If you're reading this before 02:00 on 06th July 2008, you've still got time to head down to the St Pauls Carnival, although the weather turned a bit nasty around 4pm. For some, the carnival is a celebration of Afrikan culture (spelt with a "K" for reasons that are unclear to me), for others a day out for the kids, and for others an all-day drinking session. The juxtaposition of local primary schools presenting their floats and masks, and trustafarians engaging in open drug use is peculiar, but it's all part of the festival spirit.

In my case, the day brings an opportunity to evaluate a variety of different version of the West Indian staple Curry Goat. There wasn't much branding on display, so I can't help with a recommendation for next year, but I really liked the version offered by the team with the blue tarpaulin in the stall at the corner of Wilder Street and Dean Street. In retrospect, having started early with a grilled cob of Sweetcorn and some Jerk Chicken, I probably should have stopped after the third portion of Goat, but that's nothing that a couple of boxes of Rennie can't sort out.

The organisers have really done an impressive job the last couple of years. Hopefully next year the weather will be kinder to them.

The contentious issue of charging Bristolians for on-street parking has been enough to drag the mysterious Bristol Blogger out of retirement. And with good reason: £40 quid a year per vehicle plus the hassle of having to arrange permits for visitors and tradesmen, and no guarantee that you'll be giving permission by the council to park a second car. If this were declared as an increase in council tax, it would be equivalent to a minimum of 3% on every Band D household.

As a local car owner, I don't like this policy, both because I'm already paying more tax than I want to, and because I don't believe that stringent council-led ticketing and control is the right way to solve the problem (although is it a problem? see below). My preference would be a wholesale mutualisation of non-trunk roads, to let individual home owners form friendly associations to manage their street, their approach to parking control and how much to spend on up-keep. Wearing my small business hat, I'm already investigating the purchase price of high-density, small-footprint urban parking structures, which could be a potential area of growth regardless of how we choose to respond to parking.

The trouble is that if just one area of the city did decide to go down the route of Parking Control, then the knock on effect would be to increase parking in neighbouring areas. This results in a city-wide version of The Prisoner's Dilemma.

Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies ("defects") for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence.

If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act?

If all areas of the city vote against Parking controls, then everybody get's a good result. But if only one area votes in favour whilst their neighbours take the opposing view, then that dissenting area will displace cars into the neighbouring areas. Therefore even those who are against the scheme have an incentive to vote in favour.

Redefining the problem

If we define the problem to be "too many cars on the road", the general consensus amongst drivers seems to be that the solution is better public transportation systems for other drivers. But very few people have any desire to make the "modal shift" themselves.

But if one defines the problem as excess demand at peak times - outside the rush hour, there's plenty of roadspace and traffic moves freely - then perhaps we should try to do a bit more to incentivise road use outside peak times. How about something simple, which requires no capital investment, no new staff, no consultations, no free "Our City" newsletters, no focus groups and no extra money from car drivers or council tax payers: Let's switch traffic lights to flashing amber outside busy hours. This would improve traffic flow on major roads and might persuade commuters to change their daily pattern. Simple, cheap and easy to test.

Who Watches the Watchman?

In late news, the council are running a further consultation on "the possible introduction of state-of-the-art safety measures aimed at reducing dangerous driving and protecting lives in two areas of the city."

Bristol City Council is proposing the introduction of comprehensive Watchman Safety Schemes at Long Cross in Kings Weston - between the junctions with Kings Weston Rd and Stile Acres - and at Whiteladies Road in Clifton, between the junctions with Lower Redland Road and West Park.

Both roads have relatively high accident rates. There were 63 reported accidents on Whiteladies Road in total between January 2005 and December last year - with two people killed and nine seriously injured. At Long Cross there were 27 reported accidents during the same period, with six people being seriously injured. Speed was an issue in a large number of the accidents at both locations.

If the new Watchman schemes get the go ahead, safety cameras would be installed in both directions on the two roads. They would be switched on around the clock and would record the number plates of any vehicles breaking the speed limit. Vehicle Activated Signs (VAS) would also be installed in advance of the cameras to warn motorists where they are exceeding the speed limit - and there would be clear signs to advise road users when they are entering the zones.

Fines would not be issued instantly, as with most other speed cameras, but police would be able to follow up any driving above the speed limit captured on film and consider prosecution.

A similar scheme has been in operation at Allison Road, Brislington for the past year and over that time traffic speeds have dramatically decreased and no new personal injury accidents have been recorded.

