exdulwicher

Haha! Done a lot of work for councils, you just learn how the public sector operates. Some of it is actually surprisingly good. Some of it leaves you banging your head against a desk... Fair point re the link you posted - most authorities have some form of "open access" roadworks log, I was specifically referencing the "mayors office control" part of your question, sorry for any confusion.

If it's a road under TfL control, yes. If it's a road under council control, no. That said there's a whole raft of guidance, rules, best practice and so on which if you're either really interested in or you're really bored and have nothing better to do is here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/street-works Also, if there's an emergency situation like a burst water main, all the "coordinating of work" goes out the window.

While that's a popular myth, the truth is far more practical - winter wrecks the roads so the plans are usually put in place to resurface them in the spring. Resurfacing in winter is much more difficult because of the cold and wet which affects the tarmac laying and leads to more problems later on so the ideal time to do it is spring. Although you can guarantee that as soon as Southwark's' resurfacing contractors have upped and left, some utilities company will come along and dig it all up again. ;-)

Re the consultation matters. Lambeth released this a couple of days ago on the Railton Road LTN: https://beta.lambeth.gov.uk/streets-roads-transport/railton-low-traffic-neighbourhood-stage-one-monitoring-report/methodology Stage 1 of what they stress is an ongoing consultation and within it, clearly set out, is how they've gone about it, good and bad points, next steps and so on. There's also an Equalities Impact Assessment in there. It's been said by me and others on here that Lambeth have generally engaged better and I think if Southwark were to do something similar it might help address some of the concerns raised on here. Maybe?

This is absolutely correct in terms of investing in public transport infrastructure, however the PTAL scores only really tell a small part of the story. PTAL is based on a 100m grid square - each square has a value assigned to it based on connectivity (level of access) to the transport network, combining walk time to the public transport network with service wait times. Those 100m grid squares can then be aggregated and an area can be assigned an overall value. Dulwich, with its vast areas of green space (JAGS, Dulwich College and Alleyn's playing fields, Dulwich Park, Dulwich Woods and so on) is obviously somewhat limiting in terms of buses running through it so you almost end up with a catch-22. You (fairly obviously) cannot run a bus down most of the residential streets, the roads cannot realistically be widened to accommodate buses so you're left with running buses down the roads that can have them - EDG (37 & 42), N/S through the village (just the P4), Lordship Lane (185, 176, 40, P13 - lots of options depending on whereabouts on LL you are). Using the Hopper fare, the connections actually aren't that bad at all. E-W isn't brilliant but E-W is limited to the options of the roads. South Circular, EDG/Half Moon Lane and Herne Hill itself running up to Ruskin Park which is rather outside the area anyway. Which leaves you with the only option of increasing PTAL anywhere is more buses through the Village N-S (more P4 or another service on another route). So yes, the area has a low score overall but it doesn't really tell the whole picture - once you're out onto the boundary roads, you're in a grid square with a 3 or 4 level. You can play around on WebCAT, it's public access: https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/urban-planning-and-construction/planning-applications/planning-with-webcat and also includes forecasts, a separate Travel Time Mapping Analysis (how far you can go in a specified amount of time from a set location via various modes). Most of the rest of your points I agree with as well. You're right about EV charging (it doesn't solve congestion but it does help with localised pollution and it's part of the solution), spot on about cycle storage (both destination and at home - destination is important because if you want to enable local shopping trips etc by bike, you need somewhere to lock the bike up and you'd like the bike to still be there when you come out of the shop!) and you're right with point 7 with the added caveat that quite often, you don't really know what the outcomes will be until the measure has been put in place and in that respect, planters / bollards / pop-up cycle lanes etc are a very cheap and easy way of testing, adjusting and re-testing things without going to all the expense and disruption of completely rebuilding everything. Done properly, over a decent period of time with proper consultation and good engagement, LTNs should actually be welcomed as a trial run of some proposed improvements. Everyone gets to see and experience first hand how it works, everyone gets to test out the changes required and the revised option can then be put in permanently (the revised option can also include complete removal if it's been shown not to work for the majority). One of the few transport interventions you can do that does not require colossal amounts of taxpayer money!

In that case we await with interest the names of the authors, their publicly viewable CVs (including their funding), links to their previous work and of course the peer-review of the Dulwich Alliance "report" - you know, the one that copy/pasted a whole load of comments off the Commonplace consultation page, dressed it up in a nice shiny format and was promptly seized upon as being the definitive word in all things LTN. You didn?t seem so vocal in calling for that to be peer-reviewed or enquire where their funding came from??

