exdulwicher

Bus passenger numbers in London fluctuate between about 2.2 and 2.4 billion journeys a year, small % increases and decreases. The last 5 years have seen a slight decrease although usage is still far higher than a decade ago. Also, there's been a decrease in the number of vehicle miles due to bus route alterations / consolidation of services so that accounts for some of the passenger decrease. Bus speeds on average dropped slightly 2014 - 2018 before rising again in 2018/19 and then a significant jump in speed 2020 (pandemic - no traffic) and it's largely stayed higher than 2018 since then. Anything else you want to know? Ironic isn't it that the right-wing Government we currently have is doing the best job ever in avoiding accountability, scrutiny and responsibility...?

People need to be paid for the work they do. I'm assuming you're aware of the going rate for all professions and qualifications? It might be a wider societal issue but plenty of professions earn (sorry "rake in") 6-figure salaries at the top end. You might not like that but that's the going market rate.

It's not a private company though. As a public transport authority, TfL gets all its income from fares, commercial activity and income from the Congestion Charge, grants (including business rates) and from borrowing and cash reserves (the latter was left in tatters by the previous Mayor with a deficit of over ?1bn...) When fares income dried up during Covid there was literally nowhere else to go to get any income other than asking Government for a cash injection (bailout / subsidy, call it whatever depending on your view...) The Government has given several short-term funding settlements but over the course of 2 years of Covid, various lockdowns, instructions not to travel etc, TfL was left short of about ?9bn and Government funds can't come close to filling that hole. So the funding they have supplied has come with a load of caveats. "We'll give you ?x million but you need to save ?y million on...." You can negotiate against some of it (like the proposed cuts to free travel for Under 18's) but some of it is being forced through as a condition of the funding. Doesn't matter who you have as Mayor, that's the deal that Government is offering.

They haven't. Even before Covid, London's buses took a subsidy of ?700m from TfL funds, now a lot of that came from the excess that the Tube generated (remember that the previous London Mayor, one Mr B Johnson removed central Government grant for TfL - which was actually almost exactly that sum of money - in 2015). So TfL had to move to a position of generating most of it's funds from fares - it's usually been around 40 - 45% of its income with the rest coming from Congestion Charge, grants plus minor stuff like advertising on the Underground. That allows them to run the buses as a "loss leader" which is fair enough; after all public transport is a service to everyone (even drivers!) so it's generally right that it is subsidised although it's less right that Government doesn't subsidise some of it, it's about the only transport authority in the western world not to receive an operating grant from central Government. Anyway - buses cost TfL ?700m subsidy a year to run. Covid hit, ridership of bus, tube and train fell off a cliff and fare income all but dried up. The Government have offered a few short-term funding deals, grants, loans etc but they've come heavily caveated and ringfenced requiring cuts to infrastructure projects, fare increases, service cuts etc. At one point there were requests, from Government, to remove free travel for Under 18's and 60-65 (which TfL fought back against and eventually the Government stepped back from that one). None of this is the fault of TfL or Sadiq Khan although it plays well for the Tory Government to let people believe that. Especially since the current PM is the former Mayor of London who left TfL's finances in such a terrible position anyway with Garden Bridges and Boris Airport "plans". Pie in the sky stuff that had hundreds of millions of ?? wasted on them. What you really need to be saying is "I can't believe the Government have let it come to this". Except that everyone would believe that - the single role of the Government at the moment is to keep Boris in power and pretend that Brexit "got done", not worry about any of that minor running the country stuff.

The proposal is to replace the Dulwich end of the 12 with the 148 so you're not "losing" the 12 entirely, it's extending the existing 148. However, it won't be going to Oxford Circus, it'll terminate in town. At least, that's the proposal.

Did it lie about where it was going to? 😂 There's a good Twitter thread here on what's going on with the bus cuts and, to a certain extent, the consultations:

To counter that, everyone (well, "agencies") already knows where you are, what you're buying, where you live, what you earn, where you work, where your kids go to school, where and when you went on holiday... Loyalty cards at supermarkets are just a data-mining exercise with the slight benefit that you get extra points or discounts in return for letting them have that info of what you're buying and when/how often. People willingly share vast amounts of info on Facebook and other social media so that fact that a simple coffee shop wants to do away with the hassle and security threat of cash is really not the Big Bad 1984 that you seem to portray. Also, it does away with the inevitable old biddy rummaging around in her purse going "do you want the 42p as well, I think I've got exact change, just let me count it....." while the entire queue behind gets annoyed. Major downside is that donations to charities via tins on the counter are WAY down. Previously you'd get some random, relatively low, amount of change and just drop it in the tin but it'd all add up. Now, that revenue stream for charities has almost completely disappeared.

