Rockets

A bit further afield the Crocked Well is good - and doesn't take long to walk. Rosendale has good days - again another nice Sunday stroll!

He took it everywhere with him - was quite the local character!

We had no issues with the digging - just major issues getting Openreach to send the right team for the dig! Can you shed any more light on the blame game ping pong?

I do wonder if the reason the monitoring strips have suddenly re-appeared all over Dulwich is as the council tries to satiate the above - given Cllr McAsh clearly stated that the LTNs can only be considered a success if they reduce traffic for everyone and given he now has ultimate responsibility for the LTNs and whether the council meeting the governments new guidance on them I do wonder if they are trying to "prove" they are working. How they manage to prove they are supported locally in light of new guidance on how they run consultations is a massive challenge for them - they can't fall back on previous consultations because they don't pass the new bar and if they run a new consultation they will have to add a yes/no response and that didn't work out too well for them over the CPZs.

P.S. admin I posted the DV junction comment in the wrong thread - the discussion from my post yesterday should actually be in this thread Malumbu, the majority of the 990 respondents (80% of whom said they live in Dulwich) tried to voice their opinions during the consultation but the council ignored them (see below). But really Malumbu £1.5m on a change to a junction that has already had a huge amount of cash spent on it that needs one alteration (Cyclists Dismount) to make it safer for everyone and at a time when the council is pleading poverty and asking the public to help it fund cycle hangers and street lighting - does that seem like a smart way to spend the money? It suggests to me it may not be a funding issue but a funding priority issue and this council clearly has it's priorities very, very wrong in light of this and really makes you wonder whether they can be trusted with our money - it seems frittering money on vanity projects to keep a few advocates happy is very much back on the agenda.

Makes me think the council is happily trying to pull the wool over people's eyes....£1.5m - there can't be anyone who thinks this is money well spent when there are clearly far more pressing needs elsewhere in the transport remit - instead the council is, for reasons known only to themselves, throwing money at a junction that has had a fortune thrown at it already. The council are treating people like fools but unfortunately a lot of people seem to be happy to be fooled.

Anyone want to have a bet that the rideout through the DV junction yesterday just happened to be the day Anna Goodman and Rachel Aldred chose to randomly select for another Dulwich LTN cycle count....expect to read all about the huge jump in cyclists in a Peter Walker Guardian exclusive.....;-)

Wow - just the circa £1.5m of tax-payers money being spent on the DV junction...but just remember folks the council hasn't got enough money to put in cycle hangers or fix street lighting.....but they have found £1.5m to make more changes the majority of people who responded to the consultation can't see the purpose of and clearly don't agree with..... I would love to know whether that parking revenue projection was based on a successful area-wide CPZ roll-out. https://twitter.com/DulwichCleanAir/status/1772173826446459346?s=19

And the areas and constituents they represent...but you kind of feel his role in Goose Green was merely his first step on the political ladder and his goal was to use it to get a foot up.

Is the hard-left/Momentum in Southwark trying to get control ahead of the election - trying to claw their way back into control of councils and create a problem for the Labour Party after the 2019 fiasco and Starmer's purge of the Corbynites to make them more electable? A very interesting article from when McAsh was at university and, interestingly, a member of the Green Party. https://bright-green.org/2012/04/09/democracy-and-direct-action-an-interview-with-edinburgh-universitys-new-student-president-james-mcash/

Ha ha she knows Conservative is a bad word..a bit like Southwark Labour avoiding all mentions of LTNs during the last council elections! 😉

There may be trouble ahead....that was close.

There now follows a party election broadcast on behalf of the Labour party.... Sadiq Khan: "I funded and approved this election message"! Is the pasting of the Highway Code meant to be there....?

Very much different crimes as well - you could have hundreds more bobbies on the beat and you still would not stop kids riding up behind people and snatching phones. The problem is victims of robbery now carry an expensive device with a high resale value on their person and often walk down the road using it and not paying attention to their surroundings (the lady I shouted at on Townley some months ago to warn her she was about to be robbed was utterly oblivious to the fact that someone was circling her like a shark as she pushed her pram with her phone to her ear) - the risk/reward of that robbery is weighted way towards reward for the criminal. Compare that to street robberies in a time before phones where someone would have to confront someone for something on their person - there is a much higher risk that that person may not have anything of value on them or might wallop/apprehend you. Phone snatching is a very high success/high reward/low risk rate crime and that is why it is so prevalent.

