Rockets

Could it be Rahx3 that a lot of public space is dedicated to cars because, despite all those stats you quote, people choose to own cars? And perhaps that is because they need cars - that their lives don't revolve around a 2km circle and that cycling just doesn't work for them and their family as a viable option for all their travel needs? A car is often the second biggest expense in people's lives yet they continue to want to own and use them - do those behind the war on cars ever take time to consider why? Just because they chose to cycle doesn't mean that everyone else can or will but policies are implemented on the blind assumption that everyone can. Look at Will Norman, he cycles a lot but his boss Sadiq Khan gets transported around in an armour-plated Range Rover - why because Will can but Sadiq can't. In Southwark there are parts of the borough that have low car ownership and parts that have high car ownership - you can't implement policies that presume car ownership is low across the whole borough when the council cites poor public transport, large family size etc as the major reasons why some parts of the borough (like ours) have high car ownership. In the real world, I am afraid, a one-size fits all solution doesn't exist - despite what the pro-cycling/pro-LTN lobby would like everyone to believe.

Ex- some interesting points but..... - I don't think you can lay the blame of the congestion down to people driving before and after the charge comes into effect (and I do chuckle where there is always some excuse that the pro-lobby throw out anytime the stats show their interventions may not be doing what they want it to ;-)) because London is congested all day everyday now - and particularly around the usual rush hour/school drop times and I suspect many people are leaving earlier/later to avoid the chaos (rather than to avoid the charge per se). Interesting you quote the average traffic speeds of 10 - 12 mph since the 30s - did you notice that London now is at 10mph and that is the slowest (by some margin) on the rest of the UK cities in the top 10. Also, why do you think all other UK cities have seen a marked decrease in congestion levels yet London is the only one to record an increase since pre-Covid? Table 1: 10 Most Congested Urban Areas in the U.K - see attachment And I agree that people need a nudge but at what point do we have to say...hang on folks this isn't working and it actually having an adverse impact on the health and wealth of our city? It's been well over two years for a lot of these interventions and it is clear they are not delivering and I think one of the biggest problems in central London is that bus lane infrastructure has been impacted by the provision of desire of provide cycle lanes - look at many of the bridges over the Thames now where buses now have to share a lane with cars. At what point do people need to start questioning whether the investment in cycling infrastructure has been worth it and whether it is having an overall positive or negative impact on London? The recent ONS census showed that in 2011 4.3% of Londoners over the age of 16 commuted to work on a bike and in 2021 that had risen slightly to 5.1% and nowhere near the 1000% increases being promised/lauded during lockdown by pro-LTN advocates. You can't just keep following a policy that is not delivering on the goals it set out and you can't keep going on forever promising the change will come because the negative impact of congestion is being felt by everyone.

Yes aren't there a couple of roads within the LTNs where car ownership is 3 per household? I saw non-Dulwich threads about other LTNs having the similar trends of very high car ownership within LTNs but maybe that is more a reflection of the areas that councils decide to locate LTNs (pandering to the very people who need to change driving habits). What is probably more interesting is to see whether since LTNs went in whether there has been any decline in car ownership within the LTNS - which was something the council promised. My hunch is that there hasn't been any.

Yz871 - I would say, if you can, move to Dulwich - not many people rue their decision to move to the area. It has a great sense of community (people actually talk to one another), Lordship Lane is wonderful to eat, drink and shop, the Village is lovely and the area is surrounded by lots of wonderful green space, the schools are good and you are still within a stone's throw of central London. I know lots of people who have, over the years, moved away from Dulwich to places like Beckenham and all of them wish they hadn't as they miss so much about Dulwich life! Good luck in your decision-making process and I hope to read that you made the move and are joining our community!

Malumbu - we finally agree on something...LTNs are very blunt tools and as we all know blunt tools are not very good at doing the job they were designed for.... Overwhelming evidence LTNs are continually failing to deliver on their stated goals no matter how much polishing of the turd the LTN supporters try to add. Now London, a city where private car ownership has been dropping consistently over the years, is now grinding to a halt and is the world's most congested city - go figure....it's time for people on the pro-side to pull their heads out of the sand and take a step back and look at what is going on around them and admit it is time for another approach.

And the most damning element of that report is that congestion is up 5% in London from pre-Covid levels - makes you, ahem, wonder what happened between pre-Covid and now...... Marry that with fact the report also states that when comparing UK cities every other city in the top 10 in the UK has managed to reduce congestion compared to pre-Covid it makes you wonder what on earth is being done to London. I think London is being taken for a ride (no pun intended) and one day there will be a post-mortem on how the likes of Will Norman and his band of pro-cycling headbangers were allowed to ruin the city quite so much. The decisions taken my the mayor's office and local councils in relation to LTNs etc is clearly an unmitigated disaster that is doing untold harm to the city and it's residents and instead of dealing with the mess they have created they are doubling down and making things worse.

