Power flush?

Bus miscellanea.....

The BristolRider. A bit late, but it's arrived...

The AvonRider, about which I wrote last September, has just been joined by the BristolRider, a multi-operator ticket that covers the built-up area of Bristol plus Long Ashton and Keynsham.

It costs £4.50, only 50p more than the equivalent First Day ticket (though ominously that's described as an introductory price). Better still, both AvonRider and Bristol Rider now include Bristol City Council's fully contracted services, 501 to 515, and the Park & Rides. At last the city and the operators have agreed on something!

It means, say, that a 515 journey from here in Stockwood to the new Hengrove Hospital can continue in to town on one of the First routes – and return on Abus's 57, all on the one ticket.

The Hengrove Bus Stop Gamble

Losers

If you're lucky enough to live round Fortfield Road, and fancy a bus trip into town, there's a choice of two buses, the 51 or the 20. Their routes share the stretch between Oatlands Avenue and Wharnecliffe Gardens, so that's the place to be sure of getting whichever one comes along first. Except for one thing – there's no bus stop. Go south, beyond the 51 route, and you can get the 20. Go north, off the 20 route, and you'll get the next 51. Only the fleetest of foot stand an above average chance of getting whichever comes first - by scanning for approaching buses from the Fortfield/Wharncliffe junction and racing for the relevant stop.

My comprehensive user survey found 100% of the sample (that's me, once, and a student, daily) to be seriously inconvenienced by this layout.

Luckily,  someone's alerted the Neighbourhood Partnership to it. Now it seems that common sense might provide a shared bus stop along the shared Wharnecliffe Gardens – Oatlands Avenue stretch, thanks to a windfall of cash from development around Loxton Square. Watch that space.

How Long Blues

For passengers heading back from Temple Meads to Knowle, Filwood, Hengrove, Whitchurch, or Stockwood, or further down the A37 into Somerset, the starting point is the bus stop on Temple Gate beside the Old Station.

This, according to the transport authorities, is the beginning of Showcase Route 6; part of the Greater Bristol Bus Network that will transform the quality of public transport in this city.

Passengers in Belluton or Temple Cloud will know of the benefits this brings – proper bus stops with real time information displays that tell you if you've got time for a smoke, or to nip behind a hedge for a call of nature, before the bus comes.

No such luxury here at Temple Meads, which must host more waiting passengers than any other stop on this 'showcase' corridor. For some reason, the upgrade promised by the Cabinet's decision in December 2009, was never implemented here. 

Is it too late to spend a couple of £K to give hundreds of passengers a day the convenience of knowing when the bus is really coming?

Clevedon Express?

OK, I know nothing about this... just came across it here . A firm called BristolGreyhound preparing to run an X7 express service to Clevedon from Temple Meads? From 25^th March, according to the robot-builders.

The British Disease

Flytipping.... first, here in Stockwood.

That's a heavy keyboard, and it's at least 300 yards off-road, beside Brislington Brook. Was there some cult ritual played out here?

And here at Ribblehead, Parker Knoll are proud to show us how to get rid of that old unmoded suite to make space at home for a new one. Yes, just like the most successful corporations, you too can externalise your costs, the British Way.

Cuts, Greens, and the Peoples Front of Judea

Some very nasty cuts are coming. They're not justified, they're vicious, they're counterproductive – and they're driven by ideology rather than any real economic rationale. That's the ideology of 'small government', or 'private good, public bad' that drives our political and financial elite and serves their own interests.

It might never have happened if Westminster's LibDem minority hadn't been seduced by half-promises of power-sharing, giving the Tories their chance to put the ideology into practice. There's a lesson in that for all small parties, even if it still seems lost on the LibDems. Meanwhile, the compliant media back up the cuts with superficial but persuasive economic cliches to keep people in line, and the main parliamentary opposition seems scared to risk challenging them .

What a mess we're in.

So it's not surprising that BADACA – the Bristol & District Anti Cuts Alliance – is one of many across the country trying to build an effective campaign to protect the public services on which so many people rely.

That's not an easy task. The law's been framed – and the funding managed – to make it impossible for the people we elect locally, of whatever party, to contemplate any refusal to implement the centrally-imposed budget cuts to essential council services. You can't win: the game's been fixed in advance.

In Bristol, thanks to those votes last year, all the power now lies with the mayor, George Ferguson. He can (and seems to) take advice all round, but when it comes to the budget, he too is just a player in a pre-rigged game with the government making the rules. His Cabinet are even less influential, and ward councillors – whatever rosettes they wore on election day – count for less still.

After a lot of discussion (and no little dissent), Bristol's Green Party members gave their backing to one of their councillors (Gus Hoyt) to take up Mayor Ferguson's offer of a 'Cabinet' position, offering perhaps some small influence over the cuts, but, more importantly, to help guide other key policies. It was a difficult decision, forced by a political structure that the Greens had opposed from the start.

