exdulwicher

From a boring and practical point of view if I may... The council would have to rescind the Experimental Traffic Regulation Order that currently covers the LTNs and the soon to be Permanent Traffic Regulation Orders that will cover them and are currently in the statutory notification stage. Remove all the planters. Cover all the signs and cameras, including the signs painted on the roads. Cope with the fact that some satnavs will update fairly quickly, others may still fail to recognise the re-opened roads. Cope with a lot of lost / confused motorists - they'll be the ones who normally drive right on by along the S. Circ without ever coming through Dulwich and therefore have no real idea of where they're going. Potentially re-phase some of the traffic lights. Inform everyone of the changes. And then re-do all of that afterwards. To be honest, this would be an issue whether the water main repairs were in Lewisham, Dulwich, Clapham Common or Wandsworth. It would jam up the whole S. Circ. regardless. There is no "extra capacity" or resilience anywhere in the network and that applies on roads, rail and air. One incident - burst water main, fallen tree, RTA, fire in a building on the roadside, roadworks - will jam stuff up all around no matter how many roads there are. They'll just all get jammed.

Every single time you use a mobile phone, a satnav, a bank card, a supermarket loyalty card, an Oyster card etc "the system" knows where you are and quite often where you've come from, where you're going to and how you're getting there. Have a look at your location history on Google Maps sometime. Supermarkets and online retailers know what you like to buy and when. The Government know where you live, what you do and how much you earn. You're on CCTV (including private CCTV / doorbell cameras / dashcams etc) dozens of times a day whether you know it or not. Anytime you use an online streaming service, it build a picture of what you watch / listen to. Every time you use a car, your journey can be plotted by ANPR hits. The existing ULEZ and Congestion Charge works off exactly the same principle, the only thing it doesn't do is charge by distance / time of day / type of road, it just bills you a lump sum. Part of living in a large society is that we have to pay taxes - this is just a more efficient way of paying a tax. I mean, we could go back to mediaeval times and pop a toll booth at every gate to the city if you'd prefer? You mean we shouldn't protect democratically elected leaders from lunatics? I mean, I'm not a fan of Boris Johnson but he (quite rightly) gets a security detail that ultimately we, the taxpayer, foot the bill for. I assume you don't object to the vast security operation surrounding members of the Royal Family? If you got half the death threats and despicable racist abuse that SK gets, you'd want an armoured car too. And if you want to see what lunatics do, look at Sir David Amess MP and Jo Cox MP.

At the moment, it's little more than a "get the ball rolling" conversation. Road pricing / pay-per-drive is gong to have to come in at some point because as the shift to walking / cycling / public transport continues, combined with the rise in EV / hybrid vehicles, the existing Vehicle Excise Duty and Fuel Duty receipts will decrease markedly so the Government has to fill that hole somehow. TfL is in a bit of a tricky situation - the Conservative Government are trying their best to defund it in order to discredit the Labour Mayor and when they do chuck it another lump sum, they wrap it in caveats. The increased rate of Congestion Charge was a Tory caveat to a previous round of funding (even though they happily sat back and let Khan take the complaints about it). So if Khan can get this through before the end of his second term it could be a winner for continuing to reduce pollution, driving modal shift, bolstering TfL's finances and a bit of a one over on the Government for failing to start their own road pricing conversation. It could also be a lot fairer than a lump-sum ULEZ fee of ?12.50 which applies if you drive any non-compliant vehicle in the zone whether it's a 15-min drive to the supermarket or a 6hr trip of multiple deliveries. Have to see how it ties in with proposed tolls on (eg) Blackwall / Silvertown Tunnels as well.

Usually counting people getting on / off at the stops. Sometimes they employ people to sit on buses and do counts as well. Bus journey times are easy to get off GPS but ridership can be more tricky. You can analyse Oyster / contactless data to see how many actual individuals got onto the bus over the course of its full journey but as you don't tap out on buses, it's less easy to tell if someone got on and rode 1 mile or 5 miles. So occasionally they'll use manual counts to build an idea of how busy stops are and when.

