I have been quite busy recently responding to fan mail (not!) following the article in the Evening Post where I suggested that we might be prepared to close the city centre to traffic. http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/news/Let-s-make-Bristol-city-centre-bike/article-386400-detail/article.html . I have been called a number of interesting names of which muppet is one the polite ones.
So what does this muppet actually think about traffic, cycling and the city centre?
Firstly the context – at the meeting I was responding to concerns that we were not going to be radical enough in our efforts to increase cycling in the city. Within that context I said the words quoted in the article.
I stand by those words and I do believe we will see the day when the only traffic in the city centre will be public transport, those with disability badges, cyclists and pedestrians. With service vehicles during specified hours.
To achieve this we will have to win the debate with the motorist and improve public transport both of these I am convinced will happen.
Secondly the media. The Evening Post clearly loves motorists and hates cyclists and will currently run any copy that knocks cyclists. I am at a loss to understand why they see cyclist as such a threat. The BBC ran a polemic piece by George Ferguson on cycling on their Inside Out magazine. Again I was quoted on that with the rather fluffy piece about traffic wardens on bikes. What they didn’t run was the more interesting discussion George and I had about closing roads on a regular basis as they have done in South America and in Scandinavia. So one media outlet takes the sensational view the other the fluffy view. Thank goodness for blogs at least I reasonably sure that I write here is what I actually mean!
October 19, 2008 at 11:36 am
Thank you for this, Terry – with so much misinformation and anti-cyclist rhetoric washing around, it’s genuinely useful to be able to read your opinions. If you have an e-mail list to alert me when you next opine, do, please, feel free to add my address. Jane H.
October 19, 2008 at 6:37 pm
Thank you Terry, for standing by what you said. This city deserves better than the car infestation that blights all of our lives every day of the week.
Other beautiful European Cities have led the way and demonstrated that people love car free/car reduction in cities once this is in place. Why oh why do we have to be so regressive and backward in Bristol.
And what a tragedy that the Evening Post is so toxic with its rabble rousing antics. Something to do with income from car adverts I should think ie. its intrinsically corrupt.
October 20, 2008 at 9:10 am
Terry, I suggest that the root of the Evening Post’s cycle phobia is a judgment about what will sell papers. I doubt whether it goes much deeper than that.
Thanks to your Council’s policies on traffic over the past decades we now have high levels of car ownership. People who own cars have unrealistic expectations about the ‘freedom’ they should enjoy as motorists. You have discovered how vehemently they react to any perceived threat to that ‘freedom’, whether it relates to congestion charging, traffic restraint or charges for parking.
The Council is hoist by its own petard. It has helped to create a monster that it cannot now control. You were warned from as early as the late 1970s where it was all leading, but still you continued with policies to accommodate traffic growth, even now planning to build more roads in south Bristol.
There is no easy answer, except to continue accommodating traffic growth while making ineffectual noises about traffic restraint, which is exactly what you are doing.
October 20, 2008 at 9:18 am
Hi Terry
Very refreshing to read such clear and optimistic words. I am wont to agree with you that is just a matter of time before appropriate funding is given to public transport and the power of the public car becomes less absolute. In the meantime I feel sorry for youngsters growing up in an environment heavy with pollution and danger. (Ed. Sob) I hope change arrives sooner rather than later.