What it did not mean was that the Greens are propping up a 'Cuts Cabinet'. This is not a coalition of convenience to secure power; Gus, or no Gus, Labour or no Labour, the mayor will be making the cuts, or else the government will step in with sanctions and impose its own cuts. You've heard the Pickles assessment. That's what they'd do.

This powerlessness at every local level is deeply frustrating for everyone who must watch the dismantling of public services – and it's beginning to show. Some elements of BADACA are expressing their own frustration by singling out the Greens as somehow being the 'villains', colluding with a common enemy. That's an awful pity at a time when solidarity is what's needed.

If the cuts are to be resisted, it can only be through Westminster. The LibDems, who could conceivably pull the rug out from the cuts programme, show not the slightest inclination. They're an integral part of the problem. Labour looks embarrassingly lame. Grass roots revolution looks as unlikely as ever, and it's hard to imagine the unions using their muscle.

That only leaves the big local authorities. If we think it's bad here in Bristol, it's even worse for the big northern cities. If only they could get together in effective opposition, conceivably the government would find itself unable to throw the legal book at all of them.

It's seriously unlikely to happen, of course, and still less likely that those Labour held councils would want to broaden their campaign by welcoming 'independent' Bristol into it.... but it's a more promising scenario than silly infighting within the anti-cuts movement. 

 

How to save us all (except the lawyers) a stash of cash, to spend on something useful instead.

The coalition puppeteers in London may be pulling the strings, but maybe we can guide the Mayor's knife-arm a little, using the budget consultation?

Here's one small suggestion. It's about Town Greens, and the work and income they provide for an often irrelevant bunch of lawyers.

At the moment the city council, at public expense, immediately calls in its own lawyers plus the inspectorate whenever anyone has the nerve to suggest a bit of council owned land deserves 'Town Green' protection.  All too often, it means getting the barristers in, too.  Top barristers

It doesn't actually have to be like that. They can simply take a look at the request, and agree to register. Just do it. Voluntarily.

True, registration means that the land in question immediately loses some of its 'book' value – because it won't attract premium development prices. But that's never a relevant factor unless the council is actually contemplating selling it. And it can, instead, recognise that public 'wellbeing' should come first, and consolidate that through registration.

Not all open spaces would deserve such preference – but it's not beyond the capability of the PROWG Committee, which adjudicates such things, to establish whether a particular open space merits voluntary registration, without first having to call in the lawyers and setting up a protracted legal fight with the applicants.

In fact, among the last four applications that have gone right through the process, the PROWG committee considered that two (Castle Park and Cotswold Road) may not fulfil the legal tests to the letter, but nonetheless merited voluntary registration.   (By the time they reached that conclusion, the lawyers had already taken their slice of the council's budget).

In a third case (Briery Leaze / Whitchurch Green) the council threw a six-figure sum at 'protecting' its asset against market devaluation and local residents, and still lost.   The public benefit of that futile and costly exercise is that Hengrove people now have a much valued 'Town Green'.

Whitchurch Green

I don't know the sums involved (it would probably need a persistent and long-winded FoI request to get anywhere near the truth), but they're obviously substantial, and could be used to offset some of the unkinder cuts to more sensitive parts of the council's body.

Any change would, I'm sure, be strongly resisted by the main beneficiaries of the present system, the City Hall lawyers and bean counters. But it only needs a small change to the present procedure, and, crucially,  an acknowledgement by the mayor that (as PROWG already knows) sometimes voluntary registration is the right thing to do. 

I've put it in the budget consultation, anyway.

1883 and all that

From the Bristol Mercury, 12^th May 1883 . Printed here because I'm indebted to Robert Rogers, the 'villain' of the first case . Not that he'd ever have known it of course.

In 1883 Robert Rogers was just 31 years old, and anything but wealthy. But he carried the can for the others, and paid the very heavy fine imposed for illegally moving cattle across the city boundary into the fields south of Bedminster (perhaps even the Ashton Vale TG site?).

We know that he died eight years later in the general hospital, of heart failure; family legend has it that he had been gored by a bull. We know that he was buried in an unmarked grave in the paupers' plot at Arnos Vale, presumably at civic expense, leaving a widow and a two-year old daughter. And we know that Mrs StockwoodPete owes her being to the three of them!

Then, as now, cattle movements did need to be regulated; the coming of railways must have encouraged a surge in shifting the animals to distant markets, heightening the risk of fast spreading virulent disease, while reducing the work available for the drovers who used to drive the beasts across the country. But a 45/- fine?

But the pages of newspapers – even the same short article - are full of heavy court sentences for the most minor of crimes. A ten year old birched for his part in the theft of oranges.... others fined 3/9d (or 7 days inside) for taking rhubarb. Along with reports of industrial accidents and fatalities, not to mention the most lurid of crimes, these old papers make compulsive reading. This one was found through findmypast.co.uk – but they can also be read for nothing in the central reference library!

Observed......

Life after Rovers

.....though that time it wasn't all Rovers' fault!

Glamping comes to Stockwood