exdulwicher

There's a bit of a catch-22 in that though - the busier the road the more likely it is to need repairs / resurfacing simply due to the wear and tear it's getting but the more difficult it is to do it due to the disruption (not just to traffic but to residents not being allowed to park there for a long time, maybe not having direct access to their house for a bit, noise etc). That's not EDG in particular, it's any major route. You end up in a cycle of patchwork repairs which are quick and easy to do without causing days/weeks of disruption. But they do have the downside of being very reactive - pothole appears, gest worse very quickly and then needs urgent patching but without addressing the underlying issues such as water ingress or subsidence that caused it in the first place. There are funding aspects to it as well. And yes, there's a long debate that you can have about the long-term costs of constantly doing minor repairs vs doing a large-scale job once...

Dog's Trust are worth a look: https://www.dogstrust.org.uk/rehoming/fostering/ They have lots of kennels all around the country - Uxbridge and Basildon are the nearest ones to SE London. Scroll down on that link and they cover off the basic questions. You'll have to go through a homecheck and a discussion as to what sort of dog you're after plus your experience so they can pair you with a suitable dog. If you're after a specific breed, it's worth a search on Facebook as there are a few breed-specific rescues. Generally, they try to get dogs adopted rather than fostered though as they're more volunteer run and don't have the time or resources that places like Battersea and other proper kennels have.

Much as I had to divide people up like this, it doesn't matter if you're pro or anti LTN, the issue is not really about owning a car. it's about where and when you choose to use it. Plenty of people are in a situation where they cannot just give their car up - maybe they're half way through a lease deal, maybe the car is so old that it's not worth anything to sell and it should just be kept until it falls apart... Many people genuinely do need a car for some journeys or circumstances. The problem is that the "anti" group have two answers: Pro LTN / own a car = you hypocrite! you give up your car first! Pro LTN / do not own a car = lefty hippy eco-warrior who can't possibly understand what life is like for those who NEED a car! It's not that simple - it's perfectly possible to own a car (and to need one occasionally) but choose not to use it to drive 500m to the school or half a mile to the gym. Being in favour of less traffic does not automatically mean "thou shalt never own or use a car again". Such polarised views aren't helpful to the debate. Besides which, modal shift takes time to come through - that person who currently owns a car may be using it less and less to the point where, a year or so down the line they will realise it gets so little use that it's more economically viable to just hire one when needed. https://findingspress.org/article/18200-the-impact-of-low-traffic-neighbourhoods-and-other-active-travel-interventions-on-vehicle-ownership-findings-from-the-outer-london-mini-holland-programme (I'm sure that naturally, the fact it was written by Anna Goodman and Rachel Aldred will drag out the naysayers - however there's a good summary here with numerous other links in it: https://www.rapidtransition.org/stories/making-streets-people-friendly-the-rise-of-car-free-communities/ )

https://globe.adsbexchange.com/ is good for tracking - unlike FlightRadar it covers most military stuff as well. Click on the icon, it shows you flightpath plus ID info.

You mean this one? https://eastdulwichgrove.com/content/uploads/2021/07/East-Dulwich-Grove__-LTN-Survey-Results-3.pdf The one that went along EDG and polled the residents there. 236 residential properties along there (quoted from the report itself), 127 responses so a 53% response rate. 84% of the responses were to reverse the LTNs, 84% of 127 people is 106 against. 106 out of 236 is 44%. Obviously there's no way of telling the opinion of the 47% who did not respond but you can't claim "80% of those polled". 236 properties were polled and responses received from about half of them. At absolute best (assuming a perfect survey which it wasn't) you could state that 44% of people in EDG are against the current traffic control measures. That's before you come to the questions asked which were (this is copied / pasted directly from the questionnaire): A) Make the present temporary road closures and timed camera restrictions permanent. B) Replace closed road junctions with timed camera enclosures around the school day start and finish, removing delays to emergency services. C) Reverse the schemes and return the roads to pre-closure with no restrictions. That is a *terrible* set of questions. especially B Replace closed road junctions with timed camera enclosures around the school day start and finish, removing delays to emergency services. That's a leading and biased question right there. It implies that there are delays to emergency services (without specifying what they are, how long they are and why they are directly attributable to LTNs rather than any other cause) and further implies that removing LTNs will fix the delays. The word "closure" is very misleading too. The roads aren't closed, you can access all of them with a vehicle. They are however filtered to prevent you driving through while still maintaining through access to bikes, scooters, wheelchairs, pedestrians... It's a terrible survey but once again OneDulwich have been very good at putting out the "80% of people are against LTNs" without specifying that it's 80% of 126 respondents to a biased survey of people on one road. You don't get to pick and choose data the way you are. You cannot blindly dismiss anything from TfL and Southwark Council (as well as numerous other related reports from the likes of Professor Aldred et al) as fixed, biased, out of date, not relevant to Dulwich, not from the location you want it from while simultaneously blindly accepting anything from OneDulwich. Same with the summary leaflet from Southwark Council where every dataset showing traffic reductions was questioned, rubbished and denied but where the one dataset showing an increase (EDG, 26%) was taken as gospel and widely quoted as proof that the LTN has FAILED and needs to be removed immediately. https://www.southwark.gov.uk/transport-and-roads/improving-our-streets/live-projects/dulwich-review I'm not saying that the council have been perfect in any of this but the level of conspiracy theory and confirmation bias now is at such a level that pretty much any suggestion from the council that things are broadly positive will be met in much the same way as Donald Trump met the news of his election defeat.

