Sunday 25 October 2009

Bristol Traffic announces a campaign against zebra crossings

A lot of people complain that all we ever do is take photos of cars parked badly and make fun of them. Well, we don't actually make fun of them -we are praising their innovative solutions of the problem of how to park in the city, now that the council has taken anti-car actions such as adding a new 5000 car car park in the centre purely for shoppers.

But we need to branch out, we need to raise the bar. And last week's coverage of Southmead shocked us. There were children: outside the house. Some of them on bicycles. None of them with helmets. Do they not know how dangerous this is?

The BBC coverage has shown us that we need to do more, so we have secretly stuck some cameras on pedestrians and cyclists round the city, and are seeing what it is like from their eyes. This does not mean that we support walking or cycling around the city, only that we want to see what it is the troublemakers are whining about. We will interpret the videos as we see fit, not what our undercover camera crew thinks.

Here is video #1, a pedestrian crossing whiteladies road at a zebra crossing.

As you can see, the red car CH51RLY decides that it is too important to stop for the pedestrian and instead decides to drive straight over the crossing, 5cm away from the pedestrian.

Is this wrong? Not at all! The driver clearly has to get to work, is probably tired and on the phone. Anyone would do the same thing.

It's not as if they are running red light or anything! We don't understand why these pedestrian rights groups are whining about cars endangering their right to cross roads safely. They have no such right!

And zebra crossings, just like traffic lights, create congestion. Imagine if the driver had had to stop here? an extra 15 seconds on their journey, right? Now scale that up to the number of zebra crossing and pelican crossing you might see on a commute in to work. At least ten more. That's three minutes of your commute time being spent waiting for pedestrians to toddle over. Of course the driver runs the lights -its the only way to keep the city moving.

For this reason, Bristol Traffic is pleased to announce our new Campaign against Zebra Crossings. Every zebra crossing in the city creates congestion. Every zebra crossing says to pedestrians "It's OK, you should walk round Bristol", leading them to walk round the city, eventually having to cross roads that don't have zebra crossings -getting into accidents, and blaming us, the car driver!

Join the Bristol Campaign Against Zebra Crossings today! We will print a manifesto in the week and ask all the parties and leading celebrities for their support! Sign up your support below!

Zebras belong in Zoos!

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