CityCyclingEdinburgh was launched on the 27th of October 2009 as "an experiment".
IT’S TRUE!
CCE is 15years old!
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It soon became useful and entertaining. There are regular posters, people who add useful info occasionally and plenty more who drop by to watch. That's fine. If you want to add news/comments it's easy to register and become a member.
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There has been a very successful campaign in German aimed at changing driver behaviour, Kopf an: Motor aus (brain on: engine off) campaign encouraged over 200,000 people in 4 German towns to change behaviour. Could such a thing work in Scotland?
The original report is here and there is another version here.
Or could Edinburgh follow Dublin?
Well, without descending into national stereotyping (too much), when we were staying in a small town in Germany a few years ago I was given a telling off by an elderly man for parking on the wrong side of the road (while I got the bags out of the apartment and into the car). I don't think you would see that here. I wasn't blocking his way I was just behaving incorrectly. Laidback and others have commented frequently about the respect given to cyclists in places like Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands and that was the impression I got when I was there too. There were lots of cycle paths, even in the small town we were in - something we almost never have here. And of course there's the famously cyclist friendly laws. So I feel that no, I don't think this type of campaign would work in this country. We have a very different mind-set.
Found it funny when living in NZ that it's illegal to park against the flow of the traffic. I can see the sense of it as it saves you swinging across the opposing lane to scoot into a spot or reverse parking with your face in the opposing lane.
Makes pleasantly lined up roads too for those of us on the OCD scale.
"it's illegal to park against the flow of the traffic"
Pretty sure it used to be same in UK at one time.
Think one reason was to do with lights/reflectors at night.
Found it funny when living in NZ that it's illegal to park against the flow of the traffic.
It's the same in Belgium. We got a talking to from a police office outside the WW1 museum in Passchendaele because we had parked the car facing the wrong way. We were entirely perplexed as to what the issue was. Thankfully, like most Belgs, he spoke English very well and explained that it was because of the high OCD occurence in the Belgian parliament. Or it might have been something to do with ensuring traffic flow is not adversely affected by those trying to park, I can't quite remember.
However, given that the previous day our car had been lifted from the town square of Ypres to make way for the weekly market which our hotel had failed to warn us about, we weren't particularly inclined to view this as a reasonable peice of legislation...
I think a ban on parking against the traffic is common in a lot of countries. Probably inc. Germany judging by the car I saw there performing a slow, cumbersome and somewhat dangerous three point tunr in the road in order to face the right way for the only remaining space.
Kirkcaldy used to, I don't know if it still does, allow parking on only one side of the main street but the side alternated from one day to the next. Of course I turned up not knowing this and, having parked on the left side the day before before, parked in the best spot on the street and got a parking ticket.
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