And Will Norman has some front with this tweet, he fails to realise that he is part of the problem and that just adding yet more cycle infrastructure is clearly not the answer.....I love the fact that he cites the bike lane on Blackfriars Road leading to a 5% increase in, one presumes, cycle traffic.....that isn't close to enough when you try to balance that against the negative impact that has had on buses and other transport modes around the area. At some point you have to hope they are smart enough to realise that just adding more cycle infrastructure isn't going to magically fix the problem and that a city like London is more complicated from a journey perspective than they realise. It seems they have never bothered to properly understand the challenge.

London the most congested city in the world....just look at the increase since the pandemic and how it compares to other cities and how they have performed since the pandemic. London isn't working anymore.... https://inrix.com/press-releases/2022-global-traffic-scorecard-uk/

Lambeth's Kerbside Strategy is interesting and one we can all get behind but it does fall into the usual traps that those producing these materials always do which is they focus so much on the ideological objective that there is often very little detail on the strategy or tactics to get there - sell people on the vision not some of the realities of getting there. For example : - councils always default to the "only XX% of people in our borough own cars therefore cars are bad" and then they apply these programmes borough-wide without any consideration for variations in car ownership and the reason for those higher car ownership levels - so, for example, Southwark always bleats on about how many people own cars as a justification for LTNs etc but give no acknowledgement that the ownership figures in the north and south of the borough can vary massively nor the reasons for that (PTAL scores etc). So they dump LTNs in areas like Dulwich that have poor PTAL scores and so people are more reliant on cars. - it doesn't do anything to address or understand the reason why people have cars in the first place or how/why they are used - it does little to address how, at a time of reductions in public transport, what picks up the slack for journeys not done in a car? It's clear cycling is not the only answer but the one council's like to try and over-index on as if is solves every problem - the latest census data shows that for all the money invested in cycling it isn't delivering the desired results - Slide 37 is probably the key slide as it is the Kerbside Pricing Principles - which may well be the underlying trojan horse - to start massively increasing the cost of car owners of on-street parking It will be very interesting to see how it goes for Lambeth as, as many councils have found over LTNs, pretty pictures and "everything will be awesome" superlatives on their vision are very difficult to convert to reality.

On a seperate subject this type of post from the local lobby groups really needs to stop. They take someone's misfortune and try to turn it into something to support their narrative when they know nothing of what happened. They insinuate speeding was involved when they have no clue to the circumstances of the incident. Perhaps they should be more concerned with the well-being of the person who had to be cut from the car rather than to use it to further their own selfish personal crusade.....

Rah x3 that's your interpretation of the data shared on the dashboard. And your interpretation, in my opinion, is not correct - the dashboard shows that there had been some roads that had seen a reduction in traffic (namely the roads within the LTN) but many of the boundary roads/roads outside the LTN had seen increases in traffic. If the council is, indeed, changing the categorisation of the LTNs to avoid detailed scrutiny then that probably shows you the direction of travel in terms of how successful the closures have been. And remember, the council promised us the LTNs could only be considered a success if they reduced traffic for ALL - which clearly hasn't been the case, P.S. did anyone see the census data on car ownership within the LTNs - not a good story for the council given they said car ownership decreases within LTNs.....

Ah and that is the budget that is swelled by the LTN fine bonanza I presume?

In a recent article on whether the council were prioritising gritting for some road users over others Cllr Rose said: “Regrettably after more than a decade of cuts to council funding we’re unable to grit as many roads and pavements as we'd like to, but we do provide salt bins so residents can clear their own streets.” Does anyone know, where the funding for gritting comes from because I would have presumed it was from the council's roads budget which is being massively topped up by the LTN fine revenue?

Clean Air Dulwich making another run on the tone-deaf award of the year. Lordship Lane businesses have been massively impacted by the LTNs (that CAD lobbied for) and now they want to turn what's left of free parking for the shops into bus lanes.... Someone ought to remind them that it was the LTNs that they so love are what is the major cause of public transport delays throughout the capital..... Not sure what planet this group lives on but it is certainly not one that is supportive of the fragile Lordship Lane shop ecosystem ...perhaps they want to see more Joe the Juices replacing independent shops that thrive on the Lane being a destination shopping location...

Labour went out of their way to avoid mentioning LTNs in their campaigning during the local elections so utterly disingenuous for Cllr Williams to suggest the election was won on the subject. Revisionism politics at it's finest, I will give him that!

