wulfhound

Why are they doing it? Any reason given?

If you undertake a car doing 20mph, you're either Lance Armstrong, an idiot, or both. Personally if I'm on a bike & the traffic's doing a steady 20, I find it much easier to just flow with it, same as I would driving. No need to be in at the side of the road dodging doors, drains, potholes, glass, kids and dogs, and much less likely to get taken out by anyone making a turn without checking mirrors. For the average quick-ish cyclist, 20's great.. if you're slower it doesn't help so much, and if you're *really* fast it's perhaps something of an irriation, IDK. Anyway, rather than anecdote, surely better to look at data? These schemes are being rolled out widely enough now that if it makes a difference, the evidence will accumulate very quickly, for better or worse.

Think about it - most of our journey *time* (as opposed to *distance*) driving in Inner London is spent waiting at lights, or queuing in slow moving traffic (unless you do most of your driving after 8pm ish). The journey time average speed for driving in London during the day is about 12mph, and has been for years. So there's an average speed and a peak speed. Bringing the peak down doesn't affect the average by much at all, but it does greatly reduce the likelihood of *severe* collisions, which, for cars/vans/taxis, tend to occur at or near peak speed. The figure quoted by bawdy-nan (10-25 seconds per mile) suggests 2 minutes on a 6 mile journey - 32 minutes instead of 30. Journey time *reliability* actually *improves*, because the worse-than-average journeys are affected less than better-than-average. I'm basing on DfT figures, which are approx as follows: Fatal accident - ?1.7m Serious injury - ?200k (AFAIK this means injury requiring at least an overnight stay in hospital) Slight injury - ?15k (injury requiring hospital treatment but not overnight stay) ( see https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/244913/rrcgb2012-02.pdf for how they figured it out - it appears to have been prepared by civil servants with no particular axe to grind, not lobbyists ) These figures are averages - individual cases will vary enormously. And LB Southwark STATS19 (police road casualty data) for 2013: Fatal: 5 Serious: 82 Slight: 905 ... which in fact yields a much larger number than ?15m. No doubt these figures are debatable, but I think they help get a handle on the scale of the problem. Because the South Circular is a Red Route, i.e. it's regulated by TfL not LB Southwark. TfL has decided that the limit on Red Routes should stay 30 for the time being.. you'd have to be pretty brave to try and cross that anywhere apart from a designated crossing, and they've legalised cycling on the pavement along most of it, so it probably makes sense for it to stay 30.

Not really. The arguments for 20 are only strong because of its very minimal impact on most Inner London journey times. 20 greatly reduces mortality in collisions involving cars (when compared to 30), but even 10mph won't do that for collisions involving lorries. We'll have to agree to disagree. The net savings from reduced injury rate are likely to be significant. I started off thinking that as well. A few things that changed my mind: - CrashMap data ( http://crashmap.co.uk/Search ), the majority of the problem is on the major roads. Seems sensible to apply the remedy where the problem is greatest. - Traffic count data e.g. http://www.southwark.gov.uk/downloads/download/3056/transport_data which shows that, however much we might wish it to be otherwise, there is no clear distinction in traffic volume between main and minor roads in the area. Lordship Lane is plainly a main road, but how about Dulwich Village? Court Lane? - The main roads tend to be high streets as well, with lots of pedestrians. So *some* bits of main road should probably be 20 for that reason. Near schools there's a strong case for it too. At that point you end up with a confusing, piecemeal patchwork, the very complaint which started this thread. Much better to have a clear, area-wide policy. - As an anti rat-running measure it again seems persuasive at first to have the split, but at the times when most of the rat-running happens, the average (not peak) speed on the main roads is below 20 anyway. You still save time by taking short cuts, even at 20. To make much of a dent in peak time rat running would require a much lower limit again, not something that's likely to happen.

