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!
Good work! In fact I did have a little chuckle when I actually cycled past south glos contractors moving the signpost of stupidity in Emerson's Green. A small victory but a victory nevertheless. Keep it up!
ReplyDeleteBe warned though - the sign is still stupid. If you follow its directions to the Bristol-Bath cycle track is takes you over a significant distance off road when going over the common. I was stupid enough to follow this route on my road bike - I wont be doing this again.
But was it SouthGlos who removed them??? Or was it members of the Front taking direct action??? Right under the noses of the MoD guards too? A couple of days 'jack hammer' hire, a hi-vis jacket and a pair of hob-nail boots, amazing what you can get away with ;-)
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