Earl Aelfheah

This is quite a serious allegation. What evidence is there of this? Pressured how and by whom? This is quite a spin on ‘it’s been agreed with the emergency services’. They think the vehicles pictured driving through with partially covered plates are the result of ‘poor signage’ 🤔 If it is as they say ‘small numbers’ driving through the square, that doesn’t suggest that the signage is unclear. I mean who honestly believes it’s possible to drive through there without noticing the signs / planters (assuming you’re driving with due care and attention)?! 🤨 Also, haven’t ‘One’ opposed any improvements to the layout / landscaping and signage proposed by Southwark? It’s all a bit desperate. At the height of the LTN ‘controversy’ a number of co-ordinated ‘One’ groups popped up across London. It doesn’t feel like a local grassroots movement, but has all the hallmarks of astroturfing. The lack of transparency about it’s funding / sponsorship and structure does not help with this impression.

Cars are getting bigger and heavier (new cars have become so bloated that half of them are too wide to fit in parking spaces designed to the minimum on-street standards. The average width of a new car in the EU and UK passed 180cm in the first half of 2023, having grown an average of 0.5cm each year since 2001). Speed enforcement is also pretty rare in practice and according to DfT stats, under free-flowing traffic conditions, 50% of car drivers exceed the speed limit on 30mph roads. Hopefully we'll see regulation to stop the car bloat arms race, and perhaps moves to use the same geofenced speed limiters deemed essential for electric hire scooters, but not currently SUVs. Would certainly be more effective and cause less noise, pollution and damage than speed bumps. Also the cost gets passed to the manufactures, rather than public authorities.

Nope, Sparticus started a discussion about the relative costs and revenues associated with car use, which is relevant to ULEZ (a charge on car use). I responded to him because I didn't agree with his point. Your standard knee jerk response to any debate about motor vehicles of 'but what about bikes', is not relevant. You seem obsessed with some imagined, binary opposition - bikes vs cars. Bike lanes have got nothing to do with ULEZ. You're engaged in the dictionary definition of whataboutery. It is a statutory requirement that any net revenue generated by ULEZ is reinvested back into London’s transport network. Again, if you have evidence of law breaking you should probably share it.

This is the definition of whataboutery. How does that relate to a rebuttal of the claim that cars are cash cows? You're obsessed with turning any discussion related to motor vehicles into a discussion on push bikes. It's such an obvious distraction tactic. If you can't defend a position, try and switch to a different topic. What have bike lanes got to do with ULEZ? It's embarrassing.

@Spartacus The benefits of private car ownership accrue primarily to the owner. Some of the direct costs are borne privately too (such as purchasing the car, fuel etc). But many other costs are borne by the public purse. Taxes attempt to recoup some of this. This is so obvious that it doesn't really need stating, except where someone is claiming that cars are some sort of cash cow and trying to minimise, or ignore the externalised costs in their calculations. I've mentioned land use (as just one aspect alongside many others), because land has a value. Huge amounts of public land are given over to people to store private vehicles. If you're discussing the cost of private car ownership, you can't ignore or discount some of those costs just because you've decided you want to. But this is really just another distraction from the topic. The conversation was about ULEZ. If you don't think there are costs to air pollution which are borne by someone other than the driver of a high polluting vehicle, you're wrong. Yet again, your argument seems to be that it's outrageous for the state to try and push some of that cost back to the individual generating them. This seems massively entitled to me; "I want to use any car I choose regardless of the additional costs that choice might impose on others, and I better not be asked to pick up the bill". You've stripped my comment of context, very obviously and very cynically. It's boring. I made this comment in response to Spartacus' suggestion that cars were a massive revenue generator / cash cow. I was pointing out that actually there are lot's of externalised costs which most estimates suggest are greater than the amount raised in taxes and gave a few examples. This was just one. My point is that car drivers constantly fight against attempts to reduce the subsidy that they receive and ULEZ is a classic example. If you choose a car with low emissions, it costs the state less (in managing the health impacts for example) than if you choose a high polluting car. So the question is do you socialise that additional cost, or do you follow a policy of 'polluter pays'. The latter seems to be obviously fairer.

