVERSE FERRET at the kind of furious speeds cyclists will soon be doing across his local park.

As hundreds of objections pour in from residents – as they finally find out about the road SPADstic forgot to tell them about – SPADstick is desperately issuing VAGUE and PISS WEAK promises to support the residents he deliberately sidelined and ignored during the three month consultation.

Too little; too late we say. Why did Lazy Lucy and SPADstic DELIBERATELY allow this plan get to a planning committee before telling residents? And why – if their consultation with Anais NIncompoop from cycling’s concrete kings – has been such a comprehensive listening exercise, are HUNDREDS of residents and every community group and school in the area UP IN ARMS about it?

The plan needs to go back to the drawing board and these idiot councillors need to apologise to their residents for their appalling conduct and start doing their jobs properly. Or else.

PARK’S SUPER HIGHWAY HORROR

Crash! The new VIctoria Park

Crash! The new look for VIctoria Park

Uproar south of the river as Sustrans – the cycling psychobabble lobby group for lycra clad middle class loudmouths – announces they intend to build a FIVE METRE WIDE cycling ‘superhighway’ across the southern section of VICTORIA PARK.

Naturally, this crazed idea to create a HIGH-SPEED cycle route across the flat area of the park – ideal for playing sports and games in an otherwise hilly park – is wholly supported by the management crackpots of the council’s transport and parks departments.

The decision to proceed with the highway – laughably branded a ‘QUIETWAY‘ to disguise the obvious cycling racetrack qualities of the proposal – was taken after Sustrans held a consultation “one Wednesday afternoon in the park when no one was there”!

When the absence of people actually consulted for their HAREBRAINED SCHEME was pointed out to Sustrans, they hurriedly contacted a few members of the park’s community group, VPAG (Victoria Park Action Group).

They told Sustrans the path should be no wider than THREE metres and needed to clearly encourage cyclists to understand this is a was SHARED ROUTE with all park users, pedestrians, pets, children and an inner city community short of safe, open space. Rather like the current low-tech under-engineered pathway already does!

This, of course has been entirely ignored by this arrogant sustainable transport charity for snooty people. Instead their five metre wide OVER-ENGINEERED SUPERHIGHWAY plan gives the green light to anti-social middle class loudmouths in lycra to hammer through the park at speed shouting, screaming and even attacking any dogs, children or adult who might get in their way as they race to and from their city centre creative non-jobs.

This selfish scheme must be stopped in favour of a scheme that takes account of all park users and the wider community – not just the commuting needs of a wealthy, loudmouthed lobby of twats.