Rockets

Their comms has been diabolical. The "son of a toolmaker" and "working people" soundbites may have placated an electorate before an election but they will come back to haunt you after it and will bite you hard if things don't go well. If they don't improve things soon it is going to be a long parliament for them and there are no signs things are getting better. Amazing as they had 14 years to prepare for this but being in opposition is far, far easier than running a country.

Do you actually know what an own-goal is? Let me give you an example....a council using paving from India for an active travel intervention designed to help reduce emissions... Just how is that an own-goal for One Dulwich...please do explain.. I tell you what, thank goodness for someone going to look at the packing cases for the paving slabs to see where they were from to expose the council's hypocrisy...a bit of citizen journalism holding those in power to account! We should be celebrating them and if it was OneDulwich well done to them.

We will never know will we because the council, in their quest to waste £1.5m to make changes to the junction that do and add nothing more than the previous version, decided to source paving slabs from halfway around the world and having them shipped to Dulwich. It was already a public space before this latest round of pointless works was it not?

No and Wes Streeting is heading in this direction because he knows the NHS is broken and was never built to cope with the demands currently being placed on it. A paid-for approach in some shape or form, and massive reforms, is the only way the NHS can survive - neither of which the left or unions will be pleased about.

And I worry this Labour government with all of it's own goals and the tax increases is playing into Farage's hands. With Trump winning in the US, his BFF Farage is likely to benefit from strained relations between the US administration and the UK one. As Alastair Campbell said on a recent episode of The Rest is Politics who would not have wanted to be a fly on the wall of the first call between Angela Rayner and JD Vance....those two really are oil and water. Scary, scary times right now and there seems to be a lack of leadership and political nous within the government at a time when we really need it - there aren't many in the cabinet who you think will play well on the global stage.

Labour seems to be taxing the many to get to the few in so many policies they have implemented. Look at the farmer situation: yes there are some rich farmers but the vast majority are not and they are, in my mind, the very definition of a working person - the very people this country relies upon. Most are family businesses. They were re-running some of the Simon Reeves programmes on the Lake District and it was filmed just after Covid but they featured an 18 year old farmer who was took over his parents farm after they both died of cancer within months of each other. He and his school friends were mucking in to keep the farm going and continue the family business. Today, he would have been hit by a big tax bill too. The challenge is Rachel Reeves' budget desperately needs growth and with the news today that the economy barely grew on, ostensibly, fears of what the budget was going to hit people with and the fact post budget many businesses are saying costs will have to go up due to the increases in employee NI but at the same time saying wage growth, and even jobs, will be impacted we may be heading towards a very nasty perfect storm. Public services desperately need reform not just more money. Wes Streeting said that reform was needed in the NHS and he was talking in a manner more akin to a Tory health secretary than a Labour one!

Mal, I was just challenging you on what you were basing this on? Just wondering if you had anything to back this statement up with.

Malumbu - I love how you say let's keep it on subject and then start mentioning speeding drivers! 😉 Anyway, my two-penneth worth. - I love the burn of starting and finishing a ride with Col du Dog Kennel Hill or Col du Sydenham Hill - the joy of getting to the top and free-wheeling down the other side (and making good use of the bus filter at the bottom of DKH). - the thing I love about cycling in the area and across London is that there are so many routes you can take - there used to be a website where it would plot a route that avoided the busiest roads and it was great. I would cycle to Hammersmith and hardly see a car as the route would use backstreets via Loughborough Junction, Battersea, around the back of Queen's Club - although I once had a pedal shear off in a torrential downpour in Battersea and had to wheel the bike home. - The fact there are some great backstreet routes into central London - I hate floating cycle lanes next to parked cars - just a badly designed accident waiting to happen. Hunts Slip is an awful example of this and the ludicrous cycle lane across the top of Sydenham Hill has one too - we should not be putting cycle lanes in as a traffic calming measure which is why Sydenham Hill is so awful and actually increase dangers to cyclists - I tend to try to avoid roads like Lordship Lane and use the backstreets to navigate around them but Underhill and Crystal Palace Road have become awful due to displaced traffic from the things I will not mention but I get an immense sense of satisfaction cycling around Hindmands and Oakhurst to get to Balfes and not seeing a car.