I'm not sure that even the most pro-LTN people are suggesting that LTNs are THE answer. They're not, they are ONE OF a suite of measures to reduce traffic. Some complementary - it's quite difficult to do X without doing Y in some areas of traffic design, some can be standalone and there's an element of needing stick and carrot as well. Is it equitable that the roads are too dangerous for kids to ride to school? Is it equitable that people who do not own cars find it difficult getting public transport because it's held up by private cars taking up proportionately vastly more road space than any other for of transit? Is it equitable that car owners get massively subsidised public space to leave their vehicles - space that then cannot be used for any other user? Is it equitable that car owners (in spite of the "I pay road tax, I pay fuel duty" argument) are vastly subsidised by the public purse - some of that subsidy in the form of addressing pollution-related issues? LTNs, broadly speaking, work pretty well and they're a cheap and easy thing to implement at short notice - they can also be cheaply and easily modified or removed at short notice. There's nothing special about Dulwich in terms of LTNs or traffic, the principles are exactly the same as anywhere else - you have to remove as much of the traffic as possible, you have to enable and empower active travel. If you don't remove the traffic, you can't push active travel unless you're also putting in segregated bike lanes because, much as there will always be a few folk who can tolerate riding in traffic, most people can't or won't. And a comprehensive network of bike lanes takes years to put in and also attracts just as much vitriol as LTNs. Same with all the other nice ideas like trams, extending the Tube line, changing every car to electric, autonomous cars... It's all stuff that won't happen before 2040, if at all. Extending the Santander Cycles scheme - that might come by about 2025 or so with a bit of luck. Pollution on a lot of London's roads has been above legal limits for years and you don't lower it by "spreading it around a bit". If you removed every LTN in the area tomorrow, the air pollution on EDG would still be above legal limits because it was well before the introduction of LTNs. Hardly "clean air for all". You can't start bleating about woodburners or buildings being worse - maybe they are in terms of air pollution but equally no-one has ever been run over by a speeding woodburner, nor is there a queue of them outside my house in the morning rush hour. You can argue semantics about cars being fine but PHVs and vans being not fine (?) but it's still splitting hairs. You just need less traffic. That addresses air and noise pollution, road danger and congestion all at once.

Re the train reductions, it's nothing to do with Government, TfL, Southwark or even the Train Operating Companies themselves who are simply reacting to a situation outside of anyone's control. So many staff are being pinged by the Covid app and told to isolate that there aren't enough staff to run the regular timetable. So there's no other choice than to reduce the timetable to something that can be effectively staffed. This isn't just Southern, most Train Operating Companies are in the same situation as well as a lot of bus companies. Disproportionately so because drivers/conductors travel large distances and come into close contact with a lot of people. Until Government comes up with something to say that double-vaccinated people don't need to isolate and can provide the enhanced testing to monitor it all, there's not much choice. But it's got nothing to do with the council and no-one wants to be cutting train services!

