As a former proud resident of Bath I have always had mixed feelings about traffic on Pulteney Bridge. Since I first lived in Bath in 2004 normal cars have not been able to cross the bridge. Buses, taxis, bikes are allowed, deliveries I think are ok too. However normal private cars are banned 24 hours a day.

In more recent years the council have put cameras on the bridge with ANPR cameras that recognize the number plates of cars that cross the bridge and automatically issue £30 fines.  However, I have recently noticed a stream of letters to the local news paper from angry foreign tourist and visitors who have been caught out and fined for crossing the bridge. An example letter can be found here and there is another story on the BBC website.  They generally complain that they did not see any signs. I checked on Google street view and saw the following picture:

What is people’s problem I thought? The signs are pretty small but they are standard “no motor vehicles” signs on the left and on the right. This is how I remember them. These people should either pay more attention or learn their highway code.

However today I was in Bath and I thought I would have a look for myself. Here is what you see as you approach in real life. Where are the signs?

A bit closer and you do catch a glimpse of a sign, on the left hiding behind a hanging basket.

In fact it is not until you you about to cross the bridge and get a fine that the sign appears from behind the hanging baskets.

There are no longer a standard “no motor vehicles” signs. Now there is just an more unusual, blue bus lane sign on the left hidden by the hanging baskets. I pity the foreign visitor who has to work out what it means. That is if they even see it.

Even I am a bit confused to what the sign means. The “no motor vehicles” is fine. I can look it up here. It is I am told a regulatory sign giving and order. The blue sign however seems to be an information sign for giving advanced notification of a bus lane. It does not appear to tell drivers not to do something.

I think think the complainers may have a point.

I went a bit further down the road and hung around for five minute. I counted four standard cars that came though and presumably would find themselves with a ticket in a few weeks like this lady:

If that is representative that is 48 cars per hour. That is a lot of money in fines per day many from people who are visiting the city. I much rather people go away with great memories of Bath, a city I love rather than thinking of it as a tourist trap.

On Wednesday I went along to hear Ron Holland talk at Ecademy Bath. He was talking on the subject of creatively solving business problems. Ron is a very charismatic speaker giving lots of entertaining examples from his long and eventful business career and I enjoyed his talk a lot. In fact I enjoyed it enough to buy his book. Like many  motivational “business gurus” in the American style there seems to be a lot of NLP and other things I am not sure about in his approach. For that reason I will reserve judgement on how useful it is until I have read the book properly but after hearing Ron speak I believe reading it will certainly be enjoyable.

Last evening I went along to a BarCamp in Bath. It is really interesting that this sort of event has found its way to Bath in the last year or so. It was a little different to Singapore as it is a lot newer and less mature here but the speakers were good and the format worked well. The big difference was the demographic which was a lot more (almost exclusively) male and older than in Singapore. Also it was pretty much exclusively developers and did not have the VCs etc that you have at other events I have been to.

I am starting to think the growth of this type of UnConference throughout the world is marking the beginning of a shift in the IT industry. Developers in particualar seem to be attending events as individuals who are interested in their personal development rather than being sent to events as part of their day job. I see this as another sign of a shift towards independence of individuals in the industry and decreasing reliance on the organisation as discussed in Charles Handy’s book The Elephant and the Flea.