Sorry Rockets but if you're going to go off into some sort of conspiracy theory rabbit hole there's nothing that anyone can say that will change your mind. Clearly, the fact that there are no cyclists visible on these cycle lanes is some sort of magic combination of them all wearing black and no lights while also being holed up in some kind of underground bunker in Tooley Street fabricating video evidence and holding councillors hostage. 🙄 Otherwise, if you're gong to make accusations of bias and fiddling figures etc, produce the evidence and take it to the council. Shouldn't be difficult; we've all read the comments on here about how woefully incompetent the council are so finding their wrongdoing should be straightforward, right? Or are they actually some kind of closet geniuses running an industrial-scale cover up operation just for laughs? Schrodinger's Council - simultaneously engaged in a massive data manipulation scheme *and* being too incompetent to run a bath.

It's all in the Streetspace reports. Overall review page: https://www.southwark.gov.uk/transport-and-roads/improving-our-streets/live-projects/dulwich-review Section on monitoring:https://www.southwark.gov.uk/transport-and-roads/improving-our-streets/live-projects/dulwich-review?chapter=4 There's a LOT in there - methodology, basic explanations of timings and data, locations of counters and so on but it's worth sitting down when you've got some free time to read it carefully and in context.

Because the whole South Circular is managed by TfL, it's a Red Route. They're highly monitored but there's little point in half a dozen separate boroughs looking after a few miles within their area. It was "bad" even in the 70's and there have been loads of plans and ideas over the years to do all sorts from demolish a load of housing and widen the road to building new flyovers or tunnels but as soon as ideas like that get put forward, there's an immediate petition against it and the cost would be astronomical anyway, no Government could afford that these days. It's not a "planned" road like the North Circular, it's something that's ended up with vastly more traffic than it was ever intended to manage and virtually no way of doing anything about it.

Slightly pedantically, modelling doesn't prove things work. Modelling produces a forecast of how the transport system is likely to operate in a new situation, a source of insight to help understand / prepare for the new situation.* However, once the "new situation" is in place, you then need data to prove the outcomes. The modelling is usually pretty accurate and it helps a lot that LTNs are nothing new, they've been done for decades so the outcomes and the inputs required are all pretty well understood. *"new situation" includes: opening / modifying / closing a road or roads changing parking provisions opening / modifying / closing a public transport service opening / modifying / closing a site (like closing down an old school or opening a new shopping centre) and so on

PTAL is a London system, it's not used elsewhere (or at least, not in anything like that form). In London, it's used mainly as an aid to planning developments. Areas with low PTAL are required to have more parking - it sort of accepts that as P/T isn't as good therefore more people will use private cars which is a bit of a catch-22 in itself since it entrenches car use. However the "not as good" is in comparison to high PTAL areas. You're comparing "leafy Dulwich" with central London! Of course in central London you're no more than a few minutes from a Tube or bus, you've got large terminus stations... In Dulwich, there are far fewer roads and a lot of green space - playing fields, the park etc where if you're in the middle of that, of course there's zero density of P/T! Whilst PTAL is a simple calculation (easily performed by a spreadsheet) that offers an obvious indication of the density of public transport provision in an area, it suffers three key problems: It does not take into account where services actually go to ? for example, a bus that runs every ten minutes to the bottom of the road is considered better than a bus that runs every twelve minutes to the city centre. The use of arbitrary cut-offs to exclude more distant service access points underestimates the ability to access locations just outside those cut-off distances. For example, a point 960m from King's Cross could have a PTAL of 6, whilst a point 961m from the same station could have a PTAL of 1 or 2. It does not take into account how crowded the services are. If you stand outside Victoria Station on a weekday rush hour (ignoring Covid for the moment), you're in a PTAL 6 zone. Try getting down onto the Circle or District Line platforms though! I do wish the same old "PTAL scores are really low" argument would die. It's low compared to high density P/T in central London. You will literally never replicate that in Dulwich, not without tens of billions of ?? investment in trams, a Tube line or two and some bus-only routes (the latter of which means closing some roads to cars and/or removing parking). There are more detailed models available - accessibility modelling gives you colour-coded maps of travel time door-to-door. You may have seen similar on (eg) Santander Cycles docking stations where it gives you a radius of where you can reach in 5 mins walking / 5 mins cycling etc. It's a more detailed version of that and also factors in Active Travel. PTAL only really half-acknowledges that in terms of assumed walking time to a Service Access Point (ie a bus stop / train station etc).

