Bath and Bristol May meeting: infrastructure safaris & social events

Hi

many thanks for the invite. My take on Cycling Embassy is that I am a keen road user....I walk, I cycle, I'm an advanced motorcyclist and I even enjoy using ths car occasionally.(just for the record I'm also a competent unicyclist). 20 years ago bikers were conveniently labelled as the root of all evil on the roads, these days cyclists now seem to have been given that dubious honour. I beleive in educating eveyone (including us) about good behaviour on the roads and promoting fair and safe treatment of cyclists. I'm very pro video camera to highlight bad behaviour and  impress upon the public that thy will get named / shamed and possibly prosecuted if they abuse cyclists. Good luck eveyone and I look forward to meeting you all at the AGM.

Pete

• There's a good option from templemeads along the river to counterslip road, then either down some stairs to the other side of the river and castle park, or head east and then north to get to the park which gives you some more bits of the city to experience.
• A trip to S Gloucs could be too demoralising. It will show you can take a bit of the country with space for segregated paths, the cycling city money to do it, and then show how by utter incompetence you get something that is generally useless. Its not a good advert for segregated cycling, as it hints that the entire council traffic planning teams need to be replaced for progress. 
• The inner city ones -showing what they've had to do with less space and time- may be better
• There's the option of coming off the RP at Alcove road and inspecting a bit of the eastville route there, heading in to the city under the M32 and then somehow getting across it to the YHA.
• Any trip to the western end of the harbour ought to experience the delight that is the Coronation Road path -the one with the trees down the middle- as well as the new pump trail under the cumberland basin itself. The Nova Scotia is always a good place to consume beverages. 
• To provide a realistic view of the city there needs to be some coverage of the "places it is hard to avoid".  The centre, stokes croft, the triangle, the bedminster roundabout, feeder road, the haymarket, the BRI and temple way all spring to mind. These are places that are most in need of improvement as they are hard to avoid, and even if you take detours and climbs, you end up having to cross them. 

Pubs and food

Independent reviews: http://bristolculture.wordpress.com/

1. Mud dock is fairly slow for food, ignoring costs
2. Farm pub good for food and beer and you can sit by your bike
3. Novia scotia does beers & not much else
4. Pump house has gone all premium with its food
5. Unknowns to me but on the harbour: Ostrich, Cottage. There's the grain barge too.
6. pubs that aren't so easy with bicycles: Hope & Anchor, Lion, Cliftonwood, Highbury Vaults, Hillgrove. Few of the Londoners would cope well with an on-bike pub crawl that took in the Cliftonwood and Kingsdown climbs. Be fun trying though... 

Again, my vote would be the Farm on account of its food, beer and bike parking:

http://bristolcars.blogspot.com/2010/08/farm-pub-path-one-year-on.html

Its in the right place for a quick up and down the path to the new bridge and back, and if you stay there until it gets dark you can see the (lovely) lighting.

I may be able to show you around Bath a bit on the Saturday, but my wife has an event at some point so I'll be daddy-daycare for at least some of the day. I should be free on the Sunday though.

Bath route suggestions. Either of:

1. From Bath Spa, either head through town to the James Street West contraflow cycle lane, which leads easily onto the riverside path and then the Railway Path. You'll see the infamous "No Entry Except Cycles" on Great Stanhope Street
2. Or, for a taste of Bath's lumpiness, and to see the Two Tunnels work in progress first hand, head from the station across the river to Widcombe, then through St. Mark's Road, cut through to Holloway, up its short but sharp hill to Bear Flat/Wellsway, then onto the Two Tunnels Greenway, down to Lower Bristol Road to re-cross the river and join the riverside path and onwards to Bristol.

There's not much else in the way of infrastructure to see, to be honest, unless you want to see the Pines Way Giratory, by where the Western Riverside development is happening and there was a recent minor collision between a motor vehicle and a pedestrian. It's a horrible 1960s relic, one of only two "urban motorways" in Bath (the other being Rossiter Road, in Widcombe, near Bath Spa station), and B&NES installed some shared-use paths/crossings (unsure if actually Toucans) to allow cyclists to access Sainsbury's from the east without having to dice with fast cars on the one-way system.

(My opinion: the shared use is sticking plaster. The pedestrian collision shows that this type of three-lane racetrack has no place in a civilised city. They would do better to remove the one-way system. It might make a good redesign case study for the policy bash day, especially as Rossiter Road is already earmarked for a two-way redesign at some future date)

Cyclists and pedestrians accessing Sainsbury's & the city centre from the south-west could previously go via Victoria Bridge Road and the Homebase car park, but this is not available as a route during the building works on Western Riverside.

I hope those ideas are useful. I've mentioned the weekend to the CycleBath committee; I hope that some of them can make it along.

Oops - double post. Could an admin clean up after me, please? Thanks :)

There is an outside chance that I might be in the area (dropping my wife off in Bath) on the Sunday. If so, I might try to drop in and meet people - if that is feasible.  

Around UWE there is the usual bodge of pavement conversions that stop and start randomly, and toucan crossings (some of which don't even have the cycle aspect despite being clearly marked as shared use or "segregated" on the pavement). The campus itself has some delightfully narrow cycle lanes marked so as to allow cyclists to avoid the plastic "thumps" placed on some of the roads.

For a pleasent ride, I would recommend going through Castle Park and then turning off Baldwin Street onto Welsh Back. One can then ride round Queen Square, before continuing over a footbridge towards Millenium Square. One can then turn right onto Anchor Road and then left onto the College Green cycle track.

For a more "realistic" ride, I would therefore continue (possibly having dismounted) up Park Street towards the Wills Memorial Building, and then ride round the Triangle, continue towards the Victoria Rooms, and then do a U-turn around a somewhat incompetently marked half roundabout before going back down Queen's Road (fortunately at a time of day when the cycle lane isn't full of taxis stopped near the area's many bars and nightclubs) and then continuing onto Park Row, and then around St James Barton roundabout onto Newfoundland Street, which due to its seemingly vital landscaping and six traffic lanes only has room for a somewhat pathetic cycle lane. (That is the road space allocation equivalent of buying Basics frozen mince instead of the "normal" own brand to cut your weekly shop to £15 because you spent £25 on drinks in Thekla last night.)

One will presumably wish to change course to avoid the M32, so one can either use the optimistically located ASLs or use the numerous toucan crossings, which being located next to a major shopping centre feature a familiar staggered arrangement to minimise the chance of conflicting with pedestrians - oh wait, meant to say "chance of choosing cycling as a mode of transport in the future", so as to turn onto Temple Way. (This street is the road space allocation equivalent of spending £400 on bottles of Moet but somehow struggling to pay your flatmate back £10 you borrowed last month). If you keep going this way you can exit at the next slip road outside the Marketgate UNITE accomodation, turn right at the roundabout, and then end up back in Castle Park.

Of course, this is completely ignoring the mess that is Hotwells, or loads of other places (In some ways saying Bristol is a cycling city with some of the junctions that exist is like calling a theme park "family friendly" when it has gift shops that would be more at home on Old Compton Street) but it gives you a good flavour of the good and bad places for cycling.