wulfhound

@ bil most underground isn't 12/hr by the time you get out to the suburbs; as with the Overground, the lines branch. 6/hour off-peak is fairly commonplace in zone 3, I'd say. But there are limits on how many trains they can put on the core, which is dictated by how reliable the lines feeding in are. Fully or mostly tunnelled Underground can run higher frequencies, being more controlled climate-wise & having less interaction with other services, even then the limit's just over 30 trains an hour. Thameslink will be 24 through the middle, Crossrail about the same, and they've had to spend an enormous amount of money to do that. Overground has to share track at various places with Southern Metro & some Thameslinks, so 24 through the tunnel at Rotherhithe is very hard to do. Currently it's 16 (4 to each of 4 branches), I think 18 is planned. All the more reason if you ask me for TfL to take over the non-Thameslink bits of Southern Metro - the West Croydon via Forest Hill line, the Queens Road - North Dulwich line etc. - let them set the timetable to make the most of the tunnel. Though how many per hour they can turn around at Clapham, Dalston, Highbury etc. may also be a limiting factor.

More's the pity that politics prevents TfL from being allowed to run Thameslink. They actually understands London's travel patterns - NR are stuck in the 80s.. "nobody wants to go anywhere on Sundays, a couple of short-formation trains an hour will be fine". Thankfully that's only temporary..ish, til next summer I think. Trams can move a lot of people, pretty quickly. A single tram can carry more than twice as many people as a bus, with fast boarding like the much-maligned but actually pretty capable bendybuses; you can repurpose some relatively minor roads and a bit of park (as was originally proposed for the Cross River Tram, though the disadvantage there is that you're not serving the high streets where people most want to go) and/or prioritise them at junctions.

Any Thameslink station at Camberwell would presumably also get the Sutton/Wimbledon Loop trains that come up from Herne Hill. Which means not only double the frequency (6 or 8 trains per hour, all being the big 8/12-car Thameslink stock) but a handy connection to SW London. With that and the Supertram, it'd become quite a hub.

There's already an island on the western arm - is it in fact a three-stage crossing that's proposed, or is the existing island too small to use as a waiting area for a green man crossing?

Fingers crossed..

Six of one, and.. http://www.standard.co.uk/news/transport/bin-lorry-uses-brand-new-cycle-superhighway-designed-to-protect-cyclists-from-hgvs-a3121051.html

Boris Bikes are good for getting to the station, because you don't have to worry about some little scroat nicking your ride while you're at work - the town centres with the best rail connections around here are also hotspots for petty crime. So for people who won't cycle more than three/four miles, but are OK with the roads, they do help. Given that most of the anti's seem to be people in their 50s, 60s & early 70s who insist that the roads are absolutely fine, and that "all that's needed is a dose of common sense", it might be useful for PR purposes if nothing else. The Boris Bikes do seem to have created a couple of new cycling cultures in central London (home counties commuters cycling the last mile or two, and young tourists out enjoying themselves), but they're a fiendishly expensive way to do it.

Road pricing that takes in to account the 200+ deaths per year from air pollution in Lambeth and Southwark, and the hundreds of injuries caused by vehicles on the road? The true costs imposed in terms of kids' loss of freedom of movement, blood pressure from constant noise, social losses from a population that shuts itself in private cages to move around the public realm? All of a sudden, that ten minutes of time saved, or that feeling of being in a nice snug cocoon with a stereo instead of freezing your arse off on a bike at 10pm, or that made-it-in-life feeling of being able to show off in your SUV bought on cheap credit, won't look so attractive. Also need to be smarter about light mobility in general. Some people can't cycle or find walking middling distances hard, but that doesn't mean they need a two-ton car to trundle a mile or two to the shops or the doctor. Electric mobility scooters should be subsidised to the point of being effectively free, and should be allowed anywhere that bikes are. Did notice our MP tweeting her support for the road being reopened - the day after attending a climate change meeting and demanding urgent action on CO2. 2+2=5.

Massive wide road at the northern end there, scope for them to do something great. Are they just looking at the Nunhead Lane to Rye Lane bit, or right up to the LCN at Stuart Road? Main problem there is the road surface, the nearside is bumpy as hell so you have to cycle far from the kerb, and always get some impatient person in (usually) a white van who wants to zoom up or down the hill at 35mph.

