Rockets

Germany also cannot afford to lose 780,000 jobs in car production; that has nothing to do with national pride - it's about survival. Governments are delaying the phasing out of sales of ICE vehicles because the Chinese are too good at EVs, can produce them cheaply and are a huge threat to the established players. VW will sell you an ID4 for at least £45,000 here. In China they have to sell them for £15,000 such is the pressue on prices and they're losing money each time they sell one in China as they desperately trying to maintain marketshare.

Earls it is. Electrification is leading to bigger and heavier cars. Why? Because the majority of the car is battery and to get the range you need to increase the size of the battery and that increases the dimensions of the car. A friend has an Audi Q8 electric car and whilst it looks big on the outside it feels almost claustrophobic on the inside and has a tiny boot - why, because of the size of the battery needed and the space it takes which raises the floor height. Just look at some of the electric monstrosities coming out in China (who are now the leader in EV) - many of them look like massive shoe boxes on wheels - why? Because of the battery. A bigger concern for me is exactly the Chinese EV issue if you look at the design trends (see the Ford Focus shared by Malumbu) is that, for some reason, electric cars seem to be squarer, blockier and with more prominent nose sections. Because how on earth do you legislate to stop them coming into London without also then having to address even bigger, heavier, high-fronted vehicles like vans and buses.....and given the fact Toyota Prius are the vehicles involved in most injury causing accidents on what grounds do single out SUVs - and "I don't like SUVs or SUV drivers" aren't grounds for barring them from a city. I think it is pretty clear that the citing of the Ford Puma was given as an example of how the hyperbole around the "Epidemic of SUVs" isn't actually born out by the facts - that in the Top 10 UK car sales only one is close to being considered an SUV. That's not a deflection. Maybe people's perception of the number of SUVs on the roads is being influenced because we live in a wealthy part of London and people see more of them on the roads. But like a lot of things Dulwich life is not a reflection of life everywhere.

The problem is much of the negativity and scaremongering around SUVs comes from the US and this is totally understandable. In fact, in the US they aren't known as SUVs but trucks and the really scary thing is that the F-Series and Silverado are the two biggest selling cars of any car and look at the units sold - the F Series sells more cars than all of the UK Top 10 put together and there is not one car in that list that comes close to the size of the 4 pick-up trucks highlighted in the US Top 10. Take a look at these two pics as well showing how big some of these monsters are, comparing a Ford F50 vs Fiesta and Silverado vs a Golf. Absolutely agree, there is no place for these on roads in the UK but we need to keep the perspective and stop the hyperbole - yes UK cars are getting bigger (much of this is being driven by electrification) but we will never get to the situation the US finds itself in. P.S. Whatever happened to RaptorTruckMan...... US 2024 Top-10 Car Sales 1. Ford F-Series - 765,649 2. Chevrolet Silverado: 549,945 3. Toyota RAV4: 475,193 4. Tesla Model Y - 405,900 5. Honda CRV - 402,791 6. Ram Pickup: 373,120 7. GMC Sierra - 324,734 8. Toyota Camry - 309,876 9. Nissan Rogue - 245, 724 10. Honda Civic -242,005 UK 2024 Top 10 Car Sales 1. Ford Puma - 48,384 2. Kia Sportage - 47,163 3. Nissan Qashqai - 42,418 4. Nissan Juke - 34,454 5. Tesla Model Y - 32,862 6. VW Golf - 32,370 7. Hyundai Tucson - 32,174 8. MG Motor HS - 30,207 9. Volvo XC40 - 30,202 10. VW Polo - 28,981

Is it Thames Water again?

Yup it's about as "fairly balanced" as you're going to get from the Guardian....but in typical Guardian style the headline is hyperbole not actually born out in the rest of the article 😉 It was clear from my posts that I was questioning the timing of it - why did Peter Walker suddenly decide to write about it now - one wonders what the trigger for it was given the same story was extensively covered some months ago in other media?

Of course its good news but why did Peter Walker decide to write about it now - it's really old news? And it's a classic Walker article in that the headline makes a definitive statement: Wales 20mph limit has cut road deaths. Why is there still even a debate? .....and yet his opening paragraph contradicts his headline by referring to the caveats that the Welsh government has applied to pause jumping to the conclusion of his headline. This is cub reporter stuff. Here is how the BBC dealt with those caveats: Government officials have urged caution in attributing the fall in casualties to the 20mph limit. The Welsh government's chief statistician said in a blog last year that at least three year's worth of collision data would be required for a meaningful comparison to be made. Casualty figures have also been on a downward trend for sometime - the Welsh government said they have "declined steadily over the last decade". So why did Peter decide to write that article now and gloss over the cabeats part? What do you think? I did. See post above yours.

