Earl Aelfheah

I don't want to comment on a specific case that I don't know the details of. The judge will have seen all the evidence and I'm not going to assume he got it wrong based on some headlines (that's not to say he couldn't have got it wrong, just that I'm not in a position to second guess it with none of the facts). But in general, it is the case that people have been imprisoned for causing serious injury or even death as the result of cycling into people.

Not particularly new, but finally visited Evi's and Trinco recently and really enjoyed both. Evi's a bit expensive imo, but excellent food and really nice 'vibe'.

It hasn’t been swerved. Without licensing it would be meaningless / unenforceable, and with licensing you would disincentivise cycling. This would encourage people to shift to more dangerous forms of motorised transport. For those who kept cycling, you would also reduce the well documented effect of ‘safety in numbers’ leading to more casualties. In other words, it would very likely be counterproductive. But really the onus is on those who want to create new regulations to explain why it would be proportionate in terms of the time, cost, and impact, and how tackling cyclists pedalling too fast should be a priority over other things. There is very little evidence (is there any), that people are regularly pedalling at speeds in excess of 20, 30, or 40 mph. Are speeding cyclists a big problem? Most people probably travel around on bike at about 12mph. Also, a 10kg bicycle is not remotely as dangerous as a 2 ton vehicle when both are travelling at the same speed. Bicycles do not cause tens of thousands of deaths and serious injuries, or millions of pounds of property damage each year (no that doesn’t mean they can’t cause any damage Rockets). So it would be a hugely disproportionate thing to do, even without the inevitable, negative, unintended consequences (some of which I’ve pointed out above). It’s why whenever it’s considered and assessed it’s quickly dismissed. For the cost of setting something like that up, you could actually do loads of other things that would have a far, far greater impact on road safety. The opportunity cost is ridiculous. No one has a problem with it in theory. Just in practice.

You may not agree with their actions, but we know who our councillors are, minutes of decisions are all published. You can discuss the issues with them and they are elected and accountable. It hardly the same as someone anonymously setting up a website and sending out emails under a pseudonym claiming to speak for thousands of people.

It’s actually a serious point (albeit illustrated a little tongue in cheek. ‘One Dulwich’ is just a pseudonym for who knows who (is it you Rockets, or a local Conservative MP perhaps)? There is no transparency whatsoever. I could set up a website called ‘one Dulwich’ tomorrow and start posting updates and there would be zero recourse because that is all this ‘organisation’ has done. It has no constitution or formal governance and no accountability. Until we have an idea who is behind these ‘updates’ they may just as well be coming from anyone, even me. When you Rockets, regularly posts updates from ‘One Dulwich’ you are effectively doing what I have done above. That’s the point. You should read the latest campaign update above. It makes the arguments very clearly. …arguably more thoughtfully and rationally than the other One Dulwich

Thank you Rockets. I’ll try and post regular campaign updates, alongside any other anonymous individuals who wish to adopt the pseudonym One Dulwich.