Which shops - what are you basing this on? Only today Clean Air for All Dulwich reckons only two support the measures (I think we can guess which ones) and another one is about to close... https://x.com/DulwichCleanAir/status/1856971581471560101?s=19 The overly glowing reaction to this from the usual suspects is so predictable...talk to most folks who live in the area about the money wasted, the challenges the emergency services have had with the council and the India stone debacle and the reaction is very, very different. But, to be fair, is it any wonder the council acts the way they do when some are happy to back them even when they get things very, very wrong? In some people's eyes they seem to be able to do no wrong. I suspect Dulwich Square will haunt the council and councillors for a very long time - this will be their legacy - wasting tax-payers money on a vanity project that created a bigger environmental footprint than was necessary delivered zero tangible difference to what was there 6 months ago and took desperately needed money away from more pressing needs. If their only KPI was to make some active travel lobbyists happy then congrats to them! Perhaps the government's new Covid Corruption tsar could take a look to work out what has been going on here....;-)

Budget has seen to be no object on the square given the millions wasted on it - so are you saying that if the price isn't right then it's ok to do harm to the environment...that's a very slippery slope if you are allowing the council that escape lane....? I don't think it is £1.5m better than what was there before they started these works - a lot of my neighbours say they preferred what was there a few months ago - that it now feels like a spaceship landing pad. I just think about the improvements to other parts of Dulwich/Southwark that could have been made with that £1.5m budget that has been wasted (and done unknown harm to the environment in the process).

The council apologist in chief strikes again.... Malumbu, I know you would love this to be in the lounge so there isn't any attention on the council's failure but it is a transport hub. If it is true that these slabs are from India then Cllr McAsh has some very serious questions to answer as this has happened on his watch and you cannot take a position of closing a road on the basis of helping the environment and then go and cover it in environmentally damaging materials sourced from half way around the world and transported on a cargo ship. These are elected officials entrusted by us to do the right thing - they have not done that here and it makes a mockery of their environmental stance and is beyond embarrassing - you have to ask just how much oversight and governance the likes of Cllr McAsh are providing. They have also embarrassed those supporters who have blindly stood by them with their support for the changes in DV. Their "consultation" part of the website (which has been stripped of all the detail on the consultation plans interestingly enough and is now a much more abbreviated version of the previous site) https://www.southwark.gov.uk/parking-streets-and-transport/improving-streets-and-spaces/streets-people states: How we're making streets healthier and greener in Dulwich ...which is laughable in light of their choice of materials...

The short answer is that the council don't monitor displacement. In their world traffic "evaporates". Now, they did do some monitoring and claimed that traffic was "reduced across the whole" but that monitoring was massively flawed because it did no monitoring on displacement routes such as Underhill Road, Crystal Palace Road, Barry Road or the A205. Remember, the council originally only monitored on the streets within the LTN which shows their motivation for doing robust monitoring of displaced traffic - they really didn't want to have to and were forced to. Bottom-line is LTNs do nothing to remove traffic from roads - they only move it from one road to another - it passes the problem to someone else. No it won't but this will be considered a win for the council as it stops the traffic going through Dulwich.

https://southwarknews.co.uk/area/dulwich/ltn-hailed-as-eco-friendly-using-indian-stones-quarried-5000-miles-away/

Ha ha, Earl doesn't seem like the pub going type! 😉 If we did I certainly wouldn't want to get into an argument with them! 😉

I think Earl makes a very good point that needs considering here - idling cars left that junction 4 years ago (and this is a good thing) but since then the council has spent more and more money on redesigning the junction over and over again. The question remains, and to Earl's point about the cars going 4 years ago and the fact every works has been just to tweak the design - you have to ask why? Can anyone pinpoint what has changed to warrant the £1.5m of tax-payers money - it seems to me all they have done is increase the risk to pedestrians, slowed down emergency service access and removed parking which is of detrimental impact to the shops. Oh and put in really expensive and environmentally unfriendly paving and added a couple of new benches and new traffic lights.

Earl, what are your thoughts on the council shipping those lovely pavement tiles from India (rather than Yorkshire) to use to adorn your beloved square...any concerns that this will have had an necessarily negative impact on the environment? Is that not a little hypocritical? BTW I actually preferred the Square in its previous form before this huge amount of tax-payers money was wasted on it - it now looks like a huge bright concrete landing pad and I am not sure the area looks any nicer for it. It all feels a bit Milton Keynes and I think is out of character with the rest of the Village.