@legalalien: not as such, no. And actually this picks up on @Rockets point a couple of posts above as well. I mean, if you're one of the people crying out for "equitable solutions" and saying that nothing should be done until there have been consultations and 100% buy in then yes, anything that falls short of this utopian ideal is going to be described as "poorly planned". However that is a well-known distraction technique, it's called "policy perfectionism". Push for "perfect" solutions that are equitable to all, cause inconvenience to no-one, removes 50%+ of cars from the roads, drops pollution by 50%+ etc etc. Basically stuff that does not exist and and never could. It's being pushed (probably deliberately) as a binary option. Rip everything out immediately because what has been put in is not "perfect" vs well OK, we've made a start, it's not perfect (and no traffic scheme will ever be perfect and I don't think anyone has ever claimed that LTNs are perfect) but let it bed in, then see how we can build upon the benefits and mitigate the disbenefits. @heartblock - I agree. However it needs recognition that the current, very car-biased, transport system is in itself inequitable. Plenty of people cannot afford to run a car, have nowhere to park it or at the absolute worst, you end up with what is known as transport poverty where a person is forced to own a car to get to/from work because there are no convenient / reliable / safe / affordable other options and the cost of owning and running a car (especially if it isn't compliant with the new ULEZ or you have to drive into town during congestion charge hours) takes up a significant chunk of your wages. In essence, you're working to afford the car that you need to use for work which you need to do to pay for the car etc etc. The problem is that we're back at square one. Rockets and legalalien earlier saying we need different interventions, heartblock - I think you're saying more or less the same? Which brings us back to - what interventions? What perfect policy? Put a load of free buses onto the roads which then add to the traffic and get stuck in the existing traffic? Wait 10 years for everyone to be driving EV? Solves pollution at roadside but not the congestion or parking or road safety. Also not very equitable. Wait x years for an equitable road-pricing solution? Government aren't working on anything at the moment... Wait x years until we can whistle up a self-driving car to our door and no-one needs to own their own car? Wait for eternity until the Tube / trams / flying taxis come to Dulwich? Final note on this comment: Compared to literally anywhere else in the UK, London public transport (even Dulwich public transport) is AMAZING.

Think how much worse it would have been if there hadn't been some (relatively minor) efforts to curb vehicle use. Our current Government, in between having lockdown parties and handing out lucrative contracts to all their mates, did manage to realise that post-Covid, there would be a dramatic shift away from public transport due to concerns around crowded spaces although maybe they did not predict the ongoing shift to WFH where possible. The efforts to prevent that mass shift towards private vehicle use and promote active travel have had SOME effect albeit it's taking some time to filter through, there's still shifting goalposts around "return to the office" that's having an effect. The key thing is that most of the measures have gone in with a broad degree of collaboration between boroughs (certain notable exceptions like Wandsworth and RBKC notwithstanding) which has been far better than them going in piecemeal or without any other measures (like the previously quoted Loughborough Junction which, as a standalone scheme was never going to work without significant other interventions in that location). The answer - counter-intuitive though it might sound - is to go for more restrictions. Make walking and cycling safer and more attractive, make driving/parking more difficult and (if possible) make public transport more attractive although that might require a fair bit more advertising and reassurance yet. Currently we're in a bit of a limbo - the measures that have gone in have had a reasonable impact across the boroughs, the general picture looks about the same from all the LTNs across the various boroughs with a few isolated negatives (although generally trending -> positive). However some councils, possibly with an eye on May elections, are wavering under the onslaught of the noisy minority (and in spite of the "68% of respondents" and other such stuff, it IS a minority, it always is) and are trying to throw a few bones such as timed restrictions or unlimited access for taxis which basically just shifts people's habits to "oh well I'll drive earlier or later", it doesn't shift them away from driving. It's also quite confusing - there's the potential to simply follow the car in front through a bus gate without necessarily realising that the car in front is Blue Badge or a taxi and exempt and then end up being fined. That generally upsets people - even if the argument is simply "you're a driver, you should be able to read and understand road signs, not just blindly follow the car in front". If you want more buy in, it's actually better to have more restrictions. Doesn't help much that the Government's Transport Decarbonisation Plan makes no mention of reducing vehicle mileage, instead relying on the automobile industry to come up with cleaner / electric vehicles which, while it removes the pollution aspect from the roadside, it does nothing to alleviate congestion or road danger. In some respects, the Government, after introducing and funding the LTNs have largely left councils out to dry which is why some backtracked almost immediately which in turn has made it harder still to re-introduce any restrictions.