There is a lot of hyperbole over SUVs, granted, if you get hit by one you are far more likely to suffer terrible injuries, in fact I read that the Ford F150 and Chevy Silverado are the most dangerous cars on the roads in the US and that's not surprising as they are huge and also a lot of American roads are 6 lane motorways (ostensibly) through residential areas and everyone seems to own a monster truck. In the UK by comparison I keep seeing research (that claims to come from DfT STATS19 data) that says the car involved in most accidents that lead to injury in the UK: Toyota Prius, followed by Vauxhall Corsas and Astras and Volkswagen Golf. Range Rovers are the only one on the list that falls into the SUV category. One thing worth considering as well is that due to the high value margins involved many of the newest and most expensive SUVs are some of the most advanced cars on the roads and come with significant accident avoidance technology, often long before smaller, less expensive, cars do.

I saw Peter Walker's article in the Guardian and thought, hang on this is old news and lo, the BBC wrote about it in January which then made me wonder why Peter Walker decided to write about it now. It's not news, so why now? Anyone have any clue, is he using it as part of a lobbying effort? Normally, now that he is acting political editor, his forays into his old patch of transport are usually built around "exclusives" most often fed to him by his pals in the cycle/active travel lobby because they know he will treat their narrative sympathetically and he will not ask any probing questions. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c78w1891z03o

What work are they doing outside ED station? Another route in and out of Dulwich disrupted...it's becoming a badly organised joke.

I agree it would be good if the council did the exercise again to see how much has changed. It was research done over two days in February in 2015 so repeating it wouldn't cost the earth.

In the last Lordship Lane footfall analysis (I believe the last) done by the council in 2015 their research suggested that: 29% of visitors (and by far the largest group) were from SE22 17% of visitors were from SE15 11% of visitors were from SE12 5% of visitors were from SE5 4% of visitors were from SE23 The rest were spread across a lot of London postcodes further afield but a lot from the wider South London area 37% of visitors had walked 21% had got the bus 22% of visitors had driven

Earl, for the benefit of everyone else I don't want to get drawn into one of the cycles that bore the pants off everyone else and yes you are right this has nothing to do with Peckham, but: STATS Under-reporting is an issue that the government is trying to address because the police reports that form STATS have not necessarily correlated to other forms of reporting (hospital, insurance claims etc) In fact the latest review (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/reported-road-casualty-statistics-background-quality-report/reported-road-casualty-statistics-background-quality-report) the government cites this very example in bold: For example the STATS19 definition of a collision will include single-vehicle pedal cycle collisions, if the rider (or a pedestrian in collision with the cycle) is injured. In practice, only a small proportion of these types of collision are reported to the police. This is a serious issue concerning the quality of the road casualty data. If under-reporting remains unrecognised, then the true magnitude of any road safety problems cannot be known, or could be underestimated. This could in turn lead to incorrect prioritising of policy measures to improve road safety, or could lead to less efficient or inappropriate countermeasures. These issues also affect the ‘coherence’ strand of quality. STATS is slow to adapt to new transport usage types it only started monitoring for Powered Personal Transporters (e-scooters) from November 2024 and I very much suspect PPTs were added to the data collection mechanism because other sources (hospitals maybe) were seeing an increase in issues that were not being reflected in STATS. So, what I was saying remains true that STATS data should not be used for comparisons of road user type X vs road user type Y in terms of numbers of injury inducing accidents - any database to which you refer that uses STATS as the basis for their data needs to be approached with that mindset.

Be careful @Earl Aelfheah you're taking this into personal jibe territory - keep it nice - the forum rules demand it. P.S. I don't have an X feed.

Only if the person reporting it has filled in the STATS19 form. No I was challenging you on your use of the data as a like-for-like comparison. It cannot, and should not be used for that. Yes but it's important to correct misleading use of a dataset that does not have the granularity required for the purpose it was being used.

Reported incidents via police using the STATS19 form, the vast majority of which are from police attending the scene of an accident and all of the accident/crash stats you cite (CrashMap, Microsoft whatever it is, TFL) come from the very same source - STATS19. So those are not all accidents - only those to which police attend or a member of the public filled out at STATS19 form. Only if the police attended and filled out a STATS19 form. Or if a member of the public went to a police and filled out/submitted a STATS19 form. So if, for example, an ambulance attended and police did not the police would not report it.