Campaign Update | 16 Jan Why does Southwark need low traffic neighbourhoods? A low traffic neighbourhood is a network of streets from which “through” motor traffic has been removed – this means traffic travelling through an area, not accessing a residence inside it. It is usually a whole area, bordered by A-roads, railways or other boundaries, rather than one or two streets. Every street is still accessible by vehicle, but barriers like bollards, planters or ‘camera gates’ prevent vehicles taking a short cut across the area. Low traffic neighbourhoods, LTNs for short, have been found to increase walking and cycling, make streets safer, and reduce driving and car ownership. Why do we need low traffic neighbourhoods? Four reasons 1. Too many motor vehicles dominate our roads In 2019 there were over 30,000 injuries reported due to road traffic collisions in London. Of those 3,780 were serious and there were 125 deaths due to road violence. Motor vehicle traffic is also a major contributor to air pollution which results in an estimated 9,500 early deaths per year in London. Transport accounts for 25% of carbon emissions in Southwark. Southwark Council has declared a Climate Emergency and must reduce the number of motor vehicles on our streets urgently. We are already seeing impacts due to climate change so radical change is needed. Due to their high carbon cost, electric vehicles can only be a small part of the solution. In Southwark, 60% of households do not have access to a car, which is skewed towards people on lower incomes, yet groups that do not have access to a car are most likely to be harmed by them. Disabled people and those with health conditions make 32% fewer car trips in London, yet as pedestrians, disabled people are five times as likely to be injured by a driver than non-disabled people. Motor traffic has risen steeply in the last ten years across the country, and Southwark is no exception. Between 2013 and 2019, the number of miles driven on Southwark’s roads rose by 68.8 million miles or 15%. 2. Traffic has risen most on minor roads While the number of miles driven on A and B roads in London has actually fallen slightly in the last ten years, on C or unclassified roads it’s risen by a massive 72% – most likely due to sat navs directing drivers away from main roads. 3. Too much traffic on minor roads is dangerous Minor streets aren’t designed to carry lots of traffic. Blind corners and few crossings means speeding in particular has a great impact. Minor roads are more dangerous for main roads, particularly for children. Each mile driven on a minor urban road, results in 17% more killed or seriously injured pedestrians than a mile driven on an urban A road. Specifically, on urban roads, driving a mile on a minor urban road is twice as likely to kill or seriously injure a child pedestrian, and three times more likely to kill or seriously injure a child cyclist, compared to driving a mile on an urban A road. TfL has recently found that while overall road casualties have decreased, there has been an increase for people walking and cycling and this increase is increasing at almost double the rate on minor roads. 4. Too much traffic on minor roads stops people walking & cycling Our traffic-heavy streets put people off walking or cycling, especially more vulnerable groups like children and the elderly. Road danger and too much traffic are cited as the greatest barrier to people cycling more. The solution to this is either protected space for cycling or reducing motor traffic volume. TfL and the DfT have guidance that suggests traffic needs to be below certain levels for people to cycling without protected space. It would not be practical to build protected cycling lanes on every minor road in Southwark and this would not benefit people walking, since traffic volume impacts those trips as well. A third of Londoner’s car journeys are 2km or less, a distance that could be walked in 25 minutes. Two-thirds of trips are less than 5km and can be cycled in under 20 minutes. Distance is not what prevents most Londoners from walking and cycling. This lack of physical activity is having a catastrophic effect on the nation’s health – cancer, heart disease and depression are all linked to sedentary lifestyles. Southwark is no different – our children have one of the worst rates of childhood obesity in the UK. These problems can be solved by low traffic neighbourhoods Low traffic neighbourhoods have three outcomes, 1) they stop rat running motor vehicles, returning through traffic to the strategic road network (unless they are accessing the neighbourhood, 2) they reduce short car trips made by local residents, and they 3) create space for walking, cycling, scooting and wheeling. LTNs can can reduce vehicles inside the area by 50-90%, creating a quiet network of streets where anyone can walk, cycle or use their wheelchair in the middle of the road. They enable active travel, healthy lifestyles, less car use, fewer injuries and deaths, cleaner air and fewer carbon emissions. They are not a substitute for other measures including pollution and speed control measures, and main road interventions including protected cycleways and bus lanes, but with 91% of people in London living on minor roads (this varies little by age, gender, income, disability and ethnicity), LTNs will play a key role in transforming Southwark. Read on to find out more. What does research and data show? People walk and cycle more in LTNs By providing a safer environment LTNs enable more people to walk and cycle. Waltham Forest’s first low traffic neighbourhoods were implemented in 2015 so there has been time to study them in detail. Residents within an LTN walked 115 minutes more per week and cycled 20 minutes more. This was much larger than in areas that received other walking and cycling schemes without LTNs. King’s College London also found that increased active travel leads to longer life expectancy for residents in Waltham Forest. Hackney saw similar results in the 10 years between 2001 and 2011 when it implemented low traffic neighbourhoods and installed modal filters. Cycling trips more than tripled in this time. Manual counts were taken to gauge the impact of the Dulwich Village modal filters on cycling levels. The estimated number of school children cycling increased by seven times compared to a much smaller increase in a control site. There was also a higher proportion of women cycling compared to the control site. Lambeth found that cycling increased by 51% within the Railton LTN and 32% across the area. Additionally it increased by 65% and 84% on Railton Road and Shakespeare Road, two through roads that are now filtered. Many NHS Trusts in London have come out in support of Low Traffic Neighbourhoods due to the numerous health benefits they bring. Guy’s and St Thomas’ Charity is funding 3 LTNs in Southwark, in Brunswick Park, North Peckham and East Faraday. These schemes benefit schools in the area with goals to promote active travel among pupils. LTNs reduce traffic volume and car ownership Evidence from Hackney and Waltham Forest shows that low traffic neighbourhoods reduce car journeys and car ownership. Traffic is not just displaced and overall traffic in the area drops. This may take some time as when new schemes go in it takes time for them to bed in. People get used to the changes and GPS apps update. Over time some people also change their mode of travel and switch car trips to walking and cycling ones. While some car journeys will take alternative routes this must be viewed in the context of traffic only increasing on minor roads in the last decade as shown above. From a traffic management standpoint it is also much more difficult to manage traffic if it avoids signalised crossings by taking back routes. There are some claims that LTN trials have increased congestion on boundary roads. It’s important to note that traffic has increased all across London since Covid-19 due to less people taking public transportation, but while we wait for Southwark to release monitoring data, we’ve heard from residents that traffic near these schemes is no worse than it was prior to them being implemented. Both Lambeth and Hackney have released monitoring on LTNs as part of their Covid-19 transport response. They found LTNs did not increase overall traffic on surrounding main roads. Additional monitoring in Lambeth has shown a 31% decrease in traffic and 23% decrease in HGVs in and around the Railton LTN. In addition to cycling tripling in Hackney, car journeys also halved in the 10 years the council implemented LTNs and modal filters. In Waltham Forest traffic levels fell by 56% on roads within the LTN with a 16% drop overall resulting in 10,000 motor car journeys disappearing. This is due to traffic evaporation. By reducing road capacity for motor vehicles, traffic decreases. This has been seen in many places around the world. When walking and cycling are made more safe and convenient, and driving slightly less convenient for short trips, fewer people choose to get in their cars. Some people will stop making particular trips, combine multiple trips into one, change destination, travel at a less congested time, or switch to public transport, walking or cycling. King’s College London also found that Waltham Forest’s low traffic neighbourhoods reduced air pollution. Another study showed a dramatic drop in illegal air quality levels, including on main roads. It was also found that car ownership within LTNs dropped 6% after two years. This was much larger than other areas where other walking and cycling schemes were implemented. Surveys have also been done that also show evidence of lower car ownership after an LTN is implemented. LTNs improve road safety By reducing traffic volume, road safety within an LTN improves. As mentioned above, motor traffic on minor roads is more dangerous than main roads, and collisions on minor roads have been increasing at a much higher rate than on major roads according to TfL. In Waltham Forest there was a 70% reduction in road traffic injury per trip on roads within the LTN for people walking, cycling and in motor vehicles. There was also no negative impact on boundary roads. Many main road collisions occur at junctions with minor roads. Removing rat running traffic reduces these junction movements making them safer. Modal filters placed at junctions with main roads eliminate all motor traffic movements. LTNs see reductions in street crime Waltham Forest saw a 10% reduction in street crime within their LTNs and a larger decrease in violent crime. No displacement to other areas was found. This could perhaps be due to more eyes on the street, an idea Jane Jacobs popularised in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. This requires neighbourhoods that encourage people to be out on the street, not ones that just have passing cars. All About LTNs | Better Streets For Southwark I’m sorry, who exactly am I masquerading as?

