Bristol Clean Air Zone has 'narrow' focus on replacing cars with cars

Pfft.....

Think yourself lucky, at least you have a cycle lane with some kind of segregation, even if pricks in their cars think its somewhere to park their motor.

Up here in Derby the council have decided that to meet it's commitment to Clean Air Zone is to remove one of the very few cycle lanes altogether, as increasing traffic speed is alledgedly the way to reduce pollution!

Go figure.....

One of the best things Bristol could do is go around and replace all those stupid orange screw-in wands with proper bolted-to-the-road permanent ones ...make the 'pop-up' lanes permanent.

I know I go on about it a lot (venting, for my blood pressure) but the Park Row lanes in Bristol are a complete waste.

I can use the entire length from Lower Park Row to the traffic lights at the top of Park Street, going westbound/home, at most once per week.  There is always at least one van parked in them, and usally several.  When the council teams come and replace the wands, it takes no more than a day before the wands have pretty much all disappeared again (are they the new traffic cones, for students?).

Last night there were two cars parked in the section west of the exit from Trenchard Street multi storey; another two in the next section ending at the White Hart pub; and another five in the section from the kebab shop to the traffic lights.

Waited behind one outside the White Hart until they realised I was there.  They moved their car forward and perched it right next to the kebab shop.  I told the driver this was (supposed to be!) a cycle lane, and she apologised but didn't do anything like actually driving off (?).

I moved to the next car, a couple sat there with their engine running, eating their kebabs; as I started to speak, the male passenger just reached over and wound his window up without even acknowledging me.

The next car (also headlights on, engine running) had a woman in it, who made some sort of pantomime about 'oh, so sorry, didn't realise, etc etc'.

The next two cars were empty.

If the council isn't going to actually send traffic wardens along to enforce the no-parking restrictions, and isn't going to replace the temporary plastic wands with proper un-removable things, then the whole exercise is a complete waste of their time and money and simply a box-ticking exercise so they could say they've 'done something'.

I've emailed the Highways Team and the Mayor's Office to complain

Isn't fully? Isn't at all, until they need to prop up a project (HS2) or a friend's business. We already have some electric cars. There's no way that businesses, councils and governments aren't going to suck all the potential money from that having ponied up a fair bit for some R & D and infrastructure in advance. If you're a company and you don't grab the cash, someone else will.

Hopefully (or sadly, if you're tight for cash...) we'll not end up with quite as many private cars.

For the easily triggered I think it's clear that this applies to all governments over the last few decades, all hues.