Huguenot

A request to our fine admin should be able to furnish you with the percentage of pages downloaded outside the UK. I reckon registered users would be another issue. I suspect us funny foreign types would be few and far between. Nonetheless, this would be but a quantitative rather than a qualitative assessment. Admins, moderators.. what can you tell us of the international impact of our tribe's merry scribblings?

Fug our international politics. we are but the sum total of our cultural product! I kinda like it that way - it of course means that this very forum is a foreign policy tour de force! ;-)

News just out

Zedz

Good heavens Dez, neither you nor the PO could put it through your letterbox? What was it, a fridge?

LOL, that's fabulous Ronnie. Exactly what a trigger is for.

This is great, it's like a hitlist for the b@stards who crapped in my herbaceous borders. Carlos the Jackal had less. They're all dead now. Heeeeeere's Johnny.... Imagine shower girl is your cat.... ;-)

Try this

I treid this just with restaurants. Does this link to an example survey work?

Honaloochie will appreciate a parting space. Your points seem every valid, although the 'Central core green space will cause noise pollution' seems a bit obscure, does that just affect residents of the development? In my experience the 'other people won't like it' argument rarely wins favour, it's too subjective. Have you got architect's drawings?

;-) 38 years old, married, driving license since 17, reasonable income yuppie... and never owned a car. In my early years cars seemed like a victory of status over economics, now they seem a victory of convenience over sense. Happy on train, tube and taxis, uncomfortable but persistent on buses, morally reprehensible regarding international flights. I never was an adult, see :(

Possibly SMG, possibly, but it all relates to the macro debate - 'the best way from ED top O2'. SimonM's argument is accurate but also illogical, Captain. It's unlikely that there will be a stop at the petrol staion on this return trip, does this mean that the trip is free? I reckon few would argue this. We demonstrate the imagination to recognise on a small scale the amortisation of costs (the time between refilling the tank for example), we just lack the imagination to extend this to a more accurate 1 or 5 year timescale. Regarding the Council Tax expense, it's immaterial to the debate on the O2 journey because it's payable regardless of your transport choice (car, bus, train, boat or tube). However, despite the 12 month timescale: depreciation, road tax, insurance and maintenance on private cars are all requirements in isolation for that transport choice.

Agreed Jeremy. Apologies. I wasn't isolating motorists, just anticipating a possible debating response. Poor show from me. The most important point was the cost issue - we often calculate petrol usage as the simple gauge of cost of a car journey and ignore amortised capital expenditure and depreciation (that's the cash we spend and lose just to give us access to cars). It's exasperating how inconvenient public transport is, but increasing support is a mountain to climb if we really think it's more expensive too! Public transport is almost invariably cheaper!

Our artifial Xmas tree is now on it's fifth year, and it's still going as strong as when we bought it! It cost an outrageous 100 quid when we first bought it, but now it's down to 20 quid a year and shrinking. It looks as good as when we first bought it - and most visitors think it's real. We bought it at the Xmas shop in Hays Galleria. I don't know if that's still going? However, there was an extensive debate that suggested that a 10 year life artificial tree was more environmentally friendly than cut and dispose ones when we bought it. Unhappily, whilst the debate is still there, most have agreed that cut and dispose is probably slightly better. (You have to consider transport, distribution as well as loss of land to monoculture to get the idea).

Just for fun I thought I'd like to look at the 'cheapest way to get there' argument. In petrol terms, your average 5 year old family runabout in a London's busy urban environment will achieve about 5 miles per litre. Clearly that changes dependent upon traffic and number of people in the car, but it'll do. The Dome's 5.5 miles from ED - giving you an 11 mile round trip, and 2.2 litres of petrol. At 95p per litre that gives us a petrol cost of ?2.10 However we also need to take into account the purchase/devaluation of the car itself, road tax, insurance and maintenance. For a second hand medium sized family car bought 1 year old for 15 grand and kept for 5 years, the average annual rate of depreciation is ?2,500. (That doesn't include finance costs). Road tax could be around ?175 a year Insurance could be say ?600 a year MOT and maintenance say ?500 a year That gives you annual running costs of around ?3,775. If you average 8,000 miles a year (London distances for normal driving are lower than national average), then that gives you a running cost of around 47p per mile (add 10p per mile if you had to borrow the money to buy the car). Hence that 11 mile round trip to the Dome also cost you ?5.20 of your annual running costs So in total your Dome trip has cost you: ?5.00 parking ?2.10 petrol ?5.20 running costs In total a car journey is ?12.30 (or ?1 more if you needed finance to buy the car). If you had a monthly Zone 1&2 travel card and made 60 journeys a month, the the train/tube option would be ?3. On buses with individual tickets because you had to change it would be ?4 I think. Clearly you can put all your own figures in here, but do please bear in mind that the running costs don't take into account the cost of going to war to secure access to the oil to run the cars, or the cost of the environmental impact. There is of course the 'convenience' argument which this wasn't about. However, if you want to go there it's also inconvenient to go to war for oil, inconvenient to damage the environment, inconvenient to suffer the noise pollution, and inconvenient and embarassing to explain to the kids that you poooed all over their inheritance ;-)