Earl, I think you need to spend more time reading what people actually post as you seem to constantly misinterpret/fail to grasp the message. I am wondering if you are starting to do it deliberately so you can pick a fight or whether you really don't understand. But if you had taken the time to actually read what I had said instead of doing your usual knee-jerk reaction then perhaps you would have understood it. I have explained it more than enough times to you that, given the overall number of journeys taken within an area then it is not a regular occurrence but you steadfastly refuse to acknowledge what I ACTUALLY said and instead try to accuse me of minimising it. Not for the first time, a complete untruth. Clearly....you can't argue with an....active travel lobbyist....;-)

Seemingly only in your mind but that's you interpretation and you're entitled to it. I have clearly done nothing of the sort but then it's down to your interpretation of what I, and others, have been saying and as we have seen time and time and again you get things wrong very frequently. And, on the basis of the number of journeys made within that area that does not make then a common/regular occurrence. I was taking issue with you stating that they were a common/regular occurrence - which they are clearly not. Another example of you putting your spin on the data and, deliberately, taking my point out of context to try and further your own position. Well it is if one of them hits you and that, at the end of the day, is what this thread is about so again, you have tried to turn it into a BUT WHAT ABOUT THE CARS!! I, and many others, will agree to disagree with you on this one, especially given the number of cyclists riding on pavements in the area - which, thankfully, despite your best efforts, keeps this thread on thread!!!

Because folks like you categorise every accident as bad driving (you have, predictably, just done it again) without any clue as to what actually happened. It's a Pavlovian response some of you seem incapable of shaking off. Car accident = bad driving. Absolute fantasy-land made-up nonsense. Earl, you need to be better than that. My jaw has not returned from where it dropped to when I read this..... I am afraid there are a hundred times more examples on this forum of people trying to minimise the impact of cyclists - it's almost daily. The BUT WHAT ABOUT THE CARS!! brigade do it every time anyone dares suggests cyclists might be becoming a problem - Earl, you just did it again. As far as I am concerned, and I have stated this a lot before, I do not want to be hit by a car or a bike and the biggest threat in the area we live in at the moment is being hit by a cyclist due to the high number of cyclists who ignore the rules of the road and put pedestrians at risk as a result. If some don't want to accept or acknowledge that or try to justify/minimise it because "well a bike won't hurt you as much as a car" then so be it - it does nothing to strengthen their cause just harms it and demonstrates how detached some are from reality because of their ideological blindness.

And Snowy thinks a 4x carbon footprint is funny....well that speaks volumes doesn't it....? They laugh when the council does things that do more to harm the environment...amazingly hypocritical but not at all surprising. It does make you wonder about some on the pro-side doesn't it.....

"4 x the carbon footprint" - good grief, if true, this really is becoming an on-going source of huge embarrassment to the council and councillors - seems to be own-goal after own-goal. Wasn't Cllr McAsh a member of the Green Party for a while - it seems as he signed off on that junction he isn't paying close attention or his green credentials have fallen to the kerb (or the Indian paving ;-)).... And if they have refused to put cycle slow signs at the junction you really have to question why not - and what agenda they are working to? If true, who is pulling their strings?

Does this mean the gate opposite the Grove Tavern is open again now?

Malumbu - you (and others) regularly post things in threads that have no bearing on the subject matter but are just a ploy to move the discussion onto something YOU want to talk about - especially when the subject matter of the OP is something close to your heart and you are ideologically opposed to. It's nothing more than a distraction technique and adds nothing to the debate. How many times have threads been hijacked by people saying the forum equivalent of "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE CARS!!!!"? It happens all the time and it's always done by the usual suspects and it's against the forum rules.

The rail service is particularly poor and the weekend traveller seems to take the brunt of it. Whenever we are making plans for any given weekend we always check ahead for fear of the dreaded "Bus Replacement Service" and the frequency of trains not being available has increased markedly at weekends over the last few years.

No, you were doing what so many on the pro-side of the argument do when confronted with a thread that is critical of the behaviour of some cyclists. You try to distract by screaming...WHAT ABOUT THE CARS!!!....which is exactly what you, and others, have done on this thread - and you do it all the time - you go head in the sand about the problems caused by cyclists and try to turn the debate on to cars. Again, another example of why so many people get fed-up with the actions of active travel protagonists because few are keen to address the issues in their own backyard.