That’s true. But also, to clarify, as the leader and official spokesperson for the ‘One’ group, which includes One Dulwich, as of this afternoon we do support LTNs.

We don’t know whether they’re a political Trojan horse or not. Don’t you think that’s a problem? You say ‘they’ keep fighting, but who exactly are ‘they’. Who runs ‘One London’? The lack of transparency is really quite remarkable What’s to stop me calling myself a spokesperson for One London, seeing as it has no constitution, governance or declared structure? In fact I am the leader of One Dulwich. We are now strongly in favour of LTNs after a road to Damascus conversion

Let me guess, all these groups are called ‘One something’ and we don’t know who runs any of them, or how they’re funded. #astroturfing.

This isn't true. I highlighted the number of recorded collisions in a very specific area and linked to the data. You spent pages trying to minimise them. A quick tip. If you're going criticise someone pointing out that a bicycle is not as dangerous as a car, and imply that it minimises an accident which is described later (clearly nonsense), it's best not to have a history of arguing that hundreds of recorded crashes aren't that big a deal in light of the number of car journeys that take place locally. Especially when it's recorded for everyone to go back and see.

It’s the same people creating multiple threads to moan about the enforcement of existing road rules, calling for the implementation of new ones. 🤷‍♂️ This isn’t true. I linked you to a map showing the number of recorded collisions. You weren’t establishing any facts, you were presented with them. You kept suggesting it didn’t amount to that many / they weren’t that frequent considering how many journeys there are. That is minimising. Nothing else. Because they involved cars

Just got a (very quick) response after I emailed Southwark on this. In response to the question: “Please could you let me know how many PCNs were issued in relation to Southwark School Streets in the last year?”, they confirmed there were 28,619.

