exdulwicher

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.

You see this is where it does get interesting. If you're doing a long journey, the impact of a more roundabout exit from your house (due to LTNs) onto the major road network is less relevant as a % of journey time. If you're doing a short journey, the % increase in time is very significant - that's the whole point of them to make driving less of a default choice due to the extra time while simultaneously creating a safer space for active travel - but it's still based off time rather than distance. The idea being that if your journey now takes 20 mins instead of 10, you'd look to find an alternative method. That's largely true of most modal shift although there's other factors like over-crowding on public transport pushing someone to (eg) cycling/driving the journey instead.

TfL's WebCAT system does something similar that works off time. https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/urban-planning-and-construction/planning-with-webcat/webcat-updates?intcmp=25935 Distance actually isn't that great a measure - people are generally pretty bad at judging distances (which is why so many car journeys are <2km), they go off time. It takes x minutes to go from A to B via Method Y. Time is quite heavily weighted in transport models. A minute spent waiting (eg, for a bus) feels a lot longer than a minute spent travelling (especially if there is no info on when that bus will arrive) so wait time is important as is info. The display board showing the bus is only 2 mins away massively helps with perception. Where this becomes a problem is in modal shift. Let's say you drive 2km and it takes 10 minutes due to traffic. 10 mins in a car is perceived as a large distance - "well it takes 10 mins to drive so it must be miles away". However it also takes about that long (10-15 mins) to walk it and less to cycle it. But saying to someone that they should try that is often rebuffed because it's a 10-min car trip so that would, by definition, take AGES to walk or cycle (and this is ignoring anything about carrying stuff or disabilities or whatever so there's some leeway). To get distance with cars, you can combine various data points. ANPR and/or mobile data will give you an approximate route, the vehicle's registered address is known (although that of course is no guarantee that it started its journey there) but that's still not perfect - there is not blanket coverage of ANPR. On most public transport, distance is irrelevant, it's simply how long you're sitting on the thing for. Such detail is not necessarily particularly useful, you're more broadly after trends: x% of cars driving through [location] are from outside the borough y% of people arriving at [location] do so by bus average time spent travelling by Method X is...

To be fair, it's a bit of a catch 22. Some of it is simply standardised monitoring. You build a road, you count how many vehicles go along it and when. Normal stuff. Gathering data on that before you've built the road isn't possible so there might be a policy that says "we will build a road between X and Y" for whatever reason and you can model some of it based on a number of factors but a lot of it is unknown. With cycling and walking, it doesn't help that the UK lags significantly behind other countries - we know what works, the design principles are all well-established but it's not part of UK transport policy therefore it can't be done. It is improving (slowly) and thankfully the massively car-centric design principles that have been the lynchpin of almost every urban design scheme for the last 40 years are beginning to be overhauled but there's a lot of public and council opinion that also needs to be overhauled. However, the devolved nature of it (where schemes are proposed by councils, bid for from defined pots of money and then selected (or not) by DfT) is very piecemeal, the data gathering (some by councils, some by TfL, some by DfT) is a bit fragmented and of varying quality and there's a lot of politics around it where schemes are proposed and approved because they're popular not necessarily because they're what's best. Those general points are not unique to transport by any means - I often wonder how a lot of the UK functions on a day to day basis and usually conclude that it's in spite of Government, rather than because of it!

It doesn't simplify things at all. The more junctions you have along a road, the more impediments to traffic flow. A very simple analogy, it's like a drip of water trickling along a string - the more knots in the string, the more that drip is going to be held up. There's a recognised paradox to describe it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braess%27s_paradox

Most of it is as simple as "build it and they will come". If you build A-roads and flyovers and car parks and put your supermarkets 15 mins out of town, people will drive. If you build proper segregated cycle lanes and proper cycle parking and everything is within easy reach, people will cycle (or walk/scooter etc) There's other stuff that helps - Santander Cycles hire scheme for example has been absolutely critical in increasing % of journeys done by bike in central London but that was alongside schemes such as protected cycleways. Helps if there are additional incentives like showers at work too although that's not always essential for basic commuting. Sometimes you also need some stick (such as making driving and/or parking at your destination more difficult/expensive). What rah3 says above - it's the path of least resistance but it also becomes a circular argument. More people drive so the roads feel less safe for walking/cycling so more people drive (because it's "safer"), which makes the roads more hostile for walking and cycling.... You can probably argue a host of subsidiary factors such as the comfort of sitting in your own air conditioned 3-piece suite on wheels, your choice of music, the status symbol aspect of a nice car and so on but a lot of that is unnecessary detail.

It's very prevalent amongst conspiracy theorists - in many cases it's why they're so easily lead into the conspiracy in the first place. Far easier to watch a few YouTube videos than take time to learn facts from reputable sources, especially when the facts involve maths. You see it a lot in Flat Earth stuff. Much quoting of physics without any understanding of the basics.