If you type the word "quote" in square brackets: [ quote ] (but without the spaces), copy/paste the text you want to reference (and maybe the name of the author as well) and then use [ / quote ] (again, no spaces) at the end of it, it'll give you the neat block of text which you can then respond to. Saves messages being auto-formatted with all the > > add ins. So: Edited because, ironically enough, I screwed up the quoting! 🤣

At what point did I say anything about "congestion doesn't need to be monitored"?! In fact I said quite the opposite - monitoring traffic patterns is an essential part of the statutory consultation. Please don't try and twist my words. If you'd like clarification on anything, just ask. Where I know the answer, I'm happy to help; where I don't know, I'll say.

There's already quite a few opposite ED Station. Not seen any in the park yet although I've not really been looking to be fair!

Well it does because you don't just take one snapshot. Traffic counts are averaged over times (time of day / day of week / week of year etc) to get the bigger picture. If you find an hour where the traffic count off one roadside tube sensor is obviously out of whack, you can look at the wider picture - was there some sort of blockage nearby creating an unusual flow, had someone parked with the wheels on the tube? Compare it with other days, look at other sensors nearby, check the sensor for any malfunctions or damage, align it with pollution monitoring etc. You don't just go "hey look, it only counted 10 cars that hour, publish that quick!" That is also part of the reason why you can't demand data immediately; it takes time to gather it, verify it, analyse it and present it in a meaningful way. You're looking at medium-term traffic patterns, not an individual hour where it may have been free-flowing or congested.

Well you could vote for someone other than Labour...? Bottom line is that the democratically elected (Labour) council are putting in place a policy requested and funded by a democratically elected (Conservative) Government (we'll ignore for the moment more general thoughts about Government / Boris / FPTP voting / the true meaning of democracy etc). The consultation is not asking "should we have LTNs, yes or no?" but rather "we are having LTNs, how best should they be implemented?" And that consultation forms part of the decision making process alongside stuff like traffic counts, pollution data, bus journey times, modal shift measures and so on although offset with a fairly dramatic shift in travel patterns anyway. Generally (as with pretty much all these schemes) the data is overwhelmingly positive or at the very least trending in the right direction given another couple of months or a tweak to the set-up so the consultation can be seen in the light of "well, it was rather disruptive at first which is to be expected but broadly, things are going in the right direction, we'll keep monitoring and keep consulting maybe with a few amendments here and there as required". It doesn't help the purpose of the consultation when stuff like this happens either: https://brixtonblog.com/2022/01/concerted-attempts-to-manipulate-brixton-ltn-consultation/ (not unique to Lambeth by any means)

Rockets - I'm no expert on council meetings although I know the basic governance processes from working with / for councils but the whole point of a Scrutiny Committee is that the person / people responsible for that policy are there in the room to answer questions about it. This would apply for transport matters, housing developments, planning approval (councils often have a separate committee specifically for that actually), financial matters... No good questioning the policy if the people responsible for it aren't in the room to be questioned. It's a good thing they're there, not a bad thing. For example, if the Overview & Scrutiny Committee are going to look at the councils accounts, you want the Chief Finance Officer in the room to explain / justify / answer questions about it. No good them hiding in an office somewhere saying "as it's about my work, I can't be there". It's imperative that they are there!

Scrutinise. It's supposed to be cross-party / non-partisan, the aim of it is not to say "LTN's are brilliant" or "LTNs are terrible", in fact it's not really to comment on the POLICY at all; it's to scrutinise the council's handling of it, decisions made about it and so on. https://www.southwark.gov.uk/council-and-democracy/how-we-work/scrutiny-committees

CCTV footage is subject to GDPR but the Regulation just says that footage should be kept "as long as necessary" which in practice means about a month is "standard". As it's under GDPR, you're allowed to request footage of yourself: https://www.gov.uk/request-cctv-footage-of-yourself. Of course, that doesn't necessarily extend to footage of an identifiable vehicle although technically, the vehicle doesn't identify the individual. As you'll know the date and time you were in the car park, it should be a relatively trivial matter to find that footage, it's not like there's days worth of video to go through.