Can't dispute the point, so engage in whataboutery. I haven't called for road charging generally, just challenged the idea that revenues from car taxes cover all of (the suggestion is more than) the costs they externalise. They clearly don't (and car storage is one part of that equation, along with health impacts associated with inactivity, road injuries and deaths, congestion, climate change, air quality etc). I did suggest that the owners of highly polluting vehicles should pay something towards the additional costs that imposes on everyone else. Happy for the same emission standards to be applied to bikes 🤣.

Nope. The 20 minutes on average is from the same RAC Foundation report. The Department for Transport's latest travel survey says 35 minutes. Either way, most cars spend most of their time not moving (at least 90%), Probably more in London.

No, you’re speculating / making assumptions. I’m using figures which come from research by the RAC Foundation The issue is simply that there is a cost to land use. Sparticus wants to talk about costs and revenues. It is a statutory requirement that any net revenue generated by ULEZ is reinvested back into London’s transport network. If you have evidence of law breaking you should probably share it.

According to research by the RAC Foundation, there are about 25 billion car trips per year, and some 27 million cars, suggesting an average of just under 18 trips per car every. Since the duration of the average car trip is about 20 minutes, the typical car is only on the move for 6 hours in the week: for the remaining 162 hours it is stationary – parked. Since there are 168 hours in a week, the typical UK car is parked 96.5% of the time. In London I suspect there are many cars which fail to move from one week to the next. So it's difficult to see how anyone can really argue that significant amounts of land are not given over to car storage. It is undeniably true that this is the case. What is not true is that motoring is a net positive revenue generator. It may be if you completely ignore the substantial externalities of motoring, but this is clearly naïve economics. All serious attempts to estimate the true cost of motoring conclude that it is subsidised (although by exactly how much may reasonably be debated). As for the £130m - it is all reinvested in transport. It. You're suggesting that it's fairly for the marginal costs of high polluting vehicles should be borne by the tax payer, not the polluter. That is wild imo.

They don’t pay the full cost of driving though, despite the moaning. Private cars are effectively subsidised. The amount of land given over to cars, the cost of deaths, injuries, air pollution, greenhouse gasses, congestion etc., these costs are largely externalised and when added to investments in road building and maintenance outweigh the revenues obtained by motorists, probably very substantially.

Well we wouldn’t want to increase investment at all then Best to follow a principle of polluter doesn’t pay and socialise the costs.

At least a small part of the externalised costs are being pushed back to the polluters, and more money can be invested in public transport.

This is tin foil hat stuff. The climate crisis is very real and governments have to take action. ULEZ isn't primarily about climate change, but air quality. The pro-high emission vehicle gang want to argue that drivers of the most polluting cars are being priced off the road, and also that the ULEZ is having no impact on removing older, dirtier vehicles from the road. Can't really be both. And yes, at the least, it also helps raise money. Pollution does costs money. Why should the bill (as well as the terrible health costs to individuals) of private car pollution be entirely externalised? In London, 9,400 premature deaths are attributed to poor air quality and are estimated to cost between £1.4 and £3.7 billion a year to the health service. The evidence shows that even small improvements in air quality can have health benefits.

I don't get the point in them nowadays. They've been replaced by streaming I would have thought.

There isn’t. Perhaps you don’t understand what modal share is. I don’t know and I’m not that interested. Your statement that ‘cycling modal share in London’s is decreasing’, is wrong. More interesting (or perhaps not) is why you want it to be true.