I actually thought this thread was an early April Fool's joke!

I presume it depends how you categorise local doesn't it - and that is where the question about Malumbu's response is important because where do you think that is categorised - in the Lewisham responses or in the "Not resident of Sydenham Hill or surrounding road"? Ok so does time heal all ills? But do you agree or not that consultations are open to manipulation? I mean do you agree or disagree that the Railton Road LTN consultation was manipulated?

No I was talking about Malumbu's registering of his support of the works suggested in the consultation.... But they did not overwhelming support the council's consultation did they. In fact, the largest response of the three offered to local residents was "do not support". And that is an undeniable fact.

I am not sure I have and even if I have the Malumbu question validates my position surely? No there was not - you're combining two very separate categories - "support" but "support with changes" are two very distinct categories and, as I said before, a free pass for the council to say "well we made a change so that satiates that group of people so we must have their support now". As I have said a lot of times before - potential manipulation of council consultation processes where people who do not have to live with the impact of an intervention can influence the decision-making process based on nothing more than their own ideology or because a lobby group told them to. Surely that is something we all think needs to be eliminated?

But by default East Dulwich residents are also Southwark residents are they not? So, let's take the case of @malumbu and their response to the consultation - they are a self-professed Lewisham resident, clearly don't live close enough to have got a flyer so where do you think their response went? It is an odd distribution because the other category responses are spread more evenly - the overwhelming support for the changes from that group is a statistical anomaly - it was exactly that, on a larger scale, that was the catalyst for the Lambeth cull of responses ion the Railton Road consultation - an odd grouping of responses.. You say "only" 26 people living on the road objected but "only" 23 supported it and "only" 24 supported it with changes. So, as I have said before, and for fear of having to repeat myself, the objections were the highest response of any of the 3 categories from those who lived closest to the road - that is undeniable.

As a cyclist I think it is a number of things: 1) not losing forward momentum 2) trying to get ahead of traffic before the lights go green for other vehicles 3) an ignorance that the red lights don't/should not apply to cyclists. It's interesting because back in 2007 (and I can't determine if they have done one since) TFL did a cyclist red-light jumping survey of a number of sites across London and found that 1 in 6 cyclists were jumping red lights and concluded then that it was not "endemic" but that "at this level may encourage more to do so in the future". I do wonder what the level is now and from unscientific observations I would say it is a lot higher than that now - I have actually been chastised by other cyclists for stopping at/waiting at red lights.

Police do seem to be taking a more proactive approach to enforcing rules for cyclists. I know City of London police have been doing it a lot but I saw a load of PCSOs lingering around the junction of Chelsea Embankment and Albert Bridge last week and saw that they were jumping out and grabbing cyclists who were jumping the red lights - I couldn't see if they were issuing PCNs or just giving warnings.

You'd better take that up with @malumbu as he was the one who made that claim. No point going over and over the point of the thread as that is clear for anyone who cares to read it and the data is there in black and white - the very odd distribution of positive responses of those not resident of Southwark or Lewisham. Perhaps it is a statistical anomaly or perhaps LCC and Southwark Cyclist lobbying efforts swung it in the council's favour - I mean the thread also acknowledges that people on both sides have been trying to manipulate the process - and I though we had all agreed there needs to be a more grown-up approach taken to consultations. My personal feeling is that councils were happy to turn a blind eye to interference when it suited their agenda but keen to police when it didn't. Also, on the subject of whether the cycle lane was a good investment still waiting for someone with the Strava data to share it because apparently it's perfectly reasonable to make a claim that the cycle route is well used because "a quick look on Strava shows tens of thousands of rides along there" and then when challenged to share the data suddenly Strava is "not representative" even though we were asking for comparative data with a cycle lane/route where we all can acknowledge has decent usage.

And the utterly ludicrous thing is the majority of people on both Calton and Townley voted against the CPZs during the consultation and both roads are probably two of the least densely populated roads in the borough and many houses have off-street parking. The council has clearly dropped a CPZ displacement bomb there to create problems elsewhere or as I like to refer to it CIPP (Council Initiated Parking Pressure)! It's utterly shameless - lose an area-wide consultation and come back straight away with a devious plan to roll it out anyway propped up by a few council-friendly lobby groups and locals.

@malumbu is the displaced traffic using Honor Oak Road? It makes sense it would be. Can anyone remember when the no right turn was implemented? I dont remember it being anything but.