Tag Archives: Victoria Park

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.

WHINY TWAT SEEKS PRIVATE SECTOR MOVE?

Whiny twat: working seven days a week to fuck up our city

Whiny council twat, Barra Mac “NUGGET” Ruairi, jerking himself off under the title ‘Strategic Director of Place’ and struggling by on about £130k a year for hacking our public services apart was forced by the Rev Rees in November to attend a public meeting in Henbury about the cuts.

Many who attended openly EXPRESSED THEIR FRUSTRATION at clowns like Mac Nugget filling their boots at our expense while cocking up everything in sight.

Mac Nugget replied, “I’m an exec  leader with SIGNIFICANT SALARY who moved from Sheffield to serve the city – seven days per week – genuinely doing my best. I work with £100million contracts, miles of roads, planning, 38 refurbished schools. It’s a significant job with over 1,000 staff. We need qualified people to deliver this kind of work.

“I chose to work in public but could work in the PRIVATE SECTOR. We have trouble recruiting as the private sector take our staff. We don’t just work 37 hours per week but put in as much time for the city as we can.”

Mac Nugget was noticeably light on detail about any of his ACHIEVEMENTS. So here’s some of the things he’s been working seven days a week to achieve:

An arena over two years behind schedule, 20 per cent plus over budget that doesn’t have anyone to build it; a Metrobus bus scheme that nobody wants with no one to run it that’s also over budget; unnecessary concreting over of bluefinger land and allotments at Stapleton for the Metrobus; destruction of hundreds of trees for the Metrobus scheme; endless traffic congestion that continues to get worse; collapsing city docks infrastructure that has culminated in the ongoing closure of Princes Street Bridge; cancellation without notice of vital bus services like the number 51 last year; occupation of council properties by guardian companies that don’t comply with his own council’s licencing and health and safety rules or the law; the proposal to build a five metre wide road through Victoria Park; an inexplicable £9m deficit in his Property Services Department run up between March and June last year; an ongoing failure to deliver smart ticketing on public transport.

Then there’s the risk of failure to the major infrastructure projects he’s managing. Such a failure is currently listed as ‘LIKELY‘ by Bristol City Council

Please private sector take this useless twat. He’s all yours

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.