It takes a nation of Borises to hold us back.

[hirez]

In receipt of a pamphlet of collected bumph from Bristol Corporation in re. the mayorings today.

Christ what a shower of shite.

The most obvious reading of the text(s) is to take it as a viciously surreal rag mag[1] and assume that the various alleged positions and/or apparent policy statements are a sequence of heavy-handed satirical pieces on the opinions and mores of contemporary media-consuming Britain. Thus we discover that some tosspot Occupy chancer from Brighton has Googled himself up, found a Dobbshead and used it as clip-art to decorate his comic-sans-set, dope-mediated ramblings. I have some positive wossname with the idea of 'radical transparency', but democracy-via-social-network is far too Steve Bong to describe.

The rest are worse. Mostly they want to make the traffic move better (so at least they live in Bristol...) which generally seems to involve making things nicer for those poor car-driving types. Never mind that the bits of Bristol that remained unbombed were mangled with the car in mind. Those that want to make public transport less worse also want to get rid of the local nukes, which is a crowd-pleasing stupid idea.

... Oh lord it's all too horrible.




[1] Do they have such things any more? I guess if you want something filled with shit jokes by students, google for 'banter' and follow the most disturbing path available.

Comments

[smogo.livejournal.com]

Oh, so THAT'S what happened to the Bob Dobbs people: they moved to Bristol!

[nemesis-to-go.livejournal.com]

What plans for the harbour railway? At present I'd be happy if there were no plans for the harbour railway, because anything would be better than this (http://nemesis-to-go.livejournal.com/166891.html).

[badnewswade.livejournal.com]

AFAIK the forecast is for continued HarbourWank Gentrification modules to be air-dropped into the area, with scattered carparks and regular showers of taxpayers money taken from the widows and orphans (defecit, my ass). Business as usual, in other words.

[maluse.livejournal.com]

I've just looked up the harbour railway on wikipedia. Are the council seriously suggesting ripping up a historic railway to replace it with a guided bus service? Leaving aside the fact that guided buses are a bloody stupid idea (they combine the high running costs of road transport with the high infrastructure costs and inflexibility of light rail, fantastic!) this would seem to be philistinism of the highest order!

[nemesis-to-go.livejournal.com]

In a word: yes.

I think Bristol looked at the Cambridgeshire Busway, which eventually opened, years late, hugely over budget, and in the teeth of much local opposition (http://www.castiron.org.uk/MisguidedBust.php), and thought, gosh, this is just what we need for Bristol.

The thing is, the Harbour Railway is (mostly) already there. It wouldn't take much to slap down a bit of track on the lifted section between the New Cut Bridge and Ashton Gate station ready for when this lot (http://www.portisheadrailwaygroup.org/) get passenger trains back to Portishead. It probably never should have been lifted in the first place - double track survived along this stretch right up to 2002.

A couple of these (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Parry_People_Mover_139_002_leaving_Stourbridge_Town_Railway_Station_-_geograph.org.uk_-_1376879.jpg) shuttling back and forth, and there's your urban transit system...while the historic elements of the line are preserved.

[hirez.livejournal.com]

IIRC, there was going to be An Tram running between the centre of Bristol (or Temple Meads), up to Filton and across to the bloody shopping thing at Cribb's. That died on its arse not long after we moved to Bristol.

Then there was going to be a Guided Busway (most of the way?) to Bath because there was a jolly handy bit of ex-railway going the right way and those tiresome bloody pushbikers could just sod off. There was a protest march about that, which I kind of accidentally took part in.

Bath was going to have a guided busway too, along the other end of the handy bit of ex-railway. Also thankfully sat on.

The last time I looked, there were vague plans to run robot buses halfway down the M32.

It's the world centre of shit transport ideas. I'd say 'put the fecking trams back and maybe Old Market will feel less cut off, but then you might as well finish the job by filling in the inner ring and putting the buildings back where Castle Park is now, then we could all queue up for diptheria and wages of thirty bob a week cleaning the mud off people from Clifton' but the absolute fuckabout in Edinburgh has put me off traditional tram-building for life.

Still, it could be worse. It could be that strange holiday-camp shuttle bus/train thing that pottered around Cheltenham.

Someone should write a book.

[nemesis-to-go.livejournal.com]

Well, Edinburgh did rather go out of their way to embrace every possible cock-up. But that's not an argument against trams. It's more of an argument against Edinburgh.

Everyone else seems to do trams rather well, on the whole. s it happens, I've just come back from Blackpool, where the trams are looking rather sleek (http://www.flickr.com/photos/dieseldeltic/7376889024/) these days.

In further Bristol news, there's a fair bit of encouraging stuff here (http://greaterbristolrail.com/).

[cybermule.livejournal.com]

Comic Sans? Seriously?

[hirez.livejournal.com]

Yep.

Another one was some hang-and-flog Rodney Reason type who'd done his piece in plain helvetica (or facsimile thereof) on white, like a particularly boring interoffice memo.

A further example featured a picture of a bloke with a beard, clipart of rendered metallic objects that made it look like a shoddy Amigademo, and, er, no useful information that I could spot.

I would vote for Spud Murphy out of spite, but he's another car-fondler.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

So far, only the Labour candidate has bothered to let us know that there's even an election. I haven't had time to look at the leaflet yet.

The only issue I'm really bothered about is public transit, and I am absolutely unsurprised that nobody's touching that - the suburbanites only care about cars, the hippies want me and my suit to get on a bike (which is mildly annoying now, but when I was disabled? - downright insulting), and nobody is willing to admit that Bristol might be big enough to be a Proper City and maybe should have some sort of integrated transit plan.

If only one party can be bothered to put something through my door (wouldn't be the first time it has happened - Speedwell is *really* invisible), they get my vote, no matter how repellent they are, because at least they admit that I exist.