Rockets

I do wonder if there is a correlation between the bad-temperedness of posters and how many holidays they take. It seems those who go quietest during school hols are the angriest posters on here....so perhaps jetting off on holidays does nothing for their stress levels whilst those of us who get to enjoy a quiet Dulwich find new levels of calm! 😉 Right, I am off to do some yogic flying around Dulwich Park before the angry masses return - anyone care to join me! 😉

And Easter hols and October half-term....probably difficult to post when you're in a different time zone half a world away - bit of a giveaway! 😉 I just love how quiet Dulwich Park and Lordship Lane are, especially the first week of the private school holidays.

And don't the Veolia collection teams wear uniforms with Southwark Council logo on them...this might explain why the councillors were so keen to point out the lorry wasn't operated by the council because if you saw a load of people clambering out of the cab of a lorry one that just rolled wearing clothing emblazoned with the council logo you might think it was being operated by the council. The Helen Hayes reference is weird as well it was almost as if the councillor post was: this is awful, nothing to do with us, speak to Helen.

..during the Easter holidays when it all goes a bit 28 Days Later as the second home owners, skiers and Easter sun worshippers depart on their Easter jaunts. Blissfully quiet.

Local accident investigators Dulwich Roads are claiming it was a Veolia bin lorry... https://x.com/DulwichRoads/status/1910711493273788469?t=TcPz_3Wvvv5gAk6PQg1rBA&s=19

Good grief that could have been awful and lets hope no-one in the vehicle was injured either. Interesting use of "not operated by the council" in the councillor post. The council outsources collection doesn't it so doesn't actually operate any bin lorries any more?

To be fair I think some are critical in the cases where the removal of "street clutter" a.k.a "pedestrian refuges" has been stated as part of the council's plan to facilitate cycle infrastructure. BTW did the mooted street market on Melbourne Grove ever materialise?

Yeah but I suppose the issue is that Brexit/Truss moment destabilised our economy and Trump's Truss moment is destabilising every economy globally and rocking the very foundation of global trading. Our stupid moments were just our stupid moments - Trump's stupid moment is everyone's stupid moment. The fact that people have been getting out of gold as well as stocks speaks volumes - gold is normally the safe-haven investors head for but lots are just cashing out completely.

The real worry is that Trump will never admit he got anything wrong and, as he did today with more threats to China, will keep doubling-down. Those tactics might work in real estate in the US but this is not real estate. I do wonder whether other governments will be forced to absorb the short-term pain in the view that they need to let him crash things to such a point that Americans go...what are you doing. Although he seems to be trying to mitigate dissent within his own party by turning on them quickly - like all good dictators do. It just seems ludicrous to think this puts the US in a stronger short-term position - I saw analysis that a Boeing 787 bill of materials now costs $20m more with the tariffs due to them only being assembled in the US and the parts manufactured all over the world. Just who is this supposed to be benefiting. American 401ks are linked to the stock market so American pensions are going downhill fast.

Isn't a collection of Teslas now known as a (Nuremberg) Car Rallie? I saw a great sticker on a Tesla bumper recently that read: Anti-Elon Tesla Owners Club

Never let it be said that Southwark Council have ever taken a blind bit of notice of what local residents think. Never let public opinion stand in the way of their grand plan....#comrade! They are charlatans.

I love it when you get a “we tried to deliver, you weren’t in” message and not a single post person has been anywhere near the house…it seems they sometimes don’t even bother to try to deliver and then claim you weren’t in…

Greyhound Cars is good.

Yes and I do wonder how many of those "asking" for a CPZ may be Labour supporters/activists and been tapped up to do so. I still can't work out how the council justified doing the Townley and Calton CPZ seeing as the consultation results showed the majority didn't want it.

Emma Ermengarde Ogilvy Greville-Nugent seems like an interesting character!

In my defence I only did that because 300,000 of the "1 million SUVs" article you shared are Ford Pumas or similar and are categorised as "Small SUVs". They are not SUVs - nowhere near it and nowhere near the negative impact of a Ford F50 series SUV/truck. Of course we agree on that but can we also agree that there is no "Epidemic of SUVs"? But short of incentivising manufacturers to not make them how do you stop their sales? When the stories emerged back in 2021 with the research on a 3rd of car sales in Chelsea being large SUVs the call to action centred around banning advertising and trying to advertise to shame people into not owning them but, to be honest, the people I know who own them aren't the type to shame easily and tend not to be the type to care one jot about what anyone else thinks - did Tyre Extinguishers make anyone think twice - I doubt it, far more likely they made people think there are a lot of climate cranks around! 😉

Superb - thanks both. I have never seen the sign on the bench but will seek it out.

Superb research! What is the domed building in the picture? Is that looking up the hill towards Camberwell?