The goings on in "Dulwich Square" annoy me to the extent that I rarely use it now. Coming back into Dulwich from South Circular direction I'll cut off and go through Dulwich Park in preference to getting to DS and encountering a load of ballroom dancers or carol singers or whatever version of "street art" is going on that week. Much as I agree with your point about the junction, it'll be part of the council arts & community fund (or whatever Southwark call it). All councils have them, it's part of their civic / community duties. It's not a case of if you don't spend it here, you can divert it to another budget there so no-one is really "losing out". It can't be spent on fixing potholes or repairing a broken streetlight. However, I agree entirely with the points you made about the junction.

I haven't forgotten what I posted at all @slarti b. However you've rather selectively quoted me. The One... campaigns have behind them (as I said) A very opaque mix of LDTA, UKIP, various twitter bots and pro-driving campaigns like FairFuel UK and The ABD. Back on page 96 there's a discussion and a couple of links to where Farage was getting in on the action sensing some nice political opportunism and there's been a couple of Daily Mail articles in a similar vein. However, I also added, in the same post: Plus a genuine mix of local residents, many of whom will think it's purely a local group started by local residents with concerns. There's a lot of similarities to Vote Leave and Leave.EU. Most of the people signing up to them were regular people who, for their own reasons, wanted to leave the EU. They didn't really care about who founded, funded or managed the groups in the background. Same here - most people are genuine local residents with concerns and at no point did I say anything like "all anti-LTN people are UKIP voting SUV drivers". Please don't paint me as though I did. The second one - yeah perhaps a bit stereotypical / inflammatory. Not really much different to the people going on about "the pro-closure lobby", "entitled cyclists" and comparing Southwark Council to a communist dictatorship.

I've never said that.

It's slightly buried within London Planning's website but there's a list of the viewing corridors there: https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/services/planning/planning-policy/protected-views-and-tall-buildings Tower of London and Palace of Westminster have similar (smaller) protected views. It's why the Leadenhall Building (the "Cheesegrater") slopes backwards, to sort of remove itself a bit from being directly behind St Pauls. Well London to the north of St Pauls is flat; London to the south is elevated so the issue of viewing corridors was considerably lower when they were introduced. But then again, no-one back then really foresaw 40+ storey buildings...

No it didn't, it used the public view of the site. Anyone can log into Commonplace, zoom into any area of Southwark and read/add comments and also agree/disagree with existing comments. To do anything other than reading comments, you have to submit your email address and verify it (they send a link to the email address, you click on it). Commonplace can link email addresses and other info like IP address to comments to ensure that they're genuine and to check if it's one person posting 500 comments or 500 people posting one comment each. What the council get is an anonymised version of the report; it never links a comment to an individual but it will show how many people responded, average number of comments per person and so on. Commonplace's privacy policy is here if you want to see what they can derive from the data: https://www.commonplace.is/privacy-policy The One Dulwich "report" was simply a bunch of comments collated from the public view of the page and a slant put on it. No idea of where those comments came from, how many individual people made them, where they live, in what capacity they are commentating (visitor, resident etc). You can guess some of that from comments - there are plenty on there saying "I work on [road]" or "I live in [area]" but equally, that's unverifiable as well.

They're quite expensive and generally require professional fitting but you can get protection devices for catalytic converters, eg: http://www.catsafe.org.uk/ Hope police come up lucky with tracing the car and the thieves.

Abe_froeman Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Ex-D, I don't think anybody on here apart from you > and Malumbu gives a stuff about the LTNs outside > East Dulwich tbh. I don't think that's true at all - numerous other schemes have been referenced, compared and learnt from. People on here have used examples from outside Southwark to repeat FOI requests, learn how to use them, how to measure parameters, how to petition the council to pause schemes, consult and so on. Similarly, examples have been held up as good/bad/indifferent, the way things should/should not be and I think that it's very important that everyone from councils to residents to what might loosely be termed "through traffic" can see the positives and negatives of both individual schemes and the bigger London / TfL picture. What's good in one area might not work in another and vice versa. You personally might not care but that doesn't mean that it's not a factor. The recent court case about TfL's Streetscape plans was widely referenced and noted on here so plenty of people are looking beyond the planter on their street and at the wider view.