Yes, need for lower limits - because it's crawl-sprint-crawl-sprint. Guess which bit kills and injures. And most of those accidents are low severity, unless an HGV is involved. That's part of the reason for the seemingly high rate of bus/HGV vs cyclist fatalities in central London: the cars in zone 1 mostly aren't going fast enough to kill the relatively fit/healthy people that tend to be on bikes there. There are plenty of car vs bike collisions (ask any paramedic), but in the centre of town they're rarely fatal. In the suburbs where traffic speeds are higher, a lot more people get killed by cars. Quite how getting from one end of the borough to the other in 15-20 minutes is crawling, I fail to see. At a population level, it's painfully clear that we are indeed "all too stupid". Or rather, that everybody makes mistakes sometimes. That's not exactly limited to the roads - evidence of people having made bad life choices of one sort or another is everywhere. Let me give another example: I decide to trim my front hedge with a power trimmer. Could have used secaturs but it would have taken a bit longer, plus I'm lazy. A plugged-in iphone zombie walks straight in to me while texting, with predictable results. Whose fault - theirs for general Darwin-award-grade idiocy, or mine for bringing hazardous gear out in public? The people who make the decisions have to trade off between convenience for drivers, and whether or not the public realm should be forgiving of peoples' mistakes. In a dense, built up area like the London Borough of Southwark, 20mph is a sensible balance to strike. Somewhere with longer distances - rural Norfolk, say - it wouldn't be; nor on roads like the A102(M) where there simply aren't any vulnerable users to worry about.

Because there are MORE 20MPH ZONES. No cyclists have been killed on motorways in the past 12 months. Does that mean it's safe to cycle on the motorway..? Ditto, nobody has ever been killed bungee jumping out of an airliner. The key measure is _risk per unit exposure_. With more 20mph zones, total exposure is higher & so the total number of incidents in 20mph zones will go up. The correct measure is to look at before/after statistics for a given neighbourhood. The problem is that even skilful motorists can't deal with other users being stupid. In a built-up, dense, urban area, the probability of encountering stupid is high. The philosophy behind 20mph is to design in a way that is somewhat forgiving of that stupidity. And it also recognises that the person driving is the one bringing the danger to the situation - even if they are safe and skilful. Put it this way: if I'm driving and a drunk walks out in front of me without looking, whose fault is it? In the immediate - clearly the drunk's, 100%. Yet, indirectly, by choosing to drive at all, I've contributed to conditions that make it hazardous for him to be staggering about. By keeping speeds down, the severity of that kind of unavoidable accident is somewhat reduced. Public space in a big city needs to be at least somewhat forgiving of stupidity: to err is human, and all that. Anyhow, the trip-average speed in London is far less than 20mph. Driving the clear bits at 30 instead of 20 saves virtually no time, as at most times of day you'll spend most of your journey in jams or at lights. At a steady 20, Waterloo Bridge to Goose Green is under 15 minutes.. it's not the speed limit that's the problem.

From 2018, in theory at least, you'll be able to get a Thameslink from Herne Hill & change at Farringdon. Under an hour the whole way & hopefully only ?10 ish.

Cyclists cannot be required by law to obey general speed limits, but they can be charged with the offence of reckless cycling. Just keep pace with the car in front - they're sure to be obeying the limit.. right? Average 6 deaths, 100 serious injuries & 800 minor injuries per year borough-wide. That's on the same scale as gang violence - and costs far, far more than ?1.5M - more like ?15M per year. On that basis, even a 10% reduction would pay for itself within a year. Other LAs who've rolled out 20mph see a greater reduction than that.

The problem with that is you end up with cars going the long way around on *residential* roads, they end up spending more time in total on those roads which are supposed to be quieter ones. The vast majority of people would like to see less traffic on minor residential roads - even if they don't agree about how much inconvenience it's worth to get it. Green Dale? Hundreds a day in the summer. It's the main lower-traffic cycle route between Dulwich / Upper Norwood / Crystal Palace / Sydenham and London Bridge / City / Silicon Roundabout. Not quite true: I've personally experienced a handful of near-misses there on a bike & know others (all of us with 10+ years experience riding on London roads) who also have. Southwark's ambitions to get more people cycling outside of the usual demographic means there are bound to be increasingly more novices and otherwise vulnerable riders on the road who might well not have anticipated the other side's error. The other side of the coin is council/police unwillingness or inability to do anything about the very poor standard of a minority of drivers - not one single one of these near-misses would have happened if the drivers involved had used their eyes and followed the law and the Highway Code - but getting that cleaned up seems almost impossible, at least nowhere I've ever been in this country has done it successfully.

It appears to me that the NRT arises from two seperate but perhaps overlapping agendas: 1) cyclists who are concerned about the right-hook hazard & hope to see traffic reduction on Calton Ave. 2) LBS traffic management people who think that Option 7 *without* NRT will cause unacceptable backlogs on Townley Road. Its appearance in the final design has more to do with (2), but SRS and friends are supporting it for (1). Given that Option 7, **with or without NRT**, is obviously the gold standard design for pedestrians and especially school kids, would it not make more sense to build it & trial its option without NRT, with the option of implementing NRT (either on a blanket basis or at particular times of day) if it proves to be a problem? And whatever happens, JAGS (not just a private school, but a private *business*) must not be allowed to dump additional traffic on to Greendale - making a profit from endangering the public. About time the schools took some responsibility for the problems their coaches cause too.

