Sunday Evening Scenic ride

0: Sunday Evening ride

1: Prince's Wharf

Old industrial harbourside, now museum, with museum railway operating some weekends. Shared use area. Another ~3m wide ~100m long path was added in 2006 alongside the railway under the Cumberland Road bridge, connecting the quayside with the Chocolate Block Path.





The quayside being well used on a summer evening, by flickr user tamo79:


New link between quayside and Chocolate Block Path, shot in 2007. I don't remember if the railings are still there...

2: Chocolate Block Path

Victorian era path along the tidal New Cut of the River Avon. This is a river bypass, dynamited through here after the once tidal Harbour was "floated" with lock gates, to protect the harbour from flooding and siltation. The path is narrow and crumbling. Well it is more than 100 years old.

The City Council want to run Bus Rapid Transit along here, which I think involves rebuilding the riverbank and paving over the path and the old railway (which is sometimes used for museum train trips between Prince's Wharf and Cumberland Basin). I don't understand why they can't just take over Cumberland Road for the bus route.

3: Coronation Road

One of city's more embarrassing pieces of infrastructure -- only slightly less so since removing the centre line that marked a cycle route entirely blocked by the long avenue of mature trees.

4: Festival Way and the Aston-Pill (Portishead) Path

The old Chocolate Block Path leads to this old bridge -- formerly double decker road and rail swing bridge, now fixed and rusting with one remaining track now overgrown, and a cycle path. On the other side is a well established Sustrans path down the Avon Gorge to Portishead, and a new Cycling City Connect2 route heading south to Ashton Court (scroll down for a video of that), Long Ashton, and beyond.

The local council want to ruin this whole lot with Bus Rapid Transit running through here and along the Chocolate Block Path.







Random old pictures from flickr, including one when the top deck road and swing mechanism was still operational:





Sample of the Ashton to Pill Path (turn your sound off first):

5: Brunel Way Intersection

The council were very proud of their brand new road system, aiding traffic flow by separating carriageways on multiple levels, when it opened in 1965, but are now struggling with the issue of how to make Hotwells a less awful car sick neighbourhood. Pre-dating completion of the M5, it was once a major national route. It includes a huge dual carriageway swing bridge over the harbour locks.
 

6: Viewpoint

The main reason for the ride: Clifton Suspension Bridge.

7: Portway cycle track

Heading down the river to Avonmouth beside the main road -- here are Andy P's pictures:

8: Locks & Cumberland Basin

More of the scenic tour. Almost all of the old harbourside is just left as shared use. Obviously it was never really designed for cycling and is far from perfect for it, but it can still make for a useful traffic-free route, and this is perhaps a part of Bristol's relative success: for a lot of journeys it's possible to avoid the worst of the motor traffic.

9: More harbourside path, with pointless barrier

Well, presumably some sort of incident took place here once, at a t-junction on a narrow section of the harbourside path (designed narrow, that is, by the 1990s(?) developers of the regeneration site), and somebody decided that blocking the path with railings would be the appropriate response...

10: Gap in the harbourside path

We didn't go this way because the quayside is missing here. A developer cleared the old industrial harbourside and started digging a new marina just as the recession hit, so development stalled with a temporary pontoon path that requires going up and down steps.

11: Hotwells Roundabout

...the gap is particularly unfortunate because the alternative route is through the Hotwells Roundabout on one of the busiest arterial roads. (For Streetview, click "more", bottom right.)

12: College Green - closed road

Formerly a main through road in front of the cathedral, which, IIRC, became part of a one-way-system along with Anchor Road. Closed in order to preserve the heritage and tranquillity of College Green in the late 1990s (I think) after the success of the Queen Square scheme.

13: College Green cycle tracks

It's still possible to cycle the route that was closed to through motor traffic -- a cycle path runs through the remodelled College Green. A discrete cycle path -- perhaps too discrete, with little cycle symbols set in the paving stones, and pedestrians and cyclists routinely getting the footway and cycleway mixed up.

More recently (2006?) a short section of bidirectional cycle track was added to the main road, linking this path to the Central plaza, St Augustine's Parade.

14: Bathurst Basin

Just another area of shared use harbourside with (narrow) shared use bridge.