Tuesday 19 January 2010

Death on Dove Street

Chris Hutt, that known subversive, sends news of a death last Monday.

Police are appealing for witnesses and information after a fatal road traffic collision in Kingsdown, Bristol. The incident occurred on Monday 4th January 2010 at around 10.56am in Dove Street. A Honda Jazz was in collision with a low wall. The 82 year old driver died later in hospital.

This is sad, and it is something that seemed to miss getting coverage in the other local media outlets.

Dove Street is the semicircular road that goes round the 1970s housing block in Kingsdown. We've sent bicycles along here, we've also seen how cars pulling on to Ninetree hill correctly assume they don't need to look for traffic coming down the hill.

During the snows, ninetree became a sledge and snowboard route, not a driving option. Here is the view uphill, Dove Street is just visible to the left. This picture was taken five days before monday's death; things got icier.

The pavement was unusuable, pedestrians were in the road. No cyclists to worry about, just snowboarders and sledgers. Someone had wisely scraped all the snow off a bit of the road at the base, to stop such snow-users ending up on Stokes Croft.


Off to one side, no obvious cues as to whether Y64PNV had chosen to end up here or been forced that way by gravity. The tyre treads implied that the wheels had been rotating, so perhaps this was a parking action.

Visiting Dove Street a couple of days after the fatal incident, police signs are up and some tape is across the road; now broken. There was more tape on the lampposts at the bottom of nine-tree hill.

Otherwise, no details of what happened. Presumably the car started off on Dove street and then ended up on Ninetree hill, which turned out to be non-survivable. Either the driver deliberately went onto that road, or it was trying to park on Dove Street the way the cars above have, and somehow ended up on ninetree hill, at which point there weren't many options left.

It is a tragedy, and we extend our condolencies to friends and family.

1 comment:

Sylvia Zidek said...

The authorities didn't listen to staff at Cafe Kino who requested that nine tree hill be closed during the bad weather as they had witnessed vehicles sliding all the way down the hill !!!!
The response was we can't do anything.