That.

Drive to West Dulwich or Sydenham Hill, then train to Victoria & the Circle round to Paddington, and Heathrow Express. The line in to Victoria gets pretty jammed further in to town, but getting on with suitcases at SH or WD should be fine. The Circle VIC-PAD isn't bad either, as rush hour tubes go. That said, if there's more than one of you going, and you've got a good deal on parking, it's cheaper to drive. HEX is a rip off for groups and families. Roll on Crossrail!

Highways aren't something we have to worry about around here. There was one planned (Penge to City via ED), it was cancelled before it ever got off the drawing board, I can't see it coming back unless the next Mayor goes superhighway-crazy. So in ED we're left with Quietways and Spine, which seem to be roughly the same thing. AFAIK, the yellow notices on lamp posts and the web page with feedback like they did for Townley are one and the same thing. The cycling strategy consultation? No idea either - seems mostly warm words that they may or may not stick to, I'm not sure what the point of consulting on it is. To me it reads the same as their glossy manifesto web sites in election year, how much of that stuff ever actually happens? They have to be impartial in assessing feedback, yes, but it's worth understanding that what they want to build is a transport network; again, consultations are *not* a referendum or popularity contest, the process is much more like a planning application. Of a different kind to main roads and railways, yes, but perhaps no less important in years to come. 25% population growth in London by 2030 = 25% more cars on the roads, if they're not careful. Population growth is going to happen whether we like it or not - even if anti-immigration parties gain power, London is where all the jobs are, and with a season ticket from the Home Counties costing upwards of ?3,000/year to stand for 45 mins each way on a miserable cattle truck, it's where everyone will want to live. Consider this: say population growth causes the 1960s-1990s GLC road plans to get resurrected, or Boris' grand plan to put the South Circular in a tunnel, how much will they value local concerns then? The answer on infrastructure mega-projects is 100% sweet F.A. Says someone whose office is next door to a Supersewer drilling site :(. In other words, perhaps be grateful it's only a cycle network - yes, it might mean more jams or less parking in places, but in each of the five decades up to the 90s, they razed entire neighbourhoods in the name of getting people from A to B. At one point there were deadly serious, centrally backed & well-funded plans to put a 8-lane motorway smack through the middle of Denmark Hill & Bellenden Road. Perspective?

A case for a cycle track through the woods, perhaps? Up Cox's Walk and on towards the existing track which comes out opposite Sydenham Hill station (don't know it's name, sorry). It's a bit far for primary children to walk each way daily, but a piece of cake by bike & with no traffic the whole way from Dulwich Common to Sydenham Hill station.

Good question.. that web site isn't what you or I would normally think of as a consultation (the kind legally required by, IIRC, the Town and Country Planning Act(?)), seems more like a fishing trip / knowledge gathering exercise to me. On the Waterloo-Greenwich, which they're doing right now, they had a bunch of neighbourhood-level consultations on every individual change, I'm not sure whether it was TfL or LBS who ran the process, but on council-controlled roads it'll be the counicl that takes the final decision. Quietways run across multiple boroughs, and may cross TfL-controlled roads, so it's not all in one place for any one route. Most were on stuff like rearranging bollards, dropped kerbs, moving parking bays around a bit, tightening up junction geometry; IIRC there was talk of putting new crossings (bike-zebra or lights, don't know which) where the route crosses a couple of busy roads. The biggest controversy seems to be in relation to existing anti-motorbike barriers - some bikes can't get through them (especially those used by disabled people), but residents are worried about anti-social idiots on mopeds using it as a cut-through. So I think it's a fairly safe assumption that the process looks something like this: 1) Line On Map. Council / TfL decide roughly where they'd like the route to go. We are here => 2) Knowledge gathering. They put the proposed route up on a site like the above, and see what people say about it. 3) Reviews, designs and suchlike. Council officers, Sustrans or whoever review everything that's been gathered & try to design something that fits the available budget and political constraints (bearing in mind some stuff that people ask for may fall well outside of either) & fixes the worst problems identified in (2). Fixing could mean anything up to and including reengineering a junction or rerouting the route, the former is expensive though so there's not likely to be too much of it on any given route. 4) Once they think they've got the design right, each element goes out for the legally required consultation to local residents and various statutory bodies. It's worth bearing in mind that consultations are not referendums: quality of responses may count for as much as quantity. 5) Make any changes in response to the statutory consultation, and then build it.