I think the issue is often kids are stealing these devices and securing a prosecution is very difficult - the kids are just the do'ers in a much larger network as these phones are not being flogged in pubs to mates but shipped internationally and part of a well organised network. The kids are often armed with all the information and background they need to make the police's job very difficult - they know what to say and what not to say, they all dress identically and ride identical bikes and wear face coverings as they know the police will struggle to identify them and the police will know that without a positive id securing any sort of prosecution is impossible. The raid you are referring to is probably the one in Brockley and I bet a lot of those phones were taken from people in Dulwich. https://www.standard.co.uk/news/crime/men-arrested-brockley-stolen-mobile-phones-london-met-police-b1130365.html

Liv so sorry to hear that - unfortunately there is so much of this type of crime the police can't/don't bother with it. Our son's friends' stolen phone was showing as being in a house on Barry Road but the police were not interested. The stats on how much of a problem this is are really scary - not only in Dulwich but across London as a whole - 28% increase in London in 12 months and some 51,000 phones stolen - that's 150 a day and nobody seems to know what the solution to fix it is! The phone manufacturing industry isn't likely to embrace any measures that mean they can no longer make money from the lucrative trade-in/global re-sale market. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-67125411

Snowy, I think it is a bit harsh accusing Earl of sea-lioning...;-)

Ah so it is not a physical school street closure - just camera/camera car enforced? It just always seems like there is a constant flow of buses using the street so was wondering what the pans was when the school pulled the school street barricades across it but clearly not an issue!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ce7x901l8pko

And it is definitely on the increase, here are the numbers from the last three years for Dulwich Village ward (Robbery is Theft with the use of force or a threat of force but does not include snatch thefts. Snatch theft get classed as other theft). 2021 (data from Jan 21 missing due to 3 year cut-off): Robbery: 17 Theft from person: 4 Other theft: 45 2022 Robbery: 28 Theft from person: 23 Other theft: 96 2023 Robbery: 49 Theft from person: 35 Other theft: 77 January 2024 Robbery: 5 Theft from person: 7 Other theft: 6

Hardly romanticising the past, just highlighting the very real change in threat over the years - I bet when you were robbed at knifepoint there weren't weekly reports of stabbing deaths in London as there are today? The Chelsea Smilers were the thing of playground urban legend; zombie knives and kids being pointlessly murdered today are very much not. And in Dulwich right now everyone knows someone who has been robbed and the problem is getting worse.

But the graph from the report I shared shows exactly that...that in 2022 cycling modal share declined due to increases in other forms of transport. Whether I want it to be true or not is irrelevant...you called me out for suggesting cycling modal share was declining and then you shared a TFL report that shows exactly that (but I also acknowledged it validated your position as well in another chart) - you could have accepted that and we could have agreed to disagree but you have decided to double down and deny that the graph I drew your attention to validates my position.

You know the graph I posted is from the very same TFL report you posted the table from....how come there are two conflicting items in the same TFL report......?

How will that work with the buses that use Etherow?

I am not misrepresenting the figures (they are figures from a report you shared by you after all) - I was merely pointing out that you were selectively plucking graphs from the TFL report that validate your viewpoint and I selectively plucked some from the very same report that validated my viewpoint as well. I am not against cycle lanes I am a frequent user of them - what I am against is groups spending millions and millions of taxpayers money on measures that clearly are not delivering against the stated objectives (Will Norman's 10x increase) and then their advocates selectively plucking and presenting stats to try and convince people that they are working. Like the City of London stats - according to the report detail all the investment in cycle infrastructure in and around the City delivered just a 2% increase in cycling compared to pre-pandemic levels - so how can anyone really claim it has been money well spent? This is why the pro-cycle lobby deflect and detract by saying "more bikes than cars in the City - hurrah success!" and why people like me look beyond the headlines to determine what is really happening. You might not like it, agree with it or are ever going to accept it some of the stats tell a different story to the one you are trying to tell! I never get the chance to hear the echo as there are so many people on the pro-lobby who are more than willing to pile-on and scream at me to try to accuse me of misrepresenting this, that and the other and how I must be a fascist, Tory petrolhead because I dare to challenge their view!