I wonder whether the Allison Road scheme will continue to deliver such benefits? The key phrase for consideration is "Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc", with extra credit for a study of "Regression toward the Mean".

Via the deputydogblog.

Have a look at this incredible video of a huge mass damper in the Taipei 101 tower. This enormous ball of metal serves to minimise building sway. In essence it's a huge pendulum weighing 660 metric tonnes, and the earthquakes earlier this year in China really put it to the test:

I took a quick stroll over to the Malcolm X Centre this evening for a presentation by the team hoping to create an Urban Village School in St Werburgh. They've recently been featured on the front page of the Bristol Evening Post, and today the headline act was former local secondary head James Wetz, introducing his recent Channel 4 Dispatches programme "The Children Left Behind".

The goal is to create a secondary school of around 350 peoples - a marked contrast to modern trends in the state sector to build schools with over a thousand pupils - using the principles of "Human-Scale Education",

Human Scale Education was set up in 1985 with the aim of promoting small, human scale learning communities within the state maintained and independent sectors of education. Human scale learning environments can foster the positive relationships that enable teachers to know their students well and make possible a more holistic approach to learning that engages the whole person.

A contention of proponents of Human-Scale Education is that UK primary schools offer a better standard of education because their small size allows teachers and pupils to form stronger relationships. James Wetz offered a compelling statistic to support this: of the children who leave secondary school with no qualifications, 40% of them exited primary school with marks that were average or above average. He reported the comments of a Primary Head teacher to a group of Secondary Head teachers: "So what do you do to them?".

For maximum ironic effect, this initiative is being launched just as Bristol Council are proposing plans to "super-size" many of the city's primary schools, allegedly because they "do not give the best value for money for council tax payers".

I hope this works out well for the St Werburgh's team. They've got a lot of obstacles to overcome, particularly since their stated goal is to create a school within the state sector through the "department for children, schools and families" [sic]. Two key problems they will face are the National Curriculum and the Teachers' Unions.

The National Curriculum has few champions outside Whitehall. For some the problem is that it constrains the creativity of teachers; for others the emphasis on tests and targets doesn't leave enough time for learning. Looking at the American examples given in James Wetz's film, many of the schools had negotiated independence from the equivalent US structure - typically a mandated curriculum approved by an elected school board.

The number that did shock me was the Pupil-Teacher Ratio in the UK. Would it surprise you to know it's around 16.1 pupils per teacher (Full Time Equivalent)? In fact, adding in all support staff excluding admit and clerical, on average in UK Secondary schools there are 1 staff members for every 11 pupils. And yet average class sizes are around 21-22 [anyone got the latest stats?]. So what are all the non-teaching teachers doing? A great many of them are in management roles; roles that would be unnecessary if large schools were replaced by numerous small schools. The loss of large numbers of Deputy-Head and SMT roles is unlikely to go down well with the teaching profession.

One thing that did occur to me was whether the project could work if the goal was just "build a school" rather than specifically a state school. I'm preparing an update to an old piece on Redland Green School, for which I've obtained some Quantity Surveyor's estimation sheets. The slightly out-of-date rule of thumb is that it costs around £1500 per square meter to build a new school, and another £1500 to fill it with furniture, carpets, white boards and those little pots of white glue that don't stick anything. If we go with a figure of about 8 square meters per pupil, a "human-scale" school for 350 pupils, would cost around £8,400,000.

A big wodge of cash, but not completely beyond the means of a motivated group of parents and a good fund raising operation. Dealing with the circa £1,500,000 per year in operating costs would be a challenge, but perhaps an opportunity to test-drive an education voucher scheme, and give local parents the chance to make real choices about their children's futures. Because one thing that is often forgotten is that it is to the parents that schools should be offering their services, not to the children and certainly not to the state.

P.S. Elected Ashley Councillor Jon Rogers was there, but no sign of his colleague Shirley Marshall. And now for a musical interlude...

Following a recent vote in the House of Commons, Britain is now, by some measures, a Police State. Readers: are you enjoying it so far?

More to follow on the Great Writ.

P.S. You may be interested to know that the US Supreme Court has recently ruled that inmates detained at Guantanamo Bay now have the right to pursue a habeus corpus challenge of their detention? So in certain fundamental ways, they have more rights than British citizens. But at least we don't have to wear orange jumpsuits.