Rockets

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!

Earl, please, please, please take time to read what I have posted. Yes, according to the very report you linked to from TFL it shows (Page 16 Figure 7) that in 2022 cycling modal share decreased for trip-based mode shares - look at the 2022 element of the chart.....as an overall percentage of all trips made cycling is decreasing due to the increase in bus, tube and overground trips. This is not a desperate attempt to obfuscate but a desperate attempt to educate.....

It seems the council has identified a number of areas to increase revenue (according to Southwark news): https://southwarknews.co.uk/area/southwark/budget-summary-key-points-from-southwark-councils-budget/ Southwark Council has found several ways of increasing income, including raising fees and charges and renting out council offices. Fee rises include the garden waste charge going from £60 to £80 per annum, raising planning fees, increasing the price of leisure services and commercial property rents. Southwark Council aims to raise over £1million by renting out its Tooley Street offices by 2026. The total budget proposals include additional income generation worth £7.6million. I can't find the details of where that extra income generation of £7.6m is coming from...but you can probably bet it's from you and I and the residents of Southwark!

Seemingly the Dulwich Village re-design of the re-design is burning through a lot of our cash!

Bottom-line is an increasing number of people are being targeted in the Dulwich area for their phones and personal belongings and each of those is a victim of a crime that can often have a long-lasting impact. My son's friend had his phone stolen near Dulwich Library as he got off the bus to visit us and now we have to meet him as he won't walk anywhere on his own. When I was a kid in South London there was always the threat of violence but the worst that ever happened was some bruising and a fat lip - today the threat of being stabbed is very real and that can have a very traumatising impact on people. And the street robbers use this to their advantage - according to my son the fact the person I saw in a balaclava had a blue surgical glove on Dovercourt was to indicate that they are carrying a knife and willing to use it (to be fair the little squirt probably could not have mugged anyone without the threat of a knife such was his tiny build - without it most people would have laughed at him) and the worrying thing is the brazenness of the people doing it - that they are happy to do it in broad daylight and often target multiple people in quick succession because they know no-one will ever stop them and they will get away with it. When my wife had her phone snatched the police told her they knew the group of kids that we doing it in the Dulwich area but were pretty much powerless to stop them - unless they happened to catch them in the act.

Earl, I was merely addressing your claims that what I had said was disingenuous - which it, quite clearly, was not. I always find it fascinating what happens when you look behind the headline stats touted by various lobby groups as the headline often tries to tell a different story - clearly there has been no massive increase in cycling in the City of London but there are more cyclists than motorists now. In the meantime there is another argument when you look at the data about modal share too...see the attached. In fact, if you look at Figure 7 on page 16 of the TFL report you linked to it very much suggests modal share is shifting as tube, bus and overground see more passenger usage (look at 2022) - it seems that TFL is presenting data that backs up both sides of the arguments - you win when looking at stage-based analysis, I win on trip-based analysis - so clearly not nonsense after all....;-)

Earl, the devil is always in the detail and the detail very much suggests it is not disingenuous nonsense - what is disingenuous are some of the headlines concocted by the pro-cycle lobby to present a good news story. More often than not a lot of the pro-cycle headlines have been "selectively plucked" to create a story and you highlight a very real example of that. We have discussed previously the claim that there are now more cyclists in the City/Square Mile than motorists (which was always a correct but slightly misleading headline as cars never really returned to the City after the bomb checkpoints were put in decades ago) - it is also important to note that walking is still the main mode of transport within the Square Mile by a country mile (although at the time of the report at 80% of pre-pandemic levels). And the claim of a "massive jump" in cycling - look at the figures - even in the City (which has become the poster-child for the pro-cycle lobby on the basis of that more cycles than cars headline) the very report that gave that selectively plucked headline showed a very different story that cycling was at 102% of pre-pandemic figures. https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2023/03/01/cyclists-now-outnumber-motorists-in-city-of-london/ Attached are the actual numbers from the report presented to the City of London Corporation which tells a very different story from the headlines. You can find it here: https://democracy.cityoflondon.gov.uk/documents/s182959/Appendix 6 Transport Trends Graphs and Charts.pdf But yes, cyclists do now outnumber motorists in the City of London that is correct but for all of the investment in cycling infrastructure and sacrifices made to bus lanes etc would one have not expected a bigger jump in cycling in the City? Often the headlines are written by the pro-cycle lobby to distract people from the fact that the boom in cycling (as a proportion of all journeys) is just not materialising despite the huge amount of investment to make the cycling revolution happen.

Earl have you noticed how many bus lanes have been turned into cycle lanes….take a walk across any one of London’s bridges over the Thames and see how the bus lanes have been turned into cycle lanes and buses now sit in traffic with all of the other vehicles and TFL has said that bus journey times have slowed across London, although they have blamed roadworks for the delays. Angelina, the National Travel Survey showed that London modal share is declining for cycles due to people returning to buses and tubes (I believe bus use had increased by 59% and was heading back to pre-Covid levels) there was a thread on it in October (National Travel Survey and cycling policy in London)