Nowhere in the above statement have I made any allegation against any individual on this forum or anywhere else. I posted a link from Lambeth Council which explains why they've removed 1/3rd of the "anti" comments from the Railton scheme as there was clear evidence that it was duplicate statements designed to rig the outcome. I pointed out that Hackney had done the same and there's a further link in there to another road closure scheme which had the same efforts to swing the result. There are "elements of the anti-groups" that do this. There's a pattern to it that crops up time and again on these surveys, not just in Southwark or London but nationwide. At no point did I say anything about any individual. If you've taken it personally, I apologise - maybe I should have said "elements of the anti-groups" originally rather than just "the anti-groups". The point remains that consultations which seem to be held up as some sort of gold standard of democracy, are far from it and the results should be used carefully alongside empirical data.

1) They're legally obliged to have consultations. They are not legally obliged to treat it as a referendum although it's usually a good way of getting a "sense check" of feeling. Interestingly, you can often see the tide of change as measures bed in, people get used to it and so on. 2) Consultations are not the SOLE answer to the scheme. They will be used together with data from the traffic monitoring, footfall, other engagement with schools / businesses etc. 3) Consultations are a known target for gaming. Lambeth found about a third of the respondents against the Railton scheme were duplicates: https://moderngov.lambeth.gov.uk/documents/s133594/Appendix%20E%20Oval%20to%20Stockwell%20Consultation%20Report.pdf (page 69 where they talk about data analysis). Hackney found exactly the same, they discarded about 1/4 to 1/3 of the "anti" responses because they were suspicious. It's known that Ealing and RBKC had the same but unfortunately the council or whoever was doing their consultation didn't apply the checks. There was another well-publicised case in Newcastle: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2021/02/18/consultation-rigging-trolls-get-councils-goat-over-bridge-closures/ There's a certain irony in the anti-groups complaining that the council are undemocratic while simultaneously rigging the survey...

The data seems to broadly stack up against most other LTN stuff. I don't doubt that there's a few inaccuracies in it, especially early on when monitoring has only just gone in but do note that it's also offset against the radical shift in travel patterns over the last 18 months. To a certain extent it's also dependent on what (if any) monitoring has been done before that to form the baseline. Methodology - well it's all fairly standard stuff. Traffic counters, pollution monitoring, trendlines from TfL. I mean there's nothing in there that's massively radical, it's not like they sent the Hamlet kids out into the road and asked them to keep track of things. Engagement - most councils are crap at this. That's partly because most stuff they do, very few people give a toss. You might get a few complaints if you move bin day or bump up the charge to remove garden waste or there's significant change to the social care but the critical thing is that all of those are limited to a small % of the population and it's relatively easy to deal with on a case by case basis. Traffic (and especially parking) - well if you want to cause a riot, just say you're going to remove a parking space. Everyone will pile on. Councils rarely know how best to respond to this and a lot of the response is on an emotional level which is far more challenging to deal with. Again, factor in stuff like working-from-home, staff absenteeism from Covid isolation and the responses can be delayed which is assumed to be because they're wondering how to cover things up. It isn't because as a general rule cover-ups, while they sound impressive, require far too much effort and competence for any level of Government (including councils) to pull off successfully. None of this is unique to Southwark by the way.

We're going around in circles though. We demand the data. /data is presented No, not that data! Also it's wrong and massaged and it doesn't cover x, y and z and it wasn't done at the right time and it wasn't left in place long enough and the person who wrote the report from it is biased and...and...and... If you think it's fake / massaged / biased / flawed / out of date, you need to respond to Southwark Council with your reasoning behind it, not post "it's massaged" on a forum with nothing to back up your assertion. I mean, literally every piece of "pro" data has been called into question and the poster asked to justify it so surely that works the other way around? Justify your assertion. We're into conspiracy theory levels of data bias now, to the effect that no matter how much proof is presented to say that, broadly speaking, LTNs work and can form a positive part of a raft of measures to reduce vehicle usage, nothing will ever be sufficient. You'll always be able to find a negative, even amongst a load of positives. What's presented will always be not quite what was asked for. It's classic distraction and confusion tactics. Muddle it all up, spread misinformation, make a few allegations (it's massaged, it's biased) without ever really backing them up. Before you know it, no-one has a clue what's going on! Especially if someone has managed to add percentages up incorrectly...