Well on the one hand there have been continued calls for more engagement and more consultation amid accusations that councillors are invisible / hiding / not listening and when that happens, you jump on it as a cynical desperate measure to drum up support... 🤷‍♂️ The original OHS plan had three phases of open consultation and included many comments from those streets: https://www.southwark.gov.uk/transport-and-roads/improving-our-streets/live-projects/our-healthy-streets/our-healthy-streets-dulwich OK, the original OHS plan was suspended but what is in place now isn't too dissimilar and it certainly shares the same overall aim. But you can't have it both ways - can't complain that there was no consultation and then that the consultation was extended or that only key people were allowed to voice an opinion. The thing is with a lot of the active travel and disability groups is they're very used to campaigning because for decades they've had to do so to get even the merest crumbs of infrastructure or recognition so generally they're geared up to respond to this sort of stuff pretty well. Individual residents who largely don't know or care what the council does so long as their bins are collected and they have a free parking space tend to be less interested in regular interactions with councils. Hence the door-to-door stuff which also picks up on people who may not have access to the internet. Personally I'd rate it as a good thing - I can imagine if there hadn't been any door-to-door, you'd probably complain about that too!

Government told councils to put in emergency schemes as a response to Covid and in order to prevent or at least mitigate a car-led recovery - even the current lot could forecast that a mass reduction in usage of public transport due to a mix of capacity issues (social distancing) and people being uncomfortable about returning to crowded environments would be a disaster if everyone started driving. However that instruction was given before there was any guidance or funding allocation in place. So when the backlash came from drivers, DfT sat there and let councils take the blame. Now however they're realising that by and large the schemes work and are popular (general rule across everything that's been put in is about 6 in favour for every one against albeit that the "against" tend to be far more vocal). So now DfT are complaining about councils removing schemes too hastily (fair enough, some councils have been an utter disgrace over this - notably Wandsworth and Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea) but they're also trying to take credit for it when it was councils taking most of the risk and doing most of the work. Not saying that the work was perfect but it was done with the best intentions and on limited guidance from Government while also able to be amended where required. As for hastily planned, most of it wasn't. Most councils have a variety of schemes on the back burner, awaiting funding or consultations or other planning stuff to align. A lot of the Dulwich stuff was an evolution on the existing Healthy Streets plan, modified to fit what was requested at the time.

You're allowed to discuss other options, even while a consultation is ongoing - in many ways it's actually more efficient because at the end of the consultation you can look at the results and have options to come back with. If majority is in favour of as is then there's not really much to do but if the majority is in favour of "a change" then you can quickly come back and say "we've heard your views that you don't like the current system so here are some changes proposed, what do you think?" Caveat that it's tied in with the data so if the data is broadly positive and the negativity is in a minority you still don't need to change anything because it's working. But it's always good to have a few back up options, perhaps based on specific feedback that's been picked out during the consultation. That's about right - couple of months to collate the results of the consultation, run some validity tests on the data, write it all up and present it to the council and for the council to then agree the next course of action based on the responses. I still think you're trying to find some kind of conspiracy where there isn't one to be honest. It's not unusual for a council to be discussing further traffic management options even during existing consultations, they're not being underhand or doing anything illegal.

Partly this is a manufactured culture war, a little bit of dead cat designed to inflame opinion a bit. Houses in DV itself for example are vastly more expensive than anything in Calton Avenue yet positioned right on the main road through the village. Even EDG has a huge range of housing from the large double-fronted properties towards RPH end to the much smaller flats and houses at the LL end so claiming that "EDG = poor people having pollution imposed on them" is demonstrably false. Plus you've got existing LTNs along Gilkes and the relatively modest houses in the cul-de-sacs of Great Spilmans and the back of EDG by Greendale. It's a very Daily Mail thing to do, judging people on the perceived value of their house and it doesn't help the debate. Part of it is that the wealthiest are the cause of the problem - they own more / bigger cars, they drive them more, they consume more. Make it more difficult for them to drive 500m to the school (having already established that school run is a major problem in the Dulwich area) and you have a huge gain without impacting "the poor people".

Opens from midday - something I discovered when I popped down to Evans Cycles on a hot day last week and thinking that an ice cream on the green would be lovely while I was out and about. Sadly, it was only 10.30am...

This ^^ Train companies nationwide are reducing services due to staff isolating. Ultimately you can either say you'll run 4 trains an hour and then cancel half of them (which is incredibly frustrating for all concerned) or you reduce the service intentionally which keeps reliability much higher. There may only be 2 trains an hour but at least they'll be there.