They don't get to keep the money from speeding fines - it goes to the Treasury. They do get to keep the money from parking fines. So guess what's punished and what goes unchallenged - 90 in a 30, or overstaying two minutes at the shops?

College Road, Crystal Palace Parade about 15 minutes ago. Looked like they were headed south towards Croydon.

"There's no evidence! How dare they do this without evidence!" (academic walks in to the room with a small mountain of peer-reviewed evidence.) "The evidence is wrong! And anyway, academics are a bunch of freeloading hippies who don't live in the Real World!" (sigh.)

While there's no doubt bus drivers are put under unreasonable pressure by their management, 36 in a 20 while working & responsible for members of the public is a gross breach of health & safety at work. Were an employee to breach H&S in that fashion, in a scenario that had nothing to do with the road, would people be quite so forgiving? The railways, for example, have a zero tolerance policy for H&S breaches. Clearly you won't get quite the same enviable safety record that the closed, tightly regulated Tube environment has with buses operating on the open road, but expecting employees to stick to the law and the Highway Code ought to be a bare minimum. (And of course, managing them & setting their targets in a way that makes this realistic - it's too easy for bus companies to fire drivers caught speeding without asking awkward questions about why they were doing it in the first place). Why is it that roads are seemingly exempt from the H&S standards applied to pretty much every other public place, workplace and transport service?

@spider69 Those results seem to be from Champion Hill - close to town, lots of students, relatively low incomes, low car ownership. Presumably the reason for the low numbers is it's only a small area affected - a couple of housing estates, two or three roads and the big new student halls. Are the Kings students allowed to keep cars there even if they wanted & could afford one? @Gabe Sustrans are putting forward all sorts of proposals for the D.V. junction - some better than others, some more likely to be accepted by the community, the council and TfL, some IMO a tad bit far-fetched. I agree, it's a very difficult junction for a child on a bike. Bad enough, in some directions, for an adult who knows what they're doing. There have just been a series of Southwark/Sustrans drop-in consultation sessions, there aren't any more announced but there is this, which is probably worth going along to: https://consultations.southwark.gov.uk/environment-leisure/cycling-in-dulwich/events/cycling-in-dulwich-workshop-2 If you have any constructive ideas re fixing the DV junction, there's a contact address for Sustrans on this page - drop them a line perhaps? https://consultations.southwark.gov.uk/environment-leisure/quietway-in-dulwich

@Penguin68 TfL's travel surveys have always been very conservative on all those points. And while there are brilliant solutions allowing young children & people with certain disabilities to use bikes for some of their transport, TfL aren't particularly pushing any of it (no facilities at all for passenger seats on boris bikes, for example; no parcel shelf / rear rack = even singles can't use one for the weekly shop). They seem more preoccupied with commuters. And while I'm sure your accusation rings true with a lot of people, I've not seen any indication that Southwark are planning to rellocate more than a few % of the borough's total road capacity to bikes. Why is it that closing a few fairly minor roads, which carry a small percent of total traffic (Loughborough Junction scheme aside), perceived as tantamount to banning cars and persecuting their owners? Suburban Tube isn't all it's cracked up to be - the lines branch out, some skip stations etc., by the time you get out as far as the North Circular, a lot of the surface Tube stations only get a train every 10 minutes outside rush hour.

Didn't see anything about road closures either, but did see some fairly ambitious targets for increasing cycle mode share outside of the usual core audience that I personally think they'll have a hard time achieving any other way. Although the specific road closure proposals recently seem to have come from TfL & Sustrans, not LBS. Some people will see that as a carrot (making cycling more attractive by creating quieter, safer routes), to others it's a stick (make driving shorter trips frustrating and inconvenient & get people to switch). The truth is somewhere in between.

Pevara, I mostly agree with you on the behavioural aspect, if there are still alternatives with capacity. One way to look at it is that's an argument for doing nothing & accepting the status quo. The other is to see it as an argument for a more comprehensive, area-based treatment (e.g. looking at all the parallel side roads together, and considering Woodwarde, Dovercourt & Beauval together with Calton Ave, but leaving Townley Road & Court Lane open for east/west traffic). Ditto, they probably shouldn't intervene on Turney Rd. without also considering Burbage Rd. TBH, if all of them are to be treated, the most sensible intervention would seem to be electric bollards (in order that residents & emergency services can still get in and out at both ends), but whether Southwark / Sustrans are prepared to put hand in pocket for that sort of thing off the route of the Quietway itself, I've no idea.