You spent pages trying to present different cuts of local collision data all designed to minimise the number of accidents recorded locally. You provided a screen shot centred on an area covering a 1.1km stretch of lordship lane, stretching roughly from the junction of East Dulwich Grove down to the junction with Landells road (missing all the major junctions) and 2.8km across (approximately 1.5 km to either side of it. You pointed out that there were ‘only’ 46 recorded crashes over the course of the year.This is minimising the seriousness of real world collisions. i pointed out that bicycles and motor vehicles do not pose the same risk. Which is a matter of fact, and you accused me of minimising a specific collision involving Moovarts neighbour which I had made no reference to. People can make there own judgments about you and your behaviour Here is a petition that has been started following just the latest local collision in which a van destroyed a traffic island and rolled itself last week, should anyone wish to sign it: https://www.change.org/p/implement-a-zebra-crossing-on-dulwich-common-for-pedestrian-safety

I do need to correct an earlier mistake. I misremembered research I’d read on the impact of introducing mandatory helmet laws, with mandatory registration. Should have checked that first. I believe the same outcome is very likely however; a disincentive to cycle. Meaning fewer people exercising (with associated reductions in all cause mortality), and a decrease in the safety that comes with numbers. I have deleted the personal comment. People can see that I was not commenting on Moovarts neighbour.

You spent pages minimising crash data for the local area because it involves motor vehicles. l have never once said that an actual collision was not serious (whatever the vehicle involved). What I have said is that bicycles and motor vehicles do not pose the same risk. Which is a matter of fact. I do not want to see people behaving in ways that endanger others. You are not interested in a good faith discussion. It’s shameful. Classic. No comment because it doesn’t say what you are insinuating. I have never minimised a real life collision. You downplayed hundreds reflected in local crash data.

Authorities already have powers to issue fines and on extreme cases do prosecute those cycling dangerously. I am questioning your second point though. Would forcing bikes to have a number plate / ‘identifying mark’ make people safer? I believe it would be hugely expensive and complicated to administer and I doubt very much that it would improve safety. It could very well reduce safety if it led to fewer people cycling, as well as having other negative societal impacts on health and the environment. It’s not whataboutery to question whether the opportunity cost is way too high. Why prioritise this measure over many others which would do much more to achieve your stated aim? I have never minimised a real world collision, unlike yourself, arguing over how many car crashes were too many on a previous thread.

Do anyone really believe that a bicycle poses an equivalent risk to others as a car? Anyone? So why would you treat them as equivalent? Do you think that licencing bicycles and treating them as if they are cars, is the most important thing we could do to reduce the thousands of deaths and serious injuries on our streets each year? Is it in the top 10 even? I nearly mentioned it and then decided not to 🤣

...BTW, would people also restrict the age of those allowed to cycle to match cars?

...and here we go again. Let's not talk about the thousands of casualties last year in Southwark who were involved in collisions involving motor vehicles. Norway and Japan, plus quite a few US state have introduced it. Obviously stupid and does anyone believe it wouldn't lead to a drop in the number of people cycling? Really? This pretty much sums up my view on it https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2019/mar/18/should-cyclists-be-licensed-and-insured-robert-winston

Of course, bicycles should not be ridden on the pavement. If you're caught doing this, you will be issued with a penalty as things stand. It is an issue of enforcement, not regulation. And of course, you are still much more likely to be killed or seriously injured as a pedestrian even on a pavement, by a motor vehicles than a bicycle (just to inject some perspective). Where ever barriers to cycling have been introduced it has reduced the number of people cycling and increased all cause mortality.

E-bikes are regulated already. Those with throttles are classed as motorbikes and must be licenced. There are too many illegal, unlicensed electric motorbikes on the roads for sure. But this is a different issue to pedal bikes being classed and / or treated as motor vehicles (which they are not).

Even if it led to an decrease in the number of cyclists, an increase in all cause mortality, pollution and road injuries?

This still ignores basic physics. A bicycle travelling at 10 mph doesn't remotely pose the same threat as a motor vehicle travelling at the same speed. And without licencing, there is no way I can see of enforcing speed limits. But my biggest objection (as with these threads generally) is that it's displacement activity. It's focussing on a minor issue, whilst ignoring the really serious issue of people killed and seriously injured on our streets and the increasing incidence of hit and runs.

Because it would be entirely disproportionate and would require a system of licencing, which would do more harm than good. Would you also apply the same rules that apply to HGVs to cars and motorbikes? By ensuring that bicycles had to be registered, licenced and insured (which is what this would mean in practice). you would discourage cycling. That would cost health and the environment and make it more dangerous for those who continued to cycle as they would be fewer in number. The only argument for it, is one of false equivalence. It's not remotely based on decreasing actual road danger on improving the environment, health outcomes, congestion, or the economy, or any other objective argument one could (conversely) make for wanting to encourage cycling. And again, why focus your efforts on reducing the number of cyclists, instead of measures to address the thousands of killed and seriously injured on our streets?