Pop a bid in to Southwark Council for some funding to create said rock opera and perform it in Dulwich Square. ;-)

But @Rockets, we've been here before about schools in the last 190+ pages. Schools all have travel plans (they're obliged to have them) - if you dig around enough on the school website you can usually find them, eg: https://www.jags.org.uk/admissions/transport , https://www.dulwichpreplondon.org/our-school/travel/ However, they can't mandate or police how people (both staff and students) travel to school and a lot of their influence ends at the school gates. It's all very well the school putting in a load of cycle parking but if the amount of traffic on the roads leads to all parents saying "oh it's too dangerous to walk or cycle" then you're not going to get anywhere. The council own and manage the roads (well, most of them, TfL have a hand in some of the major routes) so it's up to them to take measures to reduce the amount of vehicle traffic and increase the amount of active travel. Yes, there are complementary measures that schools, workplaces etc can take but the roads are not their responsibility. So we're back at LTNs as the one easy cheap way of doing that. Asking nicely if people wouldn't mind awfully driving a bit less doesn't work. Constant "share the road" campaigns have done absolutely nothing to increase either cycle safety or the number of people cycling. "Equitable solutions for all" (answers on a postcard as to what these actually are) don't exist because the road network is already massively unequal and unequitable, it's skewed very heavily towards the use, storage and flow of private motor vehicles. The implication that keeps being made is that by removing all LTNs and having the schools "do their bit" (which means what exactly?) we'll suddenly be at a utopian ideal of clean air for all and free flowing traffic and that's quite simply not possible. I have no idea either but you don't need to know the start point, end point, purpose and journey distance of every single car on the road. You're asking (once again) for data that is almost impossible to source with any accuracy without vast sums of money being spent and is actually not that useful anyway. The simple answer is that there are too many cars doing too many short journeys and we need urgent measures to curb that, not years more "consultation" and "research" (aka kicking the can down the road).

Even when Melbourne wasn't filtered, you wouldn't have got a coach down there. The buses (back in the days when the 37 went along it) could barely make it round the bend. Certainly now it is filtered at the ED station end, if you put a coach in there it wouldn't be able to turn around - putting three coaches down there is not an option. Second the comment about reporting them. Email to the coach firm with the school and Southwark environment copied in as it's both noise and air pollution. You're right, complaining to the drivers is usually a waste of time. Maybe if the anti-LTN'ers would like to stop pouring engine oil into planters, spray painting signs and vandalising cameras, that money could be spent elsewhere?! https://brixtonblog.com/2021/07/council-to-act-against-ltn-vandals/ Pouring engine oil over plants is just despicable. Honestly, one (heavily anonymised) photo of a Clean Air for All poster next to a massive SUV, the forum goes into meltdown. Repeated vandalism costing tens of thousands to fix and your complaint is that the council are spending money on trying to prevent it?! Not that people are committing criminal damage and (rather ironically) polluting the very streets they seem so keen on "protecting"? I think your ire is aimed at the wrong people...

But @Rockets, this is what has been asked for! Right from the moment the first planter was put in, the modus operandi of all these One... groups is the same. Demand data of all types. Interim data, initial data, monitoring data, pollution data. (it's quite ironic that the more militant minded of the anti-folk then go round cutting traffic count cables specifically to disrupt the data gathering but we'll skip over that for now...) When data is given, especially interim data, it'll be rubbished as incomplete, inaccurate, biased, faked and the demands to see the raw data (like WTF are they going to do with the download from a traffic count machine...?!). When the final report is produced, it'll be claimed that it's the follow on from an incomplete initial report. Repeat ad infinitum. Every piece of data that is produced is fought over to the nth degree, questioning it's veracity - wrong location, wrong time of day/week/month... If it came from Location X, they'll demand it from Location Y. When the data is positive (it usually is, the basic principles are all the same), the claim is then made that they don't need data to see what's happening on their own street. Muddy the waters, obfuscate, produce your own "survey" which shows the opposite, claim the council are manipulating things. You literally cannot win. Nothing will ever be good enough, every bit of data produced will be discarded with a request for ever more esoteric and specific monitoring. Sweeping generalisation but councils are usually not competent enough to do conspiracy theories or manipulation. ;-) One of the amusing things about conspiracy theories is that they almost always imply or require a massive amount of cover up from thousands of people. Face it, Matt Hancock couldn't even have a quiet shag in his own office without it becoming public knowledge; the idea that there is some kind of mass secret collusion of council officials, external contractors, DfT, transport experts and so on to hide the truth, manipulate data and so on is far-fetched in the extreme! Damn, I must have been out, that would have been an interesting conversation... ;-) And obviously not at all biased, no leading questions at all.

