Medley

Nero Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > The likelihood of a Tube station in SE22 is > practically non-existent, and that of one in > Camberwell is nearly as unlikely, but a stop on > the train line at Camberwell would be a relatively > inexpensive way of offering SE5 residents a way > into and out of Elephant, and then beyond. That > would take pressure off the buses which are often > crowded and which bunch up due to congestion and > their constant stopping and starting. In the > meantime I suggest walking more. Distances that > seem biblical shrink remarkably when you put your > best foot forward. Agree about Camberwell - as another poster said, anything would be good. Best foot forward - that' all very well, but Honor Oak to Elephant is a LEETLE bit far.

Hmmm hadn't thought of the winter visiting possibility. It looked confused! My phone isn't up to much photo-wise and I never carry my camera around so doubt there would have been any joy on the photo front.

Huguenot Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I think whether or not a tube would bring benefits > to south London would depend on your definition of > 'benefit', and what the alternative uses were for > the cash. It might be a net loss to south London > if funding on something more important was lost. > > The logic that the railway is impractical because > you live a long way from it is lost on me. The > tube would also be impractical if you lived a long > way from the tube station. > > The point about the affordability of your house is > also a bit confusing - if it had been within half > a mile of a tube station you wouldn't have been > able to afford it. Is that a benefit? QED. Nearness - you never know they might build a tube station nearer than the train stations are now. I agree this is massively unlikely. But what I'm thinking about are those journeys where I currently use a bus to connect with a tube. If the Bakerloo got to Peckham that would be a world of difference from getting it at Elephant. True enough about affordability. And I come back to average journey times - frequency and interconnections with other lines/modes. So even if the tube station were further away than the train station, the journey might be quicker end to end on average.

cate Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Pretty sure that the far southern reaches of the > Northern Line are affordable, but would you want > to live there. Places like Tooting Broadway, > Colliers Wood and Morden. I did look at houses in > Tooting and they were the same price as here, at > the time, but much smaller. Also didn't like the > area. Um, that means they're not the same price - your buck goes further in ED than those places because ED is cheaper. I'd guess the tube is a big factor in that.

Hi all, Never been on this thread before - very interesting it is too. Was walking home last night and spotted what to me can only be a woodcock browsing around in a front garden on Upland Road. I had a great view of it - no more than 10 yards and I watched it for about 5 minutes. But can it really have been a woodcock? Has anyone seen one around ED? Definitely too big for a snipe. Very long beak, correct markings for a woodcock (and I have seen them in the countryside). Any thoughts?

James Barber Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Hi cate, > Herne Hill will lose through Thameslink train > services when the Thameslink upgrade is finished. Knew it was too good to be true. > > The reason we don;'t have more tube lines in > London/South London is we're rubbish at doing them > cheaply. Network Rail has publicly stated they cos > 40% more to maintian the train network than a > mainland train company would spend. This is rather a mess of thinking, if I may say so, as train companies pay nothing directly on maintenance - that's taxpayers via that miracle of Brown Economics, Network Rail and its 20bn debt etc. etc. There are plenty of other reasons too - our relatively good train network, the water-laden clay down here (although I think modern tunnelling machines can cope much better with this now, but no idea really). > > In Madrid they build new tube lines 18km long in 4 > years start to finish at ?30M-?50M/km. I should think this is much more about the crazy multiplication of infrastructure costs that the Tube PPP (Labour's fault) and the post-Hatfield Network Rail craziness (likewise, although the Tories really for their disaster of a privatisation). Never forget the rail network, despite being 'privatised', gets c. 3.5 times what British Rail ever got in REAL terms - i.e. adjusted for inflation. The rail network is not 3.5 times better than it was under various eras of BR. As other > have pointed out they also charge peanuts to ride > on them. Seems only fair to point out that Spain is broke.

Snags with folding bike: My non-folding bike cost fifty quid, a new Brompton (I'd love to have one mind) costs c. 800 quid; I'd then have the cost of a travelcard on top. Defeats the point really. At the moment I can be pretty much anywhere in zone 1 in 40 mins or less for about 50 quid in bike maintenance per year. There's no beating that, tube or no tube! And to go back to the old saw about trains going to but not through London I'd have a fairly hefty cycle from whichever terminus I got to. Although you could take a folder on the deep tube in rush hour in theory, I really wouldn't fancy it in practice.