Thieves aren't entirely dumb - they're normally stolen to order for exactly the same type of car. That way any random roadside ANPR check comes back (on the face of it) entirely legit. If you put the plates from a blue Discovery onto a silver Transit, it'll get picked up very quickly - if you put them on another blue Discovery, chances are you'll get away with quite a lot. Put a tracker on your car. It'll save a load of admin if you have something reporting in to your mobile phone and you can prove where it was at any given time. Also, take any photos of anything unique - custom alloys, any dents/scratches/go-faster stripes/windscreen stickers etc - anything that would make your car stand out even slightly from another one of the same make / model. If you get a speeding ticket and you can easily show that your car has a sticker in the rear window and the culprit car doesn't, that's a dead giveaway. A friend had her plates cloned a long time ago. Reported it and then she got pulled over by the police about 8 times in the following 3 months. They never managed to pull over the cloned car though... Absolutely identical make, model and colour.

RSPB were suggesting putting "mud pies" out as well - with it being so dry recently, the swifts have trouble finding mud to build their nests with. https://www.rspb.org.uk/about-the-rspb/about-us/media-centre/press-releases/mud-pies-for-house-martins/

That's one way of creating a new bunker on the fairway!

Depends on the model (if you're modelling actual journeys). A journey is the same as a trip. It does also depend on the context as well. Equally, if you're analysing (say) mobile phone data to determine movements, it does fall down a bit on very short trips. If you do a 500m journey in a car in stop start traffic, it will potentially record you as walking. You can break trips down in to stages which is useful if you're doing multi-modal stuff. If a traveller drives to the station and then takes a train from there, some models will count it as one trip with two stages, other models might record it as two separate trips. It does depend a lot on what you want the model to actually show. Basic example - a parent drives a child to school, drops them off and then returns home. You can record that as two entirely separate trips: Home > School (2 occupants) School > Home (1 occupant) or you could record it as one car trip starting and finishing at Home. If you want to work out how many parents are driving a child to school then returning home vs how many parents are dropping their child off then continuing on to their own workplace for example, it's a critical distinction to make. The Home > School > Home trips are easier to replace by A/T - sending the kid off to cycle to school on some nice safe cycle infrastructure. The Home > School > Work one is less easy to replace in that fashion. There isn't really a right way or wrong way to record this so long as you're clear about what sort of travel demand you're looking at. Walking itself is rarely modelled as a "trip". It's quite tricky to do mostly because it's difficult to determine what counts as a walking trip. If you walk up LL, stopping at 5 shops en route, does that count as 5 trips between shops or one trip including shops? That example by the way is critical for stuff like footfall predictions, it's not just unnecessary pedantry. The basic premise of what Chris Boardman was saying is entirely correct though. There are far far too many very short journeys done by car. Again, part of the point of LTNs is to discourage that. If it's a direct 500m trip from Home to (say) Dulwich Hamlet but now the LTN has forced you to go to Townley, EDG, Village then it discourages that car trip in favour of walking. And yes, I have seen people drive 500m to school, the shops etc.

Simple - the top figure (92% of pre-Covid) is DfT/TfL from the Strategic Road Network whereas the Southwark figures (reduction of 21,000 vehicles) are from local road monitoring. I did write a longer reply explaining it far better but whatever restrictions are on this forum to prevent "non East Dulwich" matters from being discussed seems to prevent me posting it.

That's actually quite funny ^^. But if poor Rockets wants an answer on his/her oft-repeated question, whatever restriction is on to determine whether it's sufficiently "East Dulwich" enough needs removing... ;-)

Maybe I've been part-banned as well...! Maybe there's a little AI bot reading my contributions and going "nah, that's just traffic, not East Dulwich".