https://londonlivingstreets.com/2021/07/15/impact-of-2020-low-traffic-neighbourhoods-in-london-initial-traffic-counts-now-in-from-4-london-boroughs/ What is your definition of "worked"? Broadly speaking, vehicle traffic drops, active travel increases. Surely that means that it's working?

The graphic that Rah3 posted the other day (I've tried to link it again below) state that the 22% decrease figure was from the Court Lane end of LL which is probably as a result of Court Lane now longer being an access road from the Village (other than for residents, perhaps a few people parking on Court Lane / Eynella for the park and so on). Bear in mind that the figure generated from tube counters is for that section of road, not "all of Lordship Lane" The figure from EDG at the LL end is a 26% increase, an extra 2400 vehicles per day compared to same period in 2019. Clearly, it's not ALL displaced traffic - the maths of the reductions elsewhere simply don't add up to it ALL shifting to EDG. As an initial test of the LTN though, I'd say that's overall quite positive although it now needs some work to reduce traffic along EDG. The major problem is the EDG/LL junction area, that whole lot needs a complete overhaul but that would cost millions and take a very long time of major disruption - my guess is it's one of those things that'll be put off indefinitely either due to funding or the fact that no-one is prepared to face the year of roadworks and associated chaos. There are easier shorter term measures like restricting parking along there, adding in a pop-up cycle lane and so on, all of which would help to alleviate congestion. Counters - the accuracy varies a bit, generally the accepted error margin is about 10% although often it's a lot lower that that. A dual hose system can determine speed quite well. When a car passes over it you get F/F...R/R pulse readings and since it knows that the hoses are x distance apart, measuring the speed is easy. You can get an idea of vehicle length too from the time difference between the front and rear wheels although where it sometimes gets confused is lorries with multi-axle trailers. That said, as a general rule, the tube counters aren't suitable for larger roads with heavy traffic although they'll cope with buses. If a car stops over it though with the tubes between front and rear wheels, the longer pause can sometimes confuse it but the time gaps between pulses are pretty easy to identify. If you're getting a lot of that, you probably need to move the counter to somewhere with slightly freer flow of traffic and/or back it up with manual counts, video counts etc. As to why the council moved them - that's what they do. The whole point of those things is they're cheap and portable and don't need thousands of them across the neighbourhood, they can move them round, a week here, a week there and it'll give the same trend comparisons. You don't need to know to the last % point the exact numbers of cars, bikes, buses, trucks on every stretch of road on every day of the year. /forum/file.php?5,file=396982

There are two fundamentally opposing points here. You're calling for data - interim data, raw data, pollution, traffic, baselines, comparisons. That's fair enough, it's only right and proper that everything gets monitored and recorded. But then when that data is presented, it's rubbished, challenged, dismissed and in some cases personal attacks are made on the authors accusing them of bias. Accusations are made of rigging the system including ridiculous assertions that cyclists are riding round and round in circles to trip the counters. This is in spite of the fact that the vast majority of LTN-style interventions around the world show fairly similar patterns. The opposite, once all that data has been rubbished, is then to say that you don't need data, you can see what is happening with your own eyes. The problem with that approach is that you might see solid traffic along a road and assume it's all the fault of those LTNs but around the corner could be an accident, a badly parked or broken down car, a delivery van stopped in the middle of the road etc - something that could easily jam up traffic in a few seconds yet never be noticed as the actual cause. When that taxi went into the wall at the top of DKH, it absolutely screwed traffic for a mile or more in all directions - back to Goose Green, down to KCH... Yet anyone sat in a queue wondering why it was terrible won't have known anything about that one single incident (at least, not at the time and it only made local news very briefly). Same applies for things like roadworks which might not be known about outside of the immediate area but could have a very wide reaching effect. Easy to sit there, look at the traffic and moan about LTNs when it might not be that at all. The only thing that tells you that is data. Lived experience is fine as a back-up to the actual data but as the key metric for determining success or failure, it's terrible. The data is a snapshot over a period of time that can be compared to similar times in the past. Broad trends can be picked out fairly easily, further monitoring to check and test, adjustments made to the LTN where required etc. But you can't have it both ways - either you want the data, in which case you can of course challenge it and ask for more but you can't just dismiss it because of your opinions. LL was terrible on Wednesday therefore the data gathered 2 months ago and presented to me now is rubbish - that's not a valid argument. Loads of traffic schemes never deliver on the promises set out initially. A very common reason to build a new road or widen an existing one is that journey times / congestion will decrease - when they don't, do you ask for the scheme to be reversed? So far, the data is showing a broadly positive trend - sure there's some more that can be done especially around EDG and Croxted but undoing the whole lot is not really a sensible answer. Like saying that the smoking section is really unpleasant so we'll bin off the non-smoking bit and allow the pollution to be shared equally. The answer is to bin off the smoking section and have no smoke at all.* *analogy dating back a bit to when smoking was allowed indoors.

