Cars have their uses

Recent weather events remind us that cars have their uses in helping to keep highways clear of obstructions and debris of one sort or another. In freezing weather conditions cyclists are best advised to stick to the roads and give cycling facilities a miss because the roads will generally be salted and kept clear of snow and ice. But this is not entirely the consequence of the Council's road maintenance priorities being focused on motor traffic. The traffic itself helps to keep the roads clear by displacing snow, slush and water from the road surface.



Thanks to the Council's misguided attempts to encourage cycling we have a neat illustration of this at Prince Street Bridge (which some of you will have noticed is a bit of a cause célèbre on this blog) as pictured above and below. In the first we see how snow and slush collect on the motor traffic free side (left) compared to the side still used by cars (right) where even the footway is clearer. In the second we see that heavy rain leads to the creation of large areas of standing water on the motor traffic free side (left) but none on the side used by cars (right). In either case it would only require freezing temperatures overnight to turn the standing water or slush to ice to make the surface deadly dangerous.



Standing water on the streets seems to have become a prominent feature of Bristol from about the time that Avon County Council was abolished 13 years ago. I guess a generation of old style highway engineers, who foolishly thought their main responsibility was maintaining the highway infrastructure, disappeared along with Avon and were replaced with aspiring social engineers more interested in how they can bamboozle us into changing our individual behaviour to fit in with their targets for modal shift. Anyway, here's a long standing (well over 10 years!) seasonal body of water, Lake Pembroke (area 21 square metres), to be found at the junction of Pembroke Road and Queen's Road in Clifton.



Picturesque though Lake Pembroke is, passing traffic causes waves to wash across the western shore, totally inundating what vestiges of the footway remain above high water level, so soaking any pedestrians unfortunate enough to be passing. The remedy is of course to unblock the drainage gully located at this point, but that would involve someone from the Council having to leave the comfort of their nice warm dry offices to have a look and actually risk getting wet, which would really be asking to much of the poor dears.

Traffic in Decline

For the first time in 30 years road traffic is in decline, according to the latest data from the Department for Transport. The decline began last Spring but was particularly marked (2.2% down) in the Summer in response to rocketing fuel prices. However the decline has continued through to the end of 2008 despite fuel prices dropping back, due to the recession. All this is against an expected growth in traffic of between 1% and 2% a year.



Road deaths have also fallen by more than 400 to 2,610, about 5 times the usual annual decrease, although deaths of cyclists have increased. New car sales have slumped, over 30% down. In Bristol and other cities congestion has decreased by 5% (in terms of time wasted in congestion). Traffic on urban roads has decreased by about 1% compared to the previous year. The expectation must be that traffic levels will continue to decline as the recession develops, due to declining employment and discretionary expenditure in general being cut back.

Most of which is good news as far as I'm concerned, except of course for the increased death rate for cyclists. That is likely to reflect a sudden influx of novice cyclists who haven't yet developed survival strategies (like jumping red lights) to the extent of experienced cyclists. But leaving that aside, things are looking good from an environmental perspective. Of course the recession won't last forever but it gives us a breathing space to explore the potential for reducing our car dependence.

Yet Bristol City Council are still wedded to transport priorities based on the assumption that traffic growth will continue relentlessly into the future. Strategies for accommodating traffic growth like Bus Rapid Transit and Congestion Charging must be called into question. Much of the financial "justification" for public transport subsidy, such as the proposed expenditure on BRT infrastructure, is based on the time savings accruing to motorists as a result of reduced congestion. But if congestion is reducing anyway......

My toe in the water

18th May 2008, the day I finally take the plunge and set up my own blog. I've been following other blogs for a few months now, frequently posting comments and sometimes testing the host's hospitality. So I thought it was time to sort out one of my own. At the very least it's no more than a personal record of my thoughts and deeds, recorded for my dotage so that I can see that I was once a literate and rational person (or so I now think) and of course something for posterity, to show the future world that I once existed and thought. But I hope this turns out to be of contemporary interest to others too.

But why the Green Bristol Blog you ask? Because I intend to focus on issues that relate to the greenness or otherwise of Bristol, a city that has recently acquired ambitions in that direction. My hope is to inject some observations of the mundane reality into the debate, to help bring people back to earth, so to speak. You will be guessing by now that my approach is going to be a critical one, and so it will be. I make no apologies for that, since I regard criticism as a vital ingredient to any sensible debate. Having said that, I will try to be fair, honest and objective, and it will be open to anyone to comment on what I say, particularly if they think it fails to be all of those things. I am also happy to receive suggestions as to what should be highlighted here.

My focus will be on the way Bristol works for those who prefer to walk and cycle, not just in the limited sense of the availability of routes but in the character, quality and sociability of the environment in which walking and cycling take place. To me a journey on foot or bike should be a positive experience in itself, not just a means of getting from A to B. That is certainly true in the absence of motor traffic, as evidenced by the popularity of walking and cycling on traffic free routes. Of course any motor traffic tends to degrade that and a lot of motor traffic ruins it, but there is still much that can and should be done to make walking and cycling as pleasant as possible, even in an urban environment where motor traffic is inevitable.