There's not really a whole lot that can realistically be done with EDG/LL junction. In effect, it's actually a broadly staggered junction: the meeting of the A2216 (LL) and the A2214 (EDG). The 2214 just does a big kink north before reverting to it's easterly heading as you go off towards Peckham. You can't really widen it or smooth out the turns because of the shops on LL and the houses on EDG. The parking on both roads massively contributes to the issues there - in fact STREETVIEW shows this perfectly with the lorry turning in and then basically getting stuck there unable to proceed westbound along EDG due to parking on its side and oncoming traffic on the other side. You've then got other minor junctions cluttering the place up. The more nodes (junctions) you have closely together, the worse the traffic which is why DV is so bad because that is basically 5 junctions in one and the slightest hiccup anywhere (like one car trying to turn across traffic) brings the whole thing to a halt instantly. At EDG/LL, you've got the pedestrian crossing lights right next to it as well plus the zebra crossing on the roundabouts - so as soon as anyone crosses there, traffic is immediately stopped ON the roundabout which instantly blocks most of it. The easiest fix for that junction is to remove all the on-street parking. You could make the GG roundabout smaller but that would increase traffic speeds through it which is also undesirable, especially given the pedestrian crossings on each exit. A lot of the issues there happen before the junction anyway - one option would be to shift the filters on Melbourne, Derwent, Elsie and Tintagel to the EDG end instead of LL which would force anyone driving to those roads to come in from LL which between ED station and GG roundabout is better suited to handling turning traffic than EDG is.

The problem is though, it's still anecdotal. I don't think anyone is doubting you, I don't think, re-reading rahx3's posts that he/she has called you a liar. But in terms of the data and monitoring that is also mentioned, it is null and void, it is as it's sometimes termed, "anecdata" - information or evidence that is based on personal experience or observation rather than systematic research or analysis. That's not to say it's invalid either though. If it's any consolation, most councils lack the funds and/or expertise to be monitoring traffic / pollution all the time anyway and in many cases you end up with such a mass of data that actually not a lot useful can be gained from it anyway. It's relatively easy to get macro levels of data on stuff like traffic along a road, passengers in and out of a station, pollution within an area etc but breaking it down into (for example) what type of traffic, where is it from, where is it going etc is much more complicated. You don't really need to have counters across every road 24/7, nor do you need to have a pollution monitoring station on every road but data, by it's very nature, is always a year or two behind anyway. And when that year includes probably the greatest upset to movement in living memory, the data is massively off. If it helps at all, this has impacted road and rail and it's basically wrecked all the models (rail slightly less so since trains are a lot easier to plot in terms of where they're from and where they're going!). But yeah, baselines are off (unless you go back to 2018/19) and there's been a lot of interventions across multiple councils, locations etc and the private car stats are impacted by the public transport stats to a far greater degree than normal. Honestly, it'll take another year to untangle it all but obviously by then things will have moved on again. If there's a plus point to it, it might impress on councils the need to have these kind of figures year in year out but who knows.

The problem is that the dog really needs this instruction not to bark from it's owner / leader. Anti-bark devices work but only when accompanied by an instruction that the dog can actually connect to its behaviour and it needs to be done immediately and consistently. Of course they do but there's a difference between the occasional bark if a cat comes into the garden vs constant barking at all hours. The rescue dog that we used to have barked if there was a knock at the door. Otherwise it was (mostly) quiet because it had been trained to know what was appropriate and when. It also wouldn't obey instructions from strangers. I'm not saying it was perfect by any means but it did not annoy the neighbours, nor was it just thrown into the garden to look after itself. Recent case in North Wales where an owner was fined for excessive barking: https://www.dailypost.co.uk/news/north-wales-news/dog-owner-fined-after-fed-20795749

The register of roadworks says it's relocation of a speed hump.

A few years ago, Athens had a policy to combat air pollution by specifying certain number plates per day (only cars with odd numbered plates allowed one day, only even plated cars the next and so on). A lot of people went out and bought a second car with the opposite plates so they could carry on driving each day...

You could argue it the other way round too - look at what it was and now look at what it is. A sort of inspirational "ooh, we want some of that too". Plenty of similar pics in circulation from all over the world where a traffic-clogged highway has been turned into a public space, bike lanes etc. https://www.archdaily.com/773139/before-and-after-30-photos-that-prove-the-power-of-designing-with-pedestrians-in-mind I view that as more of a counter to the alternative currently being proposed by DA of "let's go back to what it was".

@Rockets - think it's electricity works. However I was just crossing the S.Circ from Dulwich College heading towards the park on a bike last night so I didn't have chance to see any signage that said when it was expected to be done by.