I typed out a response to the question posed by Rockets and got a message saying that posts here have to be relevant to East Dulwich... ???

We're back at the same point which has been argued to death on here and the previous thread. What would you do to achieve this that is a) cheap (cos TfL and councils have no money) b) quick and easy to implement and change c) aims to reduce car journeys and boost active travel journeys ?? We've had suggestions of opening up all roads to "spread the pollution around" which, in the dog turd analogy of a few pages ago is the equivalent to finding dog poo on your doorstep and then deciding to smear bits of it over all your neighbours doorsteps as well because "fairness". We've had suggestions of trams and tube line extensions, which cost billions, take decades to come to fruition and cause lots of disruption (although yes, I agree that public transport must always be improved). There's been some slightly more reasonable suggestions of better coach management for the schools although the council has very little control over any of that since the schools are private and the coaches are run by an arm's length foundation, not by public sector. Better bus service - again, not bad but there are limited streets you can run buses down and adding buses to congested roads doesn't work since they just get stuck in traffic; you need to reduce traffic, add in better bus lanes and so on before you can add more buses to the mix. And I referenced this a page or so ago: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213624X22000281 which concluded that the two most effective measures to reduce traffic are charging systems (so congestion charging, workplace parking charges, ULEZ) access restrictions (school streets, LTNs) But go ahead - if you have any genuine suggestions that meet all those factors above, go for it. I don't think Waseley meant it the way you took it - you seem to have taken it as an "I'm alright Jack, sod the rest of you" whereas I think it's meant more as an acknowledgment that people get used to change quite slowly so some of the restrictions take a while to influence behaviour change and modal shift. There are actually mathematical models about the number of people it takes to influence change - some relating to traffic, some in various social situations such as a person collapsing in the street - you get people passing by, not wanting to be involved, thinking that someone else will sort it, before eventually someone will stop to help and, emboldened by that, others stop. There are interesting social experiments that have been done on that but it can relate to traffic too. However it has to be forced - people have to see that walking or scooting for 5 mins to school is better than sitting in a car for 10 mins and it takes time for that to penetrate. This is often the problem with active travel interventions. Things get worse before they get better. If you build a new road, things get better before gradually regressing to at least where they were before, if not worse. There are countless models describing that.

Picking up on DKHB's point above as well... No - the majority of people responding to the consultation raised objections. That's absolutely not the same as saying the majority of people in Dulwich want it removed. And Southwark didn't ignore it, they published a response document: https://moderngov.southwark.gov.uk/documents/s103597/Report%20Determination%20of%20Objections%20Dulwich%20Streetspace%20Review.pdf which detailed why some of the objections were total rubbish, why the data didn't back up some of them and addressed some others (access to emergency vehicles for example). The consultation is PART of the process, not the deciding factor. And its purpose is not to ask "should we do X?" but rather to say "we are doing X, how best can it be done / improved?" I know it suits the narrative to loudly proclaim that Southwark didn't listen to "the majority" and they're some sort of Communist Dictatorship imposing their authoritarian jackboot over the proles but that doesn't actually match Reality.

As of September 2021, when schools properly re-opened and a lot of restrictions were lifted further, traffic returned to more or less pre-pandemic levels with some regional variations. In fact this rise was seen from mid-2021 although with schools off over summer it was a relatively gradual rise initially. There's some easy-to-read info in various places: https://www.brake.org.uk/how-we-help/raising-awareness/our-current-projects/news-and-blogs/the-return-of-rush-hour-are-traffic-levels-at-pre-covid-levels-or-higher https://fleetworld.co.uk/uk-road-traffic-back-at-pre-covid-levels/ Bus, train and tube ridership continues to be below pre-pandemic levels (again with regional variations in bus and train), it's hovering at about 70%-ish. But to all intents and purposes, (for travel at least), Covid is over, people are going about their normal lives again. As traffic levels on roads rose, the active travel dropped off again - much of this is attributed to people simply being unwilling to cycle on roads dominated by car traffic which is why active travel interventions are necessary. You can't keep claiming that the drop in traffic is solely due to Covid. It was for a few months in 2020, yes. As restrictions eased, it rose again dramatically and is now more or less at 2019 levels, sometimes above it. That was part of the reason the LTNs were introduced - the Government, in between awarding themselves corrupt PPE contracts and partying, recognised that there would be a significant car-led recovery as people avoided crowded public transport hence providing funding for councils to install pop-up cycle lanes, LTNs, wider pavements and so on. Data from thousands of "LTNs" or similar schemes worldwide suggests you're wrong on that. In fact, this document: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213624X22000281 is a meta-analysis of 800 peer-reviewed studies from around the world which summarised the 12 most effective interventions for reducing traffic. As you've noted on here so many times, you're very keen on data so I'm sure you'll read it in full and digest it carefully but as a very brief summary, the top 2 most effective interventions are: charging and pricing (congestions charging, ULEZ, workplace charging levy) access limitations (filtered streets, school streets, LTNs) Repeating "LTNs don't work" doesn't make your belief any more true. It remains as wrong now as it was the first time you typed it.

