Green perspectives on Stockwood and Bristol. Mostly.

Sunday 20 February 2011

City's latest signing

Lots of people will have seen the new signing on roads, paths, and posts, giving a bit more confidence for those attempting to find their way around Bristol by bike.

It's a Cycling City project, helpfully mapped on this pdf from their website.

It shows the major cycleways, like Sustrans National Cycle Network 3 that uses the St Philips Greenway and the recently Whitchurch Railway Path.

This has been rebranded as 'Whitchurch Way' along its route through south Bristol.

The signage map also shows route links - like these at Stockwood.

Fortunately, not all of them have acquired signs 'on the ground' like this one (the lower link on the map) at Longreach Grove at Stockwood, directing you and your bike up two flights of steps:

The next one north, if anyone were to use it would bring the rider up a steep cul-de-sac, to be rewarded for the effort by a confrontation with the steel fence of a well-defended golfcourse. (The reward is freewheeling back down!)

And a bit further north, the route heading westward up to Knowle includes these three flights of steps (which haven't had the blessing of real, on the ground signs - just as well!)

Another link into Knowle from the city side is shown leaving the Malago Greenway at Lynton Road, heading for the Health Centre. Perhaps if the signers ever got there to do their work, they'd have decided not to bother.

Could this symbolise the new, reformed, NHS ?
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You have to wonder why, if this signage map was commissioned, so little trouble was taken to get it right. The information about these links must have come from somewhere, it is demonstrably wrong, and now it's in the public domain for anyone to take as gospel.

The Longreach Grove stepped access has for a long time been on the official city cycle map. How long before the others join it on the official map, on route finders, or even on GPS gear?

1 comment:

woodsy said...

It's depressing to note that since I gave up cycle campaigning about 20 years ago, nothing has changed and planners/engineers think it's still perfectly acceptable to send cyclists up and down flights of steps.

Would they funnel traffic straight off a motorway and down a single-track road?