I’m not posting graphs. That’s you. I have linked to the latest TfL report. Cycling modal share in London’s is not decreasing as you have claimed, it’s increased. People can read the report themselves. I have also posted the table from the report for those who can’t be bothered reading the whole report. It shows modal share specifically, by year:

No Rocks. People travelling by bike account for 4.5 percent of all journeys made daily (‘mode share’) up from 3.6 percent in 2019 and the number of “stages” cycled has risen too, despite lower levels of commuting post pandemic. The 1.26m stages cycled daily is the equivalent of about a third of the trips on the entire tube network happening daily, or about a quarter of trips done on the bus network. This is an average for all of London. It’s almost certainly higher on Central London. I know you don’t approve of cycle lanes or any other active travel measures. But please take it to your roads and transport section. You can pursue your crusade there and will no doubt enjoy the echo. You don’t need to spread this nonsense across the rest of the forum.

Sorry Rockets, just to be clear. Are you still claiming that Because nothing you've posted above proves that statement. It all feels like a desperate attempt to obfuscate. Cycling modal share in London is not decreasing.

You said that: This is nonsense. Latest TfL report shows mode share for cycling consistently rising year on year over more than a decade: TfL travel in London -latest report Like I said above, this is a thread about Sadiq Khan's mayoralty. Maybe pick up your anti bike infrastructure crusade over on the transport section.

This is disingenuous nonsense. Despite fewer workers commuting daily into central London, cycling is up on pre-pandemic levels, which is not true for other modes of transport. The number of people cycling in central London has more than doubled since 2000 and cyclists now out number motorists in the City.

It came from a school surveys undertaken by Southwark. With regards CPZ around schools to further reduce school drop offs - It seems to make sense to me. Kind of depends whether you think an increase in the number of kids walking and cycling to school is a sign to stop making improvements. Personally I think you need a bit of stick and carrot - making it both easier / safer for kids to walk and cycle, and more difficult for people to drive and park outside of schools.

What will be instructive, is how many of those posting concerned pictures on social media of rush hour congestion on Streatham High Road, will continue to do so now that they've been successful in ensuring there is also traffic on side streets. In other neighbourhoods where LTNs have been removed and main road traffic congestion has remained high (such as Tooting), all the 'anti-LTN' people who claimed to be desperately concerned about it, oddly disappeared (leaving congestion on main roads and on residential side streets, with no new answers).

I don't agree (I heard Galloway making that jibe - he really is an egotist / self serving imo); Starmer on the other hand strikes me as a decent man, with solid values and a real sense of public service. I agree that we need systemic changes, but that can only happen by working in the system to bring about reform, or through outright revolution (which I don't favour personally). I think you are much more likely to get reform with a Labour government. 100% agree with this. Boris should never have been allowed anywhere near government.

The post Dulwich LTN school survey reported levels of walking and cycling up by 26% and a drop of 26% of use of car to travel to school. We know the answers - kids will walk and cycle to school (and their parents will let them) if they feel it is safe - i.e. if there are quieter routes, segregated bike routes and places to safely cross the road. We should also have more school streets, completely closed to traffic imo. More generally, there needs to be more done to tackle car bloat - the ever increasing size of high bonnet SUVs is incredibly dangerous (8X more likely to kill or seriously injure a child in a collision than a 'standard' car), as well as their adding to congestion and pollution.

The report describes how the effects of the new road layouts were monitored and changes / modifications made to keep traffic moving. It's so disingenuous to portray this as 'failure' of a scheme, when in fact it shows the opposite - how the implementation was undertaken carefully and changes made as needed. Indeed all the monitoring shows that overall the Dulwich LTN has reduced traffic, improved safety, and increased active travel. The one area where there has been an increase in traffic is along a 300 metre stretch of East Dulwich Grove, as a result of east bound traffic turning later - having been routed away from Melbourne Grove south (which has the entrance to ED Charter School on it and is full of kids in the morning and evening rush hours). As for the consultation on the design of the junction - One Dulwich has encouraged people to treat it as a referendum on the LTN. It is not. This is obvious to anyone paying attention, as is their mischief making. The council want views on the design, they are not asking people if they want to reopen Calton Avenue to rat runners.