monkey see monkey do

Oh dear, the rot's set in in the leafy suburbs of North Bristol.

The front of the Moggy has been getting very rattly lately, and yesterday I finally gave it a Serious Looking At. The starboard Armstrong damper has come loose, and the bolts holding it to the cross-member have stripped their threads. So I rolled the car up onto the pavement, so that the wheels are just on the kerb. This allows me to crawl under the engine and gain access to the inside of the cross-member. Today I shall go and get some replacement bolts and hopefully all will be well again.

This morning I looked out of the window and saw that someone, presumably inspired or emboldened by my example, has parked right up on the pavement.

This represents a further instance of the increasing encroachment onto pavements of cars, whose owners are presumably more concerned about the safety of their wing mirrors than that of pedestrians, who are, after all, inconsequential.

Hence the occasional sight of a parent pushing a pushchair down the middle of the road because there isn't enough room on the pavement to get past the cars; or of a blind person trying to negotiate a BMW 4x4 parked across the dropped kerb at a junction, which I saw recently.

No, honestly, little silver car person; this road's big enough for you to park on it!

Some other fine examples of Bristol parking can be found in this Flickr set

blue sky parking

Bristol is a centre of excellence when it comes to innovative solutions to maximising the use of cars in a crowded urban environment. I have previously documented some of the ways in which drivers have found parking spaces where once there were none. Bristol Traffic is an indefatigable campaigner for the freedom of car drivers in Bristol, threatened as they are by the muddled thinking of the pro-bike lobby. I humbly follow in their wake.

This is an interesting bit of blue sky thinking, when it comes to parking for the man-on-the-go. The driver of this Mitsubishi Colt, R643KAV, has found a way to avoid those wasted moments usually spent lining up the car parallel to the pavement. Unfortunately, I missed the arrival of the car, so I couldn't see if the driver jumped out and crouched behind the wall, covering the house door with a handgun and shouting "Come on out with your hands up! Get out an APB and get on down to the DA's office! Carter, you slaaaag! Right, you're nicked!" or any of the vocabulary of television crime shows of the 70s.

But I did see him saunter out and drive away a while later.

plenty of parking

Ha! That's what "off-road" means!

I used to know this artistic and creative bloke who once let it slip, when he was squiffy, that he was one of the ten best drivers in the country. I was seriously impressed by this, not least because I had actually been driven by him several times and had never guessed this. I guess it was his natural modesty. I used to wonder why he absent-mindedly and slowly pumped the accelerator as we bimbled along the motorway, so that I would find myself rocking gently forward and back as the car responded. Perhaps it was 'cadence'; he was a musician, after all. We used to refer to him as the Finest Swordsman In France, because it kind of fitted, and had he been a swordsman and in France, I'm sure that he'd have been the finest.

There are lots of arty and creative people in Bristol, and I have often been impressed by the way they apply that creativity to the art of driving and parking. Such people surely deserve a degree of latitude in their treatment of the city's roads; where they lead, we dull sublunary creatures can but dream of following. Here is a small selection of their comings and goings.

This chap has installed an 'en suite' in his Land Rover Discovery, and is able to complete his toilet while driving through the city centre, ensuring his completion of his journey in a minty fresh condition.


The owner of S100NDR is enabling a young girl to gain vital experience in negotiating the open road with her scooter. Pavements are not for scooters.

YY03VHK often parks here, just around the corner from the local primary school, so that cars have to slow right down to negotiate the corners. This is obviously a Good Thing.

WP07MVA has parked on the pavement so that it barely extends into the roadway beyond the the double yellow lines. This has allowed the Clifton Tractor to continue unimpeded on its school run. And we pedestrians managed to squeeze by in the bit of pavement left to us. This is a positive result.


CE54SXC has cleverly addressed the problem of reducing visibility at corners by acting as a separation zone, so that cyclists can easily pass on the inside.

The informally-accepted rule of the road in Bristol is that, if you park so far onto the pavement that the double yellow lines are clearly visible outboard of your car, then it doesn't count as an offence. So this chap who popped the wrong way down a one way street so that he could use the cashpoint machine sensibly used the pavement, to avoid giving a nasty surprise to traffic turning into the road in the officially-approved direction. This is on Lower Redland Road, just a few yards from the police station.

It was just opposite here, more recently (on Christmas Eve, in fact) that I watched a Range Rover mount the pavement so that the woman in the passenger seat could pop into the organic butcher's to collect her turkey. (This is a difficult time for the exemplary middle classes, who are 'time poor' at the best of times, and we must appreciate the difficulties they face in getting all the trappings of Christmas together at the last moment- it was hell at Waitrose, let me tell you....)

She hopped out of the car and saw me watching. She paused guiltily, then walked towards the butchers. I was pushing my bike along the pavement towards Whiteladies Road (it is, as I have said, a one way street), and there was only just enough room for her to pass, what with a Range Rover on the pavement and all. And as she went by she said, in self-righteous sort of way, "You shouldn't be on the pavement either, you know".

"I'm pushing it, you silly fool," I replied sharply.

And then felt bad about it because I should have handled the encounter more positively.

Oh well.