23 minutes from north Dulwich, direct train twice per hour. Current timetable is at 00 and 30 mins past each hour. If you go from ED, it's obviously one stop further, it adds about 3 minutes to the journey. It's not a journey I make that frequently but I know the train times for when I go - it's always been very reliable and never particularly busy. Most of the traffic at that time in the morning is coming into town from Croydon so you're going against the flow which means quiet(ish) trains. ND can get busy with kids coming in from both Croydon and Peckham directions for the schools; ED is the quieter station at that time in the morning.

Because it's not (solely) about emissions. It's about traffic congestion, pollution (which you can use as a catch-all term for CO2, NOx, particulates...), road danger, use of public space and there are other related factors such as parking, the infrastructure to support car use (like petrol stations, EV charging points, car parks). And all of those things affect *everyone*, whether you own a car or not. And in terms of "emissions" per passenger km, buses are far better than cars. Buses are about the most efficient form of mass transit around in terms of road space, emissions and efficiency. You can (to a certain extent) fix a lot of emissions-related problems by switching to EV. But that doesn't solve traffic congestion or road danger nor does it encourage active travel nor is it particularly equitable - there are plenty of people who can't afford or justify a switch to an EV, potentially a lot of people at the start of 3 or 5 year lease deals on their current car and so on. You can't fix emissions from housing / buildings in the short term, especially on older properties - that's something that will require a huge rollout of Government grants for homeowners / landlords to do things like adding insulation, removing older boilers / woodburners etc. So the current "best" answer is to address the traffic issues. Reduce congestion (by having fewer car journeys, balanced out by promoting / enabling active travel) and you reduce emissions and road danger and you need less space for parking.

On the other hand, there's a lot of expertise out there that would cost councils far more to keep "on hand" as employees. And if you do need something doing relatively short term (say over the course of 12-18 months), it's often far easier to get in consultants because recruiting the relevant expertise on short-term contracts is difficult and expensive. Generally quicker and easier to buy in the relevant needs - on the face of it, an ?85k consultancy (which is the value of the dxw one) is expensive but compared to keeping that level of expert staffing as permanent employees of the council, it's actually very cheap.

Problem is that a lot of councils are effectively paddling around in circles awaiting the (delayed) Transport Decarbonisation Plan from Government. Boris, he of the massive over-promising and under-delivering, has pledged to cut carbon emissions by 78% by 2035 and so far, the policies to actually deliver on this incredibly ambitious target are limited to a few planters, some drivel about electric cars and some limited e-scooter trials. So councils are kind of lost - there's some reasonable new guidelines about building proper infrastructure (not bits of random paint long a pavement and calling it a cycle lane") but many councils, stuck with a perfect storm of traditionalist, car-centric councillors, funding cuts, emergence from Covid and a reluctance to change are scared of putting in place anything that is actually radical. dxw do a lot with Government, councils plus stuff like housing associations. Specialists in digital public services which councils usually can't do in-house.

Confirmation bias. You get it in all sorts of fields where people will give greater weight to "evidence" which backs up their preconceived idea and lesser weight to "evidence" which does not back up their opinion. Fascinating areas of study, confirmation bias.