That admittedly is part of my prob - I'm not really that close to any station. Hence my mournful remarks about Honor Oak (er, closed 1954). As I was buying in 2007 there wasn't a great deal of choice about that! If I'd been buying in 1999 or before, as you must have been, I might have been able to do better! Still, quite happy on the bike.

Nonsense, Ramble. I'm talking about average end to end journey times, starting when I want to rather than when a timetable wants me to (hence the frequency point). Unless you live actually at East Dulwich or Honor Oak Park (if only Honor Oak still existed, much nearer to me) stations and have a magical ability to arrive on the platform c. 30 seconds before trains depart, these figures are fantasies. Having just looked up the HOP-Bond St journey, 3 of the 4 from now (as I type this) are actually using the somewhat-Tube like ELL/Overground and then the Jubilee, changing at C Water. If there could more more ELL/Oground stuff - Tube-like facilities, trains, frequency, badging, integration on existing above-ground lines that'd be great. But instead ELL only sort of goes to central London (with Shoreditch High St station ironically and irritatingly just in zone 1 and so bumping up fares along the route) and ELL phase two will deliver us to places like Clapham Junction. Cate, Victoria isn't the centre to me - it's on the fringe of the centre. I'm not saying it's all terrible. I love the new ELL and am glad the other options are there. But a tube extension would be a massive uplift for SE London. Ramble66 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > East dulwich to bond street 28minutes, probably > quicker if you're a fast walker at LB. Honor oak > to bond street also 28minutes! > > East dulwich to Cov Garden 36minutes.

Herne Hill is a proper Tlink station, PR only has the ones to St P - and fairly infrequent too. But much better than nothing (as it was for a while until it came back). Hope is that with the new Blackfriars it'll get better. Agree it can be great. Hugeonot, it's a v. good point that north London was less well served by trains. But the Met was not created solely to reach the poor, it was created for lots of reasons (not least the dappy government decision to have no termini in the heart of London, which has bedevilled the city it ever since - hence our LB/Bank debate). In any case the days of private speculative capital creating transport networks in Britain have been over for most of a century, so although it's interesting to talk about it's irrelevant today. Public money is the only thing that can deliver this stuff, albeit with some chipping in and benefit extraction as with Crossrail or the Northern extension to Battersea. I'm not saying ED/HOP etc. are cut off. Try Ham or Roehampton or Thamesmead to experience cut off - albeit they're all further out than we are. I'm saying it would be much better with a tube somewhere deeper into SE London - would benefit the whole area. So I can get to Hornsey in an hour. But I can hardly get to the centre of zone 1 in an hour from the very start of zone 3, unless I cycle. That's not great.

Good points - and I was thinking about my post while catching the tube and ELL home last night, inc. the point about Bank. What I'm really getting at is that the tube goes through central London - that's the great thing about it. So from, for example, Caledonian Road or Maida Vale or Snaresbrook (these are totally top of head) you've got a range of central London destinations without a change of mode, or often even of line. For CR and MV it's major termini, the West End, Covent Garden and for MV Westminster/Whitehall/Waterloo too. For Snaresbrook the City, Holborn, West End, White City etc. So trains to LB or Bank work OK if you want to go to LB or Bank. But changing mode at LB is quite a pain and means journey times from ED/HOP etc to, say, the West End or Holborn or Euston Road are substantially longer than they would be with direct tube access.

Yes - and for very good reasons; they are not Tube equivalents for several reasons. The key one is that they do not go to central London. It always amazes me how people don't get this. ELL and DLR are not a substitute for the Tube in terms of access to central London - and that remains where most, not all of course, people want to go. SE has more train stations than some other parts of London, yes, but fewer than it used to post-war and they're not a substitute for the Tube either. I'm not desperate to get on the Tube if I don't have to. I actually prefer overland trains, ELL, DLR - if they get me where I want to go, which they often don't. But to say SE London has been ignored for generations in terms of Tube access is only stating the obvious. njc97 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > rahrahrah - but SE has more train stations than > other parts of London. And you're ignoring the ELL > and DLR.

is going ED-PR-E&C-Bakerloo really worth it though?

edcam - we've already reached that stage! So far no response but we'll keep pushing.

That's all true, but it doesn't get you from ED to the Overground quickly. njc97 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Nero - as well as the buses to Forest hill above, > you could take the p13 to new cross gate or 484 to > brockley.