Experimental Traffic Orders can be put in at any time. Section 9 of the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984. It's not an abuse of power at all, it's specifically within legislation. It's actually a far better way of doing things than endless rounds of consultations and what ifs and modelling and "well we think x.." and then spending ??? rebuilding an entire junction. Get on and do it, monitor it, decide if it has or hasn't had the desired effect and then either remove it, adjust it or make it permanent. Answers via a mix of consultations and real life "we can see what is happening and why".

As DuncanW says above though, most of these are not in the gift of councils to deliver. ICE vehicles will continue to be sold up until 2030 which means that potentially there'll still be some on the roads by 2050. Even if you manage to swap all 2.6 million cars in London ( https://www.statista.com/statistics/314980/licensed-cars-in-london-england-united-kingdom/ ) to EV overnight, it does nothing to solve congestion, parking, road danger and the associated KSI stats and it brings with it the extra concerns over charging. There are already issues of charging cables trailing across pavements which is a trip hazard to pedestrians, especially blind/partially sighted and disabled. EVs are PART of the solution to reducing pollution at source albeit a lot of that pollution gets shifted elsewhere in terms of mining and extracting the materials to make batteries, disposing of used batteries etc. One car per household - desirable certainly but to achieve that you have to promote modal shift so that the parent who used to drive the kids to school now feels the roads are safe enough for the kids to walk/ride and can eventually get rid of the car. The thing is that cars are extremely expensive, many will be on lease deals so it's not a case of saying "OK, there's an LTN here now, get shot of it". Might take 2+ years for that to happen but it's certainly achievable for many. You can guide it a bit as well by ensuring that all new-build has only one parking space, has good active travel provision etc. Sadly, the Government are moving the other way by installing charging points in all new builds... Road charging is (usually) a regional or national policy so Congestion Charge for example. The only way you could put a charge on EDG by itself would be to have it as a private road (like the upper half of College Road). Buses - again, it's not a bad suggestion at all but someone has to pay for it. If it's council run, does it tie in with Oyster? In which case you need agreements from TfL. If it's got it's own contactless payment system that needs a separate IT infrastructure and people aren't going to be willing to pay two sets of fares. If it's simply free and it's run as a circular hop-on-hop-off, then the council have to foot the bill for it which is going to be the cost of the buses, drivers, maintenance, storage etc as well as running it. And then you run into Cost Benefit Analysis, usage, what routes it will do, what the demand is likely to be. Cost for a new bus route is in the order of ?250,000 for the first year and we still run into the issues of buses getting down some of the roads. Realistically, if you put a couple of circular bus routes in, how much traffic would it take off EDG / LL? There's already buses on both. Pick up of rubbish - again, councils have had their funding slashed over the last decade. Why do free pick-ups on the odd occasion someone wants to get rid of a sofa when it can be a service that raises some revenue for the council. The alternative is a raise on everyone's council tax for a service that most people would barely use. LTNs are a relatively cheap easy intervention, easy enough to remove or tweak as required and they work (or they're supposed to be used in conjunction with) cycle lanes / routes, parking restrictions to drive the modal shift required. You're focussed on EDG (which is fair enough if you live there) and after an initial spike, traffic levels are trending downwards again. https://www.southwark.gov.uk/transport-and-roads/improving-our-streets/live-projects/dulwich-review The answer to that, to get less traffic, is to have MORE restrictions, not "open the whole lot up again". There's a area-wide decrease offset by a slight increase in a couple of locations. Rather than trade significant reduction elsewhere for "return the streets to the status quo where everything was jammed", there needs to be something done to further reduce traffic along EDG in particular. Your ideas of segregated cycle routes, restriction on parking, bus lanes etc were very good and a lot of that is within the councils powers (or at least, council with TfL) and is fairly cheap and quick(ish) to implement. You've got the right idea about campaigning for less traffic (which brings with it less pollution, less congestion, less road danger) but the wrong target for it. Edited cos I forgot to put the streetspace link in!