That's a reasonable way to look at it. The theory is that those whose journeys are most easily substituted will be the first to give up. Not sure how well that holds up in reality, because people have varying degrees of attachment to their cars, varying degrees of tolerance for sitting in jams, and all sorts of other soft factors besides just getting them and their stuff from A to B quickly. So, in reality, some people with longer journeys to make will lose out more, and some people making short, easily substituted trips will continue to sit it out. But in balance, people do whatever's easiest. Want them to drive lots? Make that easiest thing to do. Want them to walk or cycle? Ditto. Of course, if you change what's easiest by making one of the easy options harder, people will, quite reasonably, complain. Especially if you manage to screw up one of the alternatives at the same time (buses) and don't exactly do a great job of fixing another (cycling). Expecting it all to happen at once is too much to ask, but they could (for example) have put in cycle exemptions/contraflows on some of the one way systems near LJ before closing the roads, made sure the area had Boris Bikes, and not carry out the trial at a time when the buses were already in a bad way due to other works. It's social engineering, certainly - the question is whether the conclusions of a report like this one from the GLA last month justify it. https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/Health_Impact_of_Cars_in_London-Sept_2015_Final.pdf

Apparently models are an order of magnitude more expensive than trial closures - and still far from 100% reliable. In some instances, the try-it-and-see way of doing things might be more effective. Neither traffic evaporation nor induced demand happen overnight. You'd expect things to get worse before they get better. To begin with, people will just put up with it and get annoyed. Same as if you build a new motorway, it'll take a while to fill up, but fill up it will - because longer journeys are easier and more attractive. It doesn't help that the main alternative at LJ is buses, and a combination of the LJ scheme itself and works at E&C, Vauxhall, Wandsworth Road, Stockwell, Oval etc. has fairly knackered those. Dreadful timing. The length and nature of the trial is probably counterproductive too. Short enough that most people will see an end in sight, and just sit it out rather than figure out alternatives. It'll be interesting to see if Coldharbour Lane in particular is any less awful at the end of the trial than at the beginning. Even if it only drops 10% over eight weeks, that could indicate a trend. Hopefully they're measuring that.

Does anyone claim that? The key difference here is elasticity of demand: all kids of school age need to go to school, it's the law. Not all journeys which are currently driven need to be - at least according to TfL, the councils, public health professionals etc. Y'know what? If our energy infrastructure were screwing up the city's public spaces and air to anything like the degree that vehicles are, and if those-who-run-things determined people could reasonably cut back their consumption by 20, 30, 50% without seriously impacting their quality of life, I might be persuaded to get behind that one too :o) - although not if it's promoted by those awful vegetarians as a way to make us all eat more salad. Spoken like someone who's never paid ?? for a fancy energy-saving LED bulb only to find that it doesn't work with the blasted dimmer switch & that proper filament bulbs now enjoy similar legal status to crack cocaine. The question, when it comes to cycleways is, HOW? How do you make it safe enough for a ten-year-old to cycle two miles to school, instead of being driven by Mum, without compromising the other options? I can only assume that it's either not possible (and therefore others need to be compromised, if that's what the plan is) or enormously expensive - otherwise they'd have already done it by now surely?

So many straw men in that Times piece - bonfire night isn't 'til next month, Ms. Turner, and in any case the burning of effigies is no longer considered PC :o) "Kettled" indeed. Yep, that's just how the TSG riot police do it. Five ways to walk or cycle in and out, and two you can drive. PML. "No car journey justified"? Certainly not, but every last one rather ought to be justified, given the cumulative & collective consequences. Though as with other cumulative harms (indoor smoking being the best analogy), change is hard. TfL reckon, on a fairly conservative basis, that around one in every two vehicles on the road don't need to be there. Put another way - we're all breathing double the level of NOx & particulates we could be if people were less selfish. "Why can't we all get along"? Well, if you're that under-40 white guy in Lycra, you can & you do. But if you want to see how this plays out in practice, jump on a train to Exhibition Road - complex "negotiation" with traffic is a piece of cake if you're old enough to understand the nuance of how it behaves, fast and agile enough to get out of the way, and young enough that getting it wrong generally won't have life-altering consequences. For under-15s & over-65s, that's much less of an option. Finally, is Loughborough Junction considered a cycling scheme at all? I mean - I know they're leaving it open to bikes, but it seems mostly about pedestrian space & ultimately regeneration/gentrification (delete as applicable depending if you're for or against). It doesn't really join anything to anything, cycle-route-wise, and isn't a Quietway or Cycle Superhighway. Calling it a cycle scheme seems like a way to guarantee opposition & create a load of animosity towards people on bikes.