Cos there was never, in all of history, ever a tailback in front of Hamlet before LTNs...? You only need one lane there. Traffic coming into DV from Turney can only go left or right and it has it's own phase, it's effectively a T junction for cars now. The advanced green phase for cyclists needs to be a bit longer to shift more riders before the traffic behind starts up and tries to turn left "across" the flow of riders who can go straight on and in fact it's not difficult to envisage a time where you'll need to give a full green phase to cyclists only at that junction. Same at Townley crossing over into Greendale.

Campaign for MORE interventions, not less. LTNs work best when combined - it's why standalone schemes (the old Loughborough Junction being a prime example) are rarely successful and are ripped out and used as a stick to say "we tried it and it didn't work". Used in combination with parking restrictions, segregated cycle infrastructure, 24/7 bus lanes, charging (ULEZ / congestion etc) and facilities such as secure cycle parking / storage, delivery hubs (to better manage online shopping / van journeys etc) they work very well to deliver sustainable decreases in traffic. It's not an instant fix but it works and is proven to reliably work. And unlike options such as trams, more buses, redesigning junctions etc, LTNs are very low-capital schemes, they require relatively minimal investment and can be put in (and changed, and taken out) at relatively short notice. It's been explained countless times on this thread and the previous one and there are countless studies on it but here's the basics (again...) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand A simple search for the terms "induced demand" and "traffic evaporation" will give you years worth of reading material which all comes to the same conclusion.

A few pages ago, the local elections were being touted as a referendum on all things LTN. In fact the Conservative and Liberal Democrat campaigns played very heavily on the LTNs, promises to remove them and so on. Now that Labour have had a significant win, it's suddenly not about LTNs, it's a response to national politics? Can't have it both ways. Enfield and Ealing had the same - high profile anti-LTN campaigns from Con & Lib Dem, Labour got a significant win. Outside London, Oxford had a similar story, some high-profile anti-LTN campaigning going on from independents, not one of whom won a seat on Oxford City Council. Anti-LTN campaigning is generally a very poor mast to attach your flag to, the general rule of thumb (in spite of Twitter / One[borough] etc) is that it's about 6:1 in favour of traffic reductions schemes; that's an average national picture. It really is a "vocal minority" who want them scrapped.

Westerham is really nice, there are loads of walk options in the woods around there. Toys Hill and Ide Hill both close by, Limpsfield Chart and Chartwell itself. Nearest station is Oxted or Hurst Green a couple of miles west - can then walk over, drop down into Westerham where there are loads of pubs and cafes. Or it's about an hour's drive.

That's wrong. TfL website: https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/lez-lez-services-37309 Extract from the page: The charges only need to be paid if you drive your vehicle within the zone. Parked vehicles are not subject to any charges. That's the whole issue behind reducing the hours that it is operational, that people will drive in at 6am, park up and then drive out again at 7pm. No charge payable. The info is on various London tourist websites as well eg https://www.toptiplondon.com/practical-tips/london-congestion-charge

If you drive in outside operational hours and your car is then parked for the duration, there is no charge. Same as the ULEZ - if you have a non-compliant car but it's parked on the street or in your driveway, no charge is payable. Charge only applies if the vehicle is moving within the hours of operation. Hope that helps.

It's a sparrowhawk. Peregrines have dark eyes, sparrowhawks have yellow eyes with a black pupil. Good pics though, great to see it so close up!