Sorry if you got the impression that I'm backing the town planners in all circumstances Lard (and others), that wasn't my intention. I believe in two fundamentals. Firstly that laws, rules and regulations are necessary to protect vulnerable members of society and should be made after due consideration for the likely effects (positive and negative) on all concerned. Secondly that we shouldn't take unilateral decisions to break those laws that we just don't fancy, without forgetting that that will give equal rights to others to break the laws that protect us. A lot of the arguments on these subjects are based after little consideration for other people, are often dogmatic rather than informed, they rarely make a leap of imagination concerning long term consequences, and are often a rallying cry for a mob rejection of the reasonable rules that bind our society together. As a consequence I try to populate my arguments with the facts, the supporting data, and after having taken a moment to consider what the impact may be on both other road users and our long term welfare. I'm aware that's a bit boring, and probably appears to align myself with the grey suits of authority - but it's an unintended consequence ;-)

Hi mate, according to Jay Rayner there's only one option! Haozhan Pwobably pwounounced 'How John'

Hi Dominique - click the 'Reply via Private Message (PM)' link on the bottom of the original message you'd like to quote in your article, and an email will be sent to the forumite's private address. You should get a quicker response that way. :)

This a crafty snap I took on honeymoon of the Teapot moving into Uranus. People aren't usually aware of it because it's a southern hemisphere event. Brendan, I'm surprised you're not familiar given your background, but I understand in SA it's known as a 'Welcome Entry'.

Lol wagtap - Elvis has left the building. A note on your stats - the KSI figures (killed or seriously injured) showing massive reductions since the early nineties with the onset of more pro-active traffic management measures such as speed traps. As with Jeremy Clarkson, you cherry pick your figures to pursue a self-indulgent and destructive lifestyle that harms other people. It's called denial. Even so, your figures are tatty - there was less than 3,000 (2,940 - down 6% YOY) deaths last year. It's been dropping steadily from 3,500 deaths 5 years ago. For your perusal, here's figures for the last 15 years or so. I apologise that I don't have the last couple of years as I couldn't be bothered to pay for them. I can assure you that the trend has continued. In support of SMG's observation on increased traffic, the data proves that to be the case also. There were 10,600 KSI (killed or seriously injured) per 100 million vehicle kilometres on the 94-98 average. Then we had: 1997: 10,439 1998: 9,827 1999: 9,123 2000: 9,255 2001: 8,879 2002: 8,543 2003: 7,941 2004: 7,237 As again, I haven't paid for the latest figures (as with overall deaths they've continued to drop), but I'd describe that as a complete vindication of the current traffic management policies. As someone else explained, pedestrians crossing at the no entry sign in Peckham will be on the look out for buses, not white knuckle camera dodgers. You'll kill someone.

As I mentioned, you don't need to guess at answers and come up with solutions that would be threatening. You only need to look at this well informed site here. It would appear your TW friend is either misinformed or speculating. As for the roadworks, the LL activities are nothing to do with the ring main, they're to do with surface level supplies to ED houses. I've found no confirmation about the source of the problem at Forest Hill, but have my doubts that this is anything to do with the ring main extension either. Why on earth do people feel the need to fabricate complaints and make false accusations in order to stir sh*t against people who are providing them with vital services?

The problem with discretion Wagtap, is that we're often not well enough informed to make the right decision. According to DOT road death statistics, there is less than 1% of the traffic on our roads at 4am than there is at 9am (for example). However, the number of road traffic injuries is 10% of the 9am period. That means you're 10 times more likely to suffer death or serious injury during a journey made at 4am than you are at school arrival time. Presumably that's because of twerps doing 50mph in 30mph in built up areas irrespective of the fact that visibility is lower and pedestrians more inclined to unpredictable behviour. I mean, God forbid you'd run our transport policy if you think you can go careering the wrong way down no entry signs whenever you feel like it. How many corpses will you leave in your wake? In your twisted logic presumably it's their fault for looking the wrong way? I can see your strategies leaving us with no traffic management, gridlock, sky-high mortality rates, and you whinging that the reason why it's happened is that not everyone's as clever as you?

A & R are two software packages developed after monitoring traffic flows through some tens of thousands of junctions over the last thirty years. Essentially you measure the amount of traffic approaching junctions, and their exit points, and apply the data to the forecasting model. That's where things like those rubber bands across roads spring from (despte the rumour, they're not spying on us, they're counting). Drop the data in and you can derive an average journey time per vehicle between A & B. The aim is generally to make the average journey time across the day the lowest possible value. Hence sometimes evening penalties at traffic lighted junctions are often a small price to pay for dramatically shorter wait times during the day on average. The same kind of research tells us that it's better to have just one queue in a waiting room which allocates on a first come first served basis, rather than a queue for each service point. Intuitively the queue seems twice as long, but in fact it prevents one problem siezing up an entire queue for half an hour. The average wait for all visitors is shorter...

Engles, apart from being unable to spell or structure sentences correctly, those Alright London peeps show no evidence of knowing their arse from their elbow. The council observation is unaccredited, and I suspect that Ryan Slade just made it up because he thought it looked like it could right. I doubt he's spoken to anyone at the council. I'm not aware of his supposition that Cafe Nero had its license revoked - anyone else confirm this? There'll be plenty of locals upset!

:))