The question is - good enough for what? They're spending ?3M of tax payers' money on this route, between Crystal Palace & Waterloo. If it's mainly for adult commuter cyclists - honestly, the roads are largely OK as-is. "Fine if you keep your wits about you", as Boris Johnson once infamously said. My rough guess is, there must be 500 or so who use it each way on the average day.. two or three a minute from 7:30am-9:30am, & 5:30-7:30pm, and a smattering the rest of the day. That's about what you see on Green Dale. Say they manage to double those numbers, and get an extra 500 people cycling to work. That's quite a lot - indeed, increase numbers much beyond than that & Green Dale would start to feel a bit iffy on foot. But at that rate they'd be spending ?6000 per user.. I had to double check that calculation, I couldn't quite believe it. Even if you assume that most people only cycle to & from work half the time, it's still a phenomenal amount of money per head. On the other hand, ?300 will get you a pretty decent bike at bulk wholesale. Money better spent to buy a few thousand of those (?3M = ten thousand good quality bikes), and hand them out free to anyone who'll pledge to ride them more than once a week? If, however, it's about more than commuter cyclists - kids & families, say, or older people cycling for leisure and exercise - the big, costly & inconvenient changes like road closures & junction rebuilds become more justifiable. But in that case, why do it on what looks to be a commuter route, rather than east/west? I mean, personally I'd love a weekend leisure route in to town, which felt genuinely relaxing to use, prioritised comfort over speed, and joined up to the gorgeous new fully-protected cycle routes they're building at Vauxhall, Elephant and Embankment; it feels like they might be trying to do that here, but if so they're doing a pretty poor job of communicating it. And ?3m for that at a time when they can't afford to keep libraries or park loos open looks like good value only when compared to the Garden Bridge.

How about the block they've proposed at the top (Townley) end of Calton as an alternative? I can't see anyone from the Village junction using Dovercourt Rd to get to EDG, nor vice versa. If you're on Lordship Lane, you might do Court Lane / Dovercourt Road / Townley instead of Court Lane / Calton Ave / Townley, but as far as I can see, most people stick with LL all the way up to Townley if they're headed that way - not much traffic turns right from Court Lane (westbound) in to Calton Ave (northbound). It's maybe an annoyance for those living at the north end of Calton Ave, as to go north you'd first have to double back via Village or Woodwarde - but assuming you're going to end up on Half Moon La, Red Post Hill or LL eventually anyway, it's not actually that bad, doesn't add more than a couple of hundred metres.

Quietways, by definition, aren't supposed to run along arterial roads. However, what's pretty clear here is peoples' idea of an arterial road varies. As someone who tends to drive only when I've got a long way to go, but uses buses quite a lot, arterials mean Red Routes, "A" and "B"-roads and a few other of the busiest roads. Dulwich Village / Red Post Hill, Half Moon Lane, Peckham Rye East Side etc. Not coincidentally, those routes are the simplest to navigate in a car & are usually the main bus routes too. The intent of Quietways was never to force traffic down side streets - quite the opposite, they want to keep it on the biggest roads & out of the side streets. Granted, some of the designs we've seen so far clearly fail to do that, and seem likely to work in the unfortunate way you've described above - but I've never met anyone from the cycle lobby who wanted more traffic on side streets. To me, Calton Ave & Turney Road shouldn't be used as arteries - indeed, for 20 out of 24 hours, they mostly aren't. But you're absolutely right to be concerned about bad designs displacing traffic from middling-sized streets to smaller ones. What they should be trying to achieve, if anything, is displacement from small and middling-sized to big.

Very much in the same boat. Typically cargobike if it's dry, or find a bus/train route that's scootable at either end & brings the total walk down below a mile (TfL Journey Planner & the bus countdown app make working that out much easier than it was a few years ago). The cargobike's way quicker for two miles though, timing-wise it's not that much different to driving for anything up to 3 miles. If it's pouring with rain? Hailo or as a last resort Uber. Only have to resort to those once every couple of months, but it's nice to know it's there if it's needed.