LCN are the oldest. Goes at least back as far as Ken Livingstone's first term as Mayor, maybe a lot further (think its origins may even be GLC). Commissioned London-wide but implemented by the boroughs, so it varies enormously in quality even on the same route (mostly depending on whether the borough responsible gave a damn). When I say enormously, anything from off-road cycle track like Green Dale and Surrey Canal to 30mph "A" roads with no cycle facilities at all. **On the same route**. Which is, frankly, stupid. Although the LCN is no longer funded (Boris axed that early on), & some officials might regard it as no longer existent, they still get used a lot by commuters as the signage is there and they're, well, better than nothing. Superhighways. These are identified as Boris' brain child, hence the blue paint to go with his Barclays Boris Bikes. Broadly speaking there are two generations of these. The first are often just blue paint on a main road, aimed at commuters, generally popular with the fast-commuter type; the second generation (of which only one short segment in Stratford exists so far) are done properly, following a spate of widely publicised deaths on the blue paint. TfL put these along the Red Route main roads, I think, partly because of the problems of getting the boroughs to do the LCN consistently; but the first generation are almost consistently pants safety-wise - although they are getting progressively upgraded. Originally there were going to be 12 of these, I think they've built maybe 6, some seem to have been cancelled when they realised they couldn't be done properly. At one stage it looked like there might be one along Lordship Lane and Dog Kennel Hill, that's definitely not happening anymore. The second generation Superhighways are the big-budget ones being done right from the get-go. Supposedly. There are two of these planned, a North/South one from Elephant to Kings Cross and an East/West one that's eventually supposed to run from Barking to Uxbridge, but at the moment they're working on Tower Hill to Hyde Park along Lower Thames Street & the Embankment. They should be pretty great, the conceptual drawings look fantastic, but they may yet end up getting watered down. AFAIK they're building them next year. Southwark Spine. I'm not sure anyone outside the council really knows, or if they do they aren't telling. All I've seen is a line on a map - my guess is it'll be more like a quietway than a superhighway, if only because of the choice of roads and parks. No way are they putting anything Superhighway-ish through Dulwich or Burgess Parks, for example, nor are residents of Eynella Road likely to want a filthy big slick of bright blue paint up the carriageway; and yet some of it (Barry Road, Lyndhurst Way, Thurlow Street) is very far indeed from quiet. So perhaps a bit of both, but whether it's actually any good or not depends on them being able to reclaim some space from traffic on Lyndhurst Way, Thurlow Street and suchlike. It would be a crying shame to put a load of new tarmac down in the parks and yet *not* get something out of it that simply anyone can use. (Just to be confusing, I've seen some pages on Southwark Cyclists' site which refer to one or other of the LCNs as "Spine Route", but the Southwark Spine on the council consultation web site doesn't overlap significantly with either). Quietways. These are somewhat like the LCN: Originated centrally by Boris / TfL / Andrew Gilligan, but using mostly borough controlled roads & with Sustrans somehow involved. Southwark are building one right now in the north of the borough (runs north of, and parallel with, the Old Kent Road). There's a second one planned for even further north - Canada Water to Waterloo, south of, and parallel with, the A200.. less than half a mile north of the first one in places, go figure. Finally there's the Crystal Palace to Elephant/Borough/Waterloo(? depending on which press release you read), which runs through Dulwich/Camberwell, on average about a mile west of the Southwark Spine line-on-map. Quietways are intended "to use quieter roads" and be "for less confident cyclists", but if any politician has offered a straight answer on what this actually means, I've not seen it. There appear to be no guarantees, for example, as to whether quietways will be suitable for children to cycle to school; there is a laudable set of design standards, but how hard will they actually try to meet them? Right now it's not very clear at all. If they draw the map line along a road that's not quiet enough, and locals object vehemently to any plans to quieten it (by blocking off one end with bollards, say), what happens next? The proponents won't want to lose face by cancelling the plans, but the councillors responsible for the area won't want a postbag full of bile and fury. I hope people can keep a sense of perspective though - they're only cycle routes. It's not so long ago they were seriously considering building this monster... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Cross_Route Not sure about you, but I'd much rather have a Quietway than a Ringway on my doorstep.