Ah so it's part of the Melbourne Grove Streets for People works then. Madness that the council goes ahead with this when there are so many other works disrupting traffic in the area but I suspect year end budget surplus spends are at play here. Who at the council is responsible for the co-ordination of this type of thing?

Funny isn't it - the council rinse and repeats this approach all across the area, they say there will be no displacement but the moment anyone says there is a problem they acknowledge that it is due to the CPZ and, gleefully, ask whether people would like a CPZ on the streets impacted.

Absolute nonsense, how you can claim nitpicking and pedantry is laughable. We are not the ones making sensationalist and hyperbolic statements that there are now over one million new SUVs on the road when the "definition" of SUVs to get to that 1 million figure includes vehicles that nobody would ever claim to be SUVs. Do you think a Puma, Qashqai or Mokka is really an SUV? No, I didn't think so. If you want to have a discussion about the 3,000+ large SUVs purchased in the UK last year go ahead but don't wrap an ideological crusade around it and try to create the narrative that somehow there is an "epidemic of SUVs" in the UK based on injury data from a country (the US) that in 2024 sold over 2 million monster trucks and a country where the best selling vehicles are monster trucks. If challenged on that narrative don't then share data to back that claims 1 million SUVs sold in the UK that includes the vast majority of cars which no-one would ever consider to be an SUV because the rational people you want to engage with in the discussion will turn around and go...don't be daft and sideline you as some sort of "eat the rich and their Chelsea tractor crank". No-one here is doubting car bloat - I actually gave a reason for that and interestingly but somewhat predictably shot down as wrong by other posters. I am sorry but this thread really highlights how some refuse to let the truth get in the way of a good story and how knee-jerk ideology is not borne out in fact. And remember, it wasn't so long ago that eco-terrorists Tyre Extinguishers were going around letting tyres down on vehicles they deemed to be too big for cities based on this type of nonsense. There is no epidemic of SUVs in the UK. There is in the US. Don't conflate the two.

But interesting when the report originator never gives any indication as to what 30% of car sales in those areas actually equates to in actual numbers. It makes a good headline until you look and consider well, how many new car sales are there in those boroughs and what is 30% of that..... Given that in the year that report was published there were 2287 large SUVs bought in the whole country I very much suspect the numbers for those boroughs are no more than a handful and if you went with the actual number rather than a % then the hyperbole impact would have been massively diluted. To be fair @Earl Aelfheah when the original report got publicised by Ash Sarker hate, envy and a healthy dose of Marxist-ideology is normally not far behind.....;-) The original report did wreak of activist research.... It is funny because in the original publicity one of the authors/advocates for the report suggested that people should stop buying large SUVs and buy a Tesla instead....that hasn't aged well!!! 😉

But you are because you are sharing hyperbole reports and headlines to justify your narrative on SUVs yet the data within those reports includes small cars that they deem to be "SUVs". But it's not at all - you seem to think those cars are part of the SUV problem. Do you? Because if not I do not know why you are using research and articles that do to back up your point. You have to agree the headline you shared is undermined massively when you look at the detail included within.

To be fair @Earl Aelfheah - you're throwing around headlines and articles to try and justify the "epidemic of SUVs" like the below but when you look at the detail it includes cars that no-one thinks of as SUVs and then you look even further you realise the attention grabbing headline is because the major growth is not in actual SUVs but things like a Nissan Qashqai or Ford Puma. And I am sorry but this is not an SUV....and this is the SUV Mini category in that survey.

I don't think anyone is saying the trend for larger cars is a good one but other than the fact people are ideologically opposed to them (or maybe their drivers) I really don't understand the fevered reaction to them and there is nothing to suggest there is an epidemic as the title suggests. It does seem that people are conflating (perhaps deliberately) the massive challenges the US has with truck sized SUVs that are 1) bought in huge numbers - the F150 is America's best selling vehicle and over 700,000 were sold last year alone and 2) kill and injure people in huge numbers as a result. The fact there is only 1 SUV (and even that is small compared to the "trucks" in the US) in the UK Top 10 sales figures for last year really demonstrates that this is in no-way an epidemic. The question remains, on what grounds are people going to ban them in London when a much smaller car - Toyota Prius - is actually a bigger menace to people because 1) there are so many of them and 2) given many are PHVs spend a very large time on the road so proportionally are the vehicle most involved in injury causing accidents. Hang on @Earl Aelfheah that survey counts a Mini, Ford Puma and Nissan Juke as an SUV.....and the chart below seems to show that's where the big growth is coming from. I don't think anyone looks at one of those and thinks that's an SUV. Is the Ford Puma a vehicle you categorise as an SUV? Are you suggesting we ban all of these from London as well?