Cllr Williams was bang out of order for what he said at the beginning - wholly unprofessional but what do we expect from our councillors - everyone knows they were the Tory candidates but it's almost as if Cllr Williams wanted to pre-load the answers and discussion with "but you're Tories" when they made it clear they are residents? Anyone who needs to get a dig in early like that knows that they don't have a rational argument to counter and it is actually shocking that Cllr Williams felt it necessary to take it down that path (although I actually think the two Tory candidates should have had one less of them and one of the resident association leads instead so Cllr Williams couldn't play his card). But both of them make very clear and rational arguments that deserved a response from the councillors. Instead we got Cllr Rose not appearing completely convinced in the stats she regurgitated as she filibuster'd from her prepared comments...and her "mansplaining" moment is just embarrassing and very cringe-worthy - her body language is so aggressive - the banging the table beforehand (but given what happened with TFL this seems to be the go-to place for councillors when faced with people who don't agree with them or oppose their view of the world - shout, scream and make accusations to try to unsettle their opponent). The council may not be on the ropes but they are heading towards them in regard to Dulwich Village closures and you can see why they continue to hide and not engage residents in regard to these matters - they are terrified of facing residents with a view that is opposite to theirs because they have no answers - it's why neither Newens nor Leeming bothered to attend the RA meeting - again they felt, as Cllr Williams did, the need to attack the motives instead of having the conviction and guts to attend and engage. Shameful, cowardly and politically weak behaviour and it will catch-up with them all eventually because it is clear they can't make this issue go away.

Can't help but ponder whether the Turney Road closures might be part of the war the councillors are waging with TFL - those closures came completely out of the blue, seemingly at the behest of no-one, so I wonder what the catalyst was and whether it is the councillors trying to assert their authority?

Yes the fact that Will Norman stepped in to try and get the council/councillors to stop upsetting TFL staff and now Dale talks about the councillors still "wanting blood" is a very worrying sign. It suggests that the disfunction caused by the toxicity between council/councillors and TFL is still very much there and, ultimately, it is us who suffer when two public bodies fall out so spectacularly as it hinders their ability to deliver programmes. I wonder if more will be uncovered in the coming weeks in relation to the 10-tonne block - could be a goldmine of info waiting for an FOI if parts of the council thought it was the wrong thing to do. Does anyone ever hear from our local councillors any more - have they provided any commentary on any of this?

It is a really difficult one isn't it? Firstly the person should not have parked their car there and should not have harassed the person taking the picture. But, taking a picture of someone's car is suspicious in itself no matter how you plan to use it - unless you are a police officer or parking attendant - and if you are caught you may incur the wrath of the person whose vehicle you are recording - because they have no idea who you are or for what purpose you are taking the photos of their car. Naturally they will likely jump to the (at best) "you're going to report me for bad parking and I will get a £65 fine" and you probably have to sell a lot of fish and chips to pay a fine. It's one of the downsides right now of the, sometimes over-zealous, "Citizen Police" approach many are taking right now and the way people are being encouraged to shop on people acting in a bad way (the upside is of course people change their bad behaviours because they know that any member of the public can shop them). The Barbyonabike person in Dulwich Village is doing a great job reporting people who park badly by filming them but then was surprised when someone remonstrated with them a few weeks later because they received a £65 fine because of their reporting. Don't try to police if you're not the police because they (and parking attendants) have the uniform to protect them.

So if Dale is disparaging of his own council's consultation plans are we to assume that, as head of Highways for the council, he doesn't get any input into the process of initiating a consultation or the right of review or veto? The tone of his email suggests councillors (or someone else) is determining highways strategy and proceeding with these consultations no matter what the input of the people with responsibility for them. Do we know who was the architect of, and who are the local champions for, the Turney closure plan? It seems all is not well in Southwark council right now.