It is. But much of the 22 is still a very long way from suitable for kids to ride - and that's a great shame. Given suitably benign road conditions, a healthy kid of 7-8 will happily ride 15 miles in a day at a good speed - enough to get them from ED to the Science Museum and back. (Perhaps not today's couch potatoes or should that be mouse potatoes, but that's another story). It's a great shame kids are denied the option to be active by default, instead relying on Mum's Taxi for all sorts of routine stuff. I use it a fair bit, as it happens, but buses are slow once you factor in walking/waiting, and trains don't always go where you need to go. Most importantly though, it's just not active. Anything that combines exercise and travel (whether that's walking, cycling, skating, scooting, running) gives you 2 for 1 on your time. Public transport works to somebody else's schedule; active travel, like driving, works to your own. I don't think that's necessarily any more true for cyclists than it is for pedestrians. As a pedestrian, there are, broadly speaking, two kinds of road: those you cross informally, and those you cross at zebras or lights. Sat Nav has blurred the distinction somewhat, by increasing rat running, but it's generally true. So you provide for cyclists in two ways: build solid cycle lanes on those main roads "which have space", and reduce traffic volume + speed on those minor roads "where you can", as far as possible making them access-only. So there'll still be cars and vans on them, but only those that actually need to be there to access properties on that street. It's quite possible to cycle across the whole of London on roads which either could be made access-only, or could have cycle lanes/tracks installed, given sufficient will from the politicians. There are a minority of roads which don't fall in to either category, being essential main roads but too narrow for cycle tracks - East Dulwich Grove, Croxted Road, the northern end of Lordship Lane - but there's usually a way to avoid them. "which have space" and "where you can" are in quotes, because it's really more a matter of politics than engineering. Ask a Green and a UKIPper (the most pro-car party of all) whether you "can" close one end of a road, take out some parking to put in a cycle lane, or even ban a right turn (surely not...), and you'll get very different answers.

@ Green Goose, if you mean by tiny minority those that cycle in today's conditions: well, yes. But it's said that you don't measure the need for a bridge by counting how many people are swimming across the river... spending money on existing cyclists doesn't really benefit anyone, it has to be about enabling more people to take it up for routine journeys. Does it cost money? Sure, but how much are air pollution or obesity costing the NHS? @ slarti B, the reason for Elephant as the destination (indeed, how many "less confident" cyclists would want to end up at London's second-most-infamous killer roundabout after Bow) is that in Central London, they're putting in Segregated Superhighways, which are (supposed to be) full Dutch-style bike lanes through the heart of the city, from Elephant to Kings Cross and from Tower Bridge to Hyde Park. So it's natural that lots of people from the inner southern suburbs, probably as far as Crystal Palace, will want to be able to get there. DV to Embankment is a distance a young child could cycle both ways, and probably quicker than getting the train. Not to mention healthier and less expensive. Judging from the Waterloo-Greenwich plans above, "removing parking to create a cycle lane" is the polar opposite of the plans. Quietways are supposed to be about calming roads down to the point that 8 year olds can cycle with whatever traffic's left. On some of that Waterloo route it might even work. What I don't understand though, is that this route overlaps 80% with existing route LCN23 (good in places, crap in others) and doesn't even use all of the good bits. And it runs parallel with the "Southwark Spine" which is a seperate consultation on a different web site. I'd much rather they did one of the routes thoroughly - the whole thing built to a standard an 8 year old kid can ride with her granny - than both of them half-cooked. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link, as BrandNewGuy alludes to.. granted it will be a long time before all of London's roads are as cycle friendly as Amsterdam, but at least the designated routes ought to be. If they're not, I'm not sure what the point of designating a route is.

@slarti b I'm not qualified to design such measures, but yes, I'd be 100% in favour of more bans on the minor roads. I think it's borderline immoral that the council has allowed minor residential roads to become used as traffic systems (a problem that's become far worse since the widespread adoption of sat nav). Gilkes is an easy one maybe - ban the right from DV, OR the right to EDG - whichever is considered less inconvenient to residents (probably the former). Dovercourt, perhaps a diagonal barrier at the junction with Woodwarde preventing rat-runners from getting from the south-west corner of the grid to the north-east.. I'm just throwing ideas out there really, I have neither skills nor data. You're absolutely right to be concerned about the DV/EDG junction, I use that one now & again and share your concern there. BUT - and this is the clincher for me - DV/EDG are both main roads, that junction is always going to be a keep-your-wits-about-you sort of place & not a preferred route for children to cycle (at least not without a greater degree of intervention than is on the table right now). The situation I think the council should be trying to arrive at is one where minor roads carry so little traffic as to be effectively "access only" - main roads need to be dealt with in a different way. Reducing traffic volume on the likes of DV and EDG to a point where under-11's feel comfortable cycling there routinely is completely unrealistic, other answers will be needed, but on Calton, Gilkes, Dovercourt etc. it can and should be done. In fact I rather think the success of the much vaunted Southwark Spine depends on them doing so - without tackling traffic levels on the minor roads it's a pure PR exercise.