That IS sneaky.

Interesting about those figs James. I always suspected that there was a huge amount of unrecorded travel and suppressed demand. It's a variant of the old tactic of running a cr*p service and then claiming there's no demand for it.

Totally agree. 'ooh look a shiny new thing - shame you can't get to it'. Phase two of shiny new thing is launched through P Rye 'ooh look a shiny new thing - shame it goes nowhere' I know integrated planning and execution is harder in any field than just slapping something down - esp. in transport, perhaps, but why oh why oh why can there not be more understanding that London'd transport is a system. I don't care what mode I use to get somewhere, I just want to get there as quickly, pleasantly and cheaply as possible. I was very interested to read that there had been the chance to get Phase 2 of the Overground, through P Rye, to link up with the Vict line at Brixton. Now that would have been integration worth having. mikese22 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > You can get the 185 or 176 to forest hill and > catch the overground > > Nero Wrote: > -------------------------------------------------- > ----- > > The new Overground service is very good - fast, > > fairly frequent, extremely clean and quiet and > - > > becauase all the carriages are interlinked - a > > safer feeling. The only thing against it is > > getting to Honor Oak park to get on it! I know > > there is a thread about the 63 and wishes for > the > > route to be extended so it goes to HOP, but I > am > > 'just saying' here that now we have a good, new > > service that is crying out to be used - to > return > > the investment in it - it seems very daft that > > there is no bus service that will take you > there > > from SE15/22.

That was my point. So they don't need transport - they've got large cars, several of them, possibly even drivers! Although I do find it a bit odd how the richest live in fairly inaccessible places - some of them must have to get somewhere at some point, surely? ???? Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > No of course they don't......they'rre all just > lazy fookers with inherited wealth...or sumffink

DJKQ that may well all be true but it doesn't get around the fact that most people can't or won't turn up to such things. It's unrealistic to expect turnouts of even tens on issues such as this. That doesn't mean they don't matter. What I would be in favour of is better publicisation of consultations - and someone actually listening to the responses. We've all got a part to play in this, I agree. But to me what happened with Burgess Park was much more like it - there were meetings, sure, but there were also ways to engage online and by email - thanks to the action group, the council and the developers - that are far more realistic than expecting people to turn up to meetings. With the greatest of respect to councillors, it's partly what they're paid for. We're not.

Think you've missed the fact that people who live in the Village don't actually have to get to (or in many cases possibly even do any) work. ???? Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Yeah, if money was no object I'd live in The > Village even less well connected for Transport. > "We live here" were you just talking about > yourself?

Me. Sounds like too many of here have got too much of a hump to swank like camels. Shame. HonaloochieB Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Let's get the article printed onto T shirts and > promenade round the streets of Nunhead and Forest > Hill swanking and putting on side. > > I know the good burghers of ED are usually modest > as head lice but when we've something to swank > about I say we get out there and swank like > camels. > > Who's with me?

But how is discussing it on a thread on a public forum whingeing? I've learned lots from reading this thread, some of it useful to me as I cycle through this delight twice per day.

This has been mooted in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s... you get the picture. Technical reasons - may be the most pressing being not enough rich and connected people live in SE London?! rahrahrah Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > As I understand it, the tube tunnel does extend > for some way down the walworth road (to Burgess > Park) and is used for turning the trains. > If the bakerloo line was extended, even just as > far as Camberwell, it would massively improve > journey times in inner SE London. > I've always thought it would be a good idea to > extend it underground to Camberwell, where it > could prehaps surface onto what is now the strange > little loop line on the Thameslink network. This > wouldn't effect the rest of the Thameslink > services which come in from the east and use the > Walworth Road stretch of line and as the loop line > which turns on itself at Tooting, only really > serves inner London anyway, I'm sure no one would > complain at it's being replaced by a tube service. > Probably lot's of good technical reasons why this > isn't possible I'm sure...

With respect PeckhamRose, it is not. I quite see that we should communicate our concerns. I do not see it's our duties as citizens to turn up in the evenings to meetings where a) we'd be repeating our comments already sent in on b) failings of the Council/TfL that c) probably won't be improved anyway. PeckhamRose Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > "P.S. the timings are ridiculously tight for > traffic on E Dulwich Road turning right in either > direction. Certainly under 3 seconds." > > Exactly! That's why it is important for people who > agree to go to council meetings to persuade them > to improve it.