I would prefer not to have idiots on any/in mode of transport and think we should all be doing our utmost to protect all road and pavement users from all of them - I don't want to be hit by an SUV and I don't want to be hit by a bike. But we legislate and try to protect people from idiots in cars but are somehow supposed to turn a blind eye to idiots on bikes. And, as a cyclist myself, I hate to admit it but there are far more idiot cyclists around than there used to be. And the fact you don't want to protect pedestrians in the square because it might be inconvenient for cyclists speaks volumes - these are shared spaces and mixing cyclists and pedestrians is like mixing oil and water - especially when you only want to prioritise cyclists over everyone else. On a recent trip into London (train to Victoria and walk to Soho before you start shouting about which mode of transport) I was walking up Regent Street St James and went to cross on the pedestrian crossing in front of the Vue cinema. Green man came on and I started to cross and had to stop suddenly to avoid being hit by a cyclist who had jumped the red light. He then proceeded to cycle on and off the pavements around Piccadilly Circus choosing to jump from road to pedestrian crossing to avoid having to wait at the lights outside Lillywhites. In the same week my wife was in the car and had stopped at the pedestrian crossing at Overhill and Lordship Lane and saw a cyclist jump the red light and run into a mother and her two young children who were crossing - sending them all crashing to the ground. And these are not isolated incidents. Below is a great example from barbyonabike who is probably well known to many in Dulwich (many of whom may have received penalty points for parking illegally in Dulwich Village and being photographed by him) and as much as he hates bad car drivers he hates bad cyclists too. These are not things being reported on Clean Air For All Dulwich that you can challenge as fake - this is a shocking reflection of how bad some cyclists are in the area and why people are massively concerned. Some classic moments in this video, with some superb examples of terrible cycling by Dulwich folks at 0.05/0.40/2.48/3.27/3.54/5.24 and , I especially like the one at 6.26 when the bad cyclist abuses the Barbyonabike who is obeying the rules of the road....this is what we are dealing with constantly in Dulwich and something has to be done. Perhaps we can start a local rogue's gallery of Dulwich cycle offenders based on these videos alone....anyone recognise themselves - come on admit your crimes! ;-) I challenge anyone to watch that video and suggest all is well and that pedestrians are getting the protection they need from cyclists. The point is - DV/Calton is a still junction and, per the Highway Code, pedestrians have priority over cyclists so cyclists should be stopping to let pedestrians use the space. But, very few cyclists seem to realise that, under the new Highway Code rules, they have to give way to pedestrians at junctions and few are doing so at the junction so we need to force the issue and I think making all cyclists dismount is the only way to do it. Much of the problem is the way the council has created that cycle speed lane through the middle of the junction. It should be broken with a stop and give way line at the point outside Knight Frank - would you agree that that is a good compromise if you refuse to agree with Cyclists Dismount?

Which doesn't work for cargo bikes, bikes/trikes for the disabled, recumbents and, depending on the setup, some bikes with kids in/on/on tow. It's also a total pain if you're using cycle shoes with cleats And it's pretty much unenforceable. Sorry Ex- I was forgetting the first rule of active travel - do nothing that even slightly inconveniences cyclists and build everything around their, and only their, specific needs.....

Northern - yes, absolutely without a doubt speeding bikes, e-scooters and mopeds are the biggest danger to pedestrians right now at that junction. Are there cars that drive through the junction? Yes, there are, but I have never seen any going more than walking pace - often with drivers looking utterly confused by the signage and realising that they may be getting a fine (just look at the plethora of videos CAD has posted - all the cars are crawling through the junction far slower than a lot of bikes fly through it) - even those who have deliberately covered their numbers plates are driving slowly due to the layout. The weekends are terrible for having to dodge "Olympic" cyclists bombing down Calton - it's that sound of an expensive cogset and cassette approaching at speed that strikes fear into many residents using the junction! And yes I did see the report of the collision with a child on Clean Air For All Dulwich but I also heard about it from my neighbours (although I cannot vouch for where they got the info from). Would you not agree that making cyclists dismount would be a sensible approach to ensure safety for all users of the junction - given the challenges always associated with mixing active travel types in a confined area - especially one that is at the bottom of a hill?

Ex- I am absolutely keen on a crackdown on illegal driving (and anyone who crosses the threshold of the junction will get a ticket which should be disincentive enough for all but the most hardened rule breakers) but Clean Air Dulwich have been campaigning, and lobbying the council and councillors, for a return of the old measures (the physical barrier) and a return to the permanent closure of the junction which whilst stops an vehicular traffic also restricts emergency service access and impacts response times. And in equal measure I am keen to see a clampdown on pavement-riding, RLJ cyclists etc but the issue there is cyclists can jump red lights without any fear of fine or retrospective action for their law breaking and can do so scott-free - which is why there is such a huge problem with it at the moment. I have never seen CAD say anything about the biggest issue at the DV junction which is speeding cyclists (I read that there was an accident involving a child and a cyclist at the DV junction a week or so) - just an almost obsessional fixation with cars driving through the junction (at much slower speeds then cyclists go through it I hasten to add). My personal opinion is that junction needs to be a cyclists dismount area (especially for anyone coming down Calton Avenue) as it is incredibly dangerous at the moment and that is the feedback I left when I responded to the consultation. I note today that CAD has been talking again about the coaches (but they must read this forum as they have clarified that they accept that these coaches mean a reduction in private use!! ;-)) and they say that the "the Foundations' coach service create a hostile and dangerous environment for sustainable, active travel" which is exactly the way many pedestrians feel cyclists are making the DV junction - but CAD never mentions this yet purports to be a mouthpiece for local parents - I think what they mean to say is they are a mouthpiece for local cycling parents.

The Tweets don't say that at all. You've made a leap of logic so big you could probably commute to the City on it... Errrrr...I will just leave this here.... If you pitch one short I will knock it out of the ground.....;-)