On one level, I agree with you.. I've used that junction a dozen times a week for ten years, and as Boris once infamously said of a junction in Central London (at which, the following year, two cyclists were killed within a fortnight), "it's fine if you keep your wits about you". And yet, that same "common sense" has led to record levels of obesity and loss of independence in kids, a London road network which claims the lives of 100+ pedestrians and a dozen or so cyclists every year, and the majority of people outside of the Urban Lycra Warrior demographic saying they're too scared of traffic to get on their bikes. Our streets are, first and foremost, public space. I think we should aspire to something better for them than "fine if you keep your wits about you". How about comfortable, convenient and subjectively safe for pedestrians and cyclists of all ages and abilities? Certainly you don't stand a snowball's chance of persuading the ED Mums out of their 4x4s with anything less. And you're damn right life's precious. A heck of a lot more precious than saving five minutes on the odd car journey here or there. Which is why I support these changes, and if the right turn has to go for it to work as designed, so be it. If it causes problems on other streets - as it may well do - those streets should be looked at in turn with similar measures adopted.

I've seen this phrase crop up a few times now on this thread, and the idea that walking or cycling around the place in safety is considered by some to be a "special interest" is rather worrying. Whether or not you agree with the design, respecting the wishes of those who wish not to be killed or injured is just basic human decency. Asking that cyclists can dismount is an admission of failure in junction design. If I'm cycling and dismount, I'm not a cyclist, I'm a pedestrian pushing a bike. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but nobody can legitimately claim that a junction design is "safe for cyclists" if it requires them to become pedestrians in order to negotiate it. It's like the Garden Bridge claiming it's "designed for cyclists" when they mean "get off and walk across".

The Southwark Spine route appears to run further east - Dulwich Park, Eynella Road, Crystal Palace Road, Lyndhurst Way. Calton Avenue, Townley Road, Green Dale is part of existing cycle route "LCN 23", which I've seen referred to as a Spine Route in the past, but is not the Southwark Spine they're talking about nowadays. (aside: I wish they'd upgrade the 22 & 23 routes as I use both a lot, but they've reached a point where fixing the weakest links of either is a real challenge - so they're looking at other routes with easier upgrades and no hills). One way systems and roundabouts are awful for both residents and cyclists so I really hope you're wrong edhistory! James - are you & your colleague proposing to oppose the banned right on grounds of inconvenience, or on grounds of making rat running on other local roads worse (Woodwarde Road and Gilkes Crescent look likely to suffer)? Put it another way - if measures could be sought to address likely problems on those roads, would that change your view? Do you support removing through-traffic from the minor roads in principle, even if this design isn't quite right in practice?

Exactly - if they're not paying attention enough to notice another human being, what makes anyone think they'll notice a sign. Probably too busy playing with their phones. @BrandNewGuy, cyclists have been hit at this junction - at least three recorded incidents (injuries serious enough to need a hospital visit) since 2006. And with more & more kids cycling to school in the area, the council should be doing everything in its power to prevent a reoccurrence.

@BrandNewGuy redesigns can't prevent everything, *some* collisions result from a level of idiocy by one of the involved parties that no design can prevent. In this particular example though, by the 50-year measurement, it'd only need to be a 10% reduction to break even, which to me sounds plausible. If this design drastically reduces crashes resulting from hook-hazards to cyclists, and those resulting from "bad" crossing patterns by pedestrians, it'd easily do that. The really bad junctions of course cost a lot more than ?200k to fix though. The re-dos they're planning at Elephant & Castle, Old Street etc. probably run to the tens of millions.

When they finish the Oval-Vauxhall cycle superhighway (next year?) that route will be much less stressful. Especially if Lambeth's Loughborough Road scheme also gets the OK. For the time being, the Brixton / Clapham / route is the one to go for.