Comrades! Fellow cyclists against the incompetent regime that is S Gloucs council! We have some good news for a change!
Firstly, the bollards on the bollards-of-death path have been removed! Only two are left standing -apparently at MoD insistence- to keep motor vehicles off the path. Sadly, the fundamental problem: the path isn't wide enough for two lanes of bicycles and pedestrians remains. We suspect our comrades in the Netherlands will still be unimpressed. Widening the path would be the obvious solution, but instead the council insists on wasting money on road widening elsewhere instead.
Secondly, the sign-of-stupidity in the middle of the A4174 path has been moved.
We, the People's Cycling Front of South Gloucestershire take all credit for this, and denounce the collaborators in the Popular Cycling Front of South Gloucestershire for their attempts to politely point out the weaknesses in the designs. While they may claim credit, those polite complaints have been going on since August 2010, yet it is only a few weeks after we publicly denounced the cycle team at S Gloucs council of being incompetent that they acted.
We have won our first battles! However now the real war begins! All we have done is fixed two recent changes that made the existing bicycle paths worse. Yet the council still spends millions of pounds on road and roundabout widening, puts in car sharing lanes then removes them as they were under-used, and fritters away money on new routes to Cribb's Causeway that don't stop John Lewis naming and shaming that out of town shopping centre as having significantly lower revenue than their in-town stores. And who was the councillor pleased to have that new road opened? That's right, Cllr Bwian Allinson, the so-called cycling-city liaison councillor.
We cannot achieve our goal: cycle lanes the Dutch won't laugh at, while S Gloucs councillor doesn't give a fuck about bicycles except when they get a chance to get their face in the local papers pretending to care. Overthrowing the council is our only solution.
This is what we all must do!
Friday, 15 April 2011
Saturday, 2 April 2011
Old Filton Road
We'll cover this more over time, but here is a video from Yangtse55:
People will look at this and say "oh, this is the usual half-arsed cycle lane put in by some idiot". But it is more than that. It is a road that was closed to through traffic, and re-opened with a half-arsed cycle lane, due to councillor pressure.
For a year this was a nice road. No need for a cycle lane. Cars had the A4174 ring-road, this was the quiet alternative. Yet the need to provide a rural rat-run forced the road to be reopened and this piece of shite-cycling-facility to be rolled out. The cycle team probably worked hard to produce the least mediocre design they could given the constraints, but the key constraint was this "re-open the road to cars".
That was the mistake, and the blame goes above the cycle team. No, this lies at the Councillor level.
Bwian, was this your idea?
People will look at this and say "oh, this is the usual half-arsed cycle lane put in by some idiot". But it is more than that. It is a road that was closed to through traffic, and re-opened with a half-arsed cycle lane, due to councillor pressure.
For a year this was a nice road. No need for a cycle lane. Cars had the A4174 ring-road, this was the quiet alternative. Yet the need to provide a rural rat-run forced the road to be reopened and this piece of shite-cycling-facility to be rolled out. The cycle team probably worked hard to produce the least mediocre design they could given the constraints, but the key constraint was this "re-open the road to cars".
That was the mistake, and the blame goes above the cycle team. No, this lies at the Councillor level.
Bwian, was this your idea?
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