Actually Metallic, I get to see this across a much wider range of transport issues, not just in Dulwich or Southwark or London and it's largely the same. A lot of it at the moment is being spread by astro-turfing of the various One... groups, helped by some slightly inflammatory press. The broad outline is that "an area" is restricted and because of the layout of towns, the demographics of "residential areas" vs light industry or shopping or business districts etc, the accusation of pandering to a wealthy few is fairly easy to make. It isn't (wholly) accurate but there's enough half-truth or apparent truth in there to let it through unchallenged. Meanwhile, the outraged people within the LTN who can no longer drive their SUV the 500yds to the primary school can't really complain too publicly about that because they come across as very entitled. That is the overall aim - unrestricted driving for residents, as evidenced by the continual calls for ANPR gates with resident permits - but to call for that is generally seen as selfish. So you get gas-lighting where the causes of others (no matter how tenuous) can be harnessed to call for the outcome that you actually want. "what about the poor living on these roads that are now more polluted?" "what about the elderly who can't walk far?" Translation: I've never really cared one way or the other about them but they're a useful patsy so I can get my own way without appearing selfish. As I say that's not a Dulwich issue or specific to any one individual on this forum, it's just what is happening now in what is rapidly, thanks to certain elements of the media, becoming a class issue and culture war. https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2020/11/low-traffic-neighbourhoods-LTNs-London-car-street-cycling-walking-culture-war-pollution-gentrification Most councils are not very good at handling this sort of thing which is why there are (quite valid in many cases) accusations that the consultation processes aren't up to scratch because they're more used to dealing with written feedback, not instant social media comments and fast-moving news. That then goes back into the feedback loop that the council aren't listening to "the poor, the deprived" and so on and the cycle continues.

And here's the counter-argument, notably better researched than The Times one... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/16/claim-low-traffic-schemes-only-benefit-better-off-debunked-in-new-study The cost differences quoted in The Time article are because the housing stock is completely different. If you're comparing grand Victorian houses in one street with council flats in another, the difference in price is right there (almost) irrespective of traffic. Equating house prices to rich/poor is very over-simplistic - reputable studies don't use it (or if they do, there's a mass of weighting applied for numerous other factors. It also don't account for things like social tenancies, rented properties etc - house prices themselves are a very simplistic measure which doesn't really explain or define who is rich/poor. There was an interesting article on broadly similar lines of how cities developed where the "east end" was generally the poor, the slums, the factory workers and the "west end" was generally the preserve of the wealthy, the landowners, the industry tycoons. It was down to the prevailing winds of SW to NE which meant that you built your nice house upwind of the stinky factories. This myth of "only benefits wealthy areas" is a similar class war to a lot of other populist war cries of taking back control from unelected elites. Still, it's fascinating how society's concern for the poor, disabled and marginalised can lie dormant for so long, only requiring the installation of a few bollards and planters before it can be expressed...

Looking forward to it Wardy, some great stories in there! Do you still live on the same road - if not do you ever go back and see things as they are now? Be fascinating to see a "then and now" set of pictures if there's anything surviving from your childhood days there.

A very opaque mix of LDTA, UKIP, various twitter bots and pro-driving campaigns like FairFuel UK and The ABD. Because issues like LTNs have becomes so politically divisive, it's become a very easy target for right-wing campaign groups that find it easy to pick on populist issues. Plus a genuine mix of local residents, many of whom will think it's purely a local group started by local residents with concerns. If you delve deeply enough into the Twitter feeds of them you can find the key accounts that follow them all, retweet them and contribute to them; it's usually only a dozen or so people behind them all plus some bots. The wording on the "about us" gives it away, it's virtually identical across the board even for groups outside London. Apolitical, members from all walks of life, holistic solutions... It's almost word-for-word. There's a reference in this article about the overall secrecy behind the One... groups (this one specific to One Oval) https://www.brixtonbuzz.com/2020/08/save-oval-streets-hits-back-at-oneovals-misleading-information-about-emergency-access-to-the-the-oval-triangle-ltn/

The DfT National Travel Attitudes Survey has just come out, this has some good info around changes in transport patterns. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/956170/national-travel-attitudes-study-wave-4-final.pdf The modelling is beginning to catch up with "normal" (pre-Covid), lockdown, the initial easing of Lockdown 1, LTN implementation, Lockdown 2 and so on but it's a lot of data to crunch. Reports like that one ^^ really help from.a national point of view.

Last week, The Telegraph ran two pieces in three days; the first arguing that LTNs were great, we needed more of them, the second arguing exactly the opposite. Newspapers like this, it's good for clickbait.

I should probably have used the word "experiences" rather than opinions. Apologies. Not at all - IMO it's still far and away the best method to ascertain what works, what doesn't and what (with a bit of tweaking) might. However 6 months is more or less the minimum to get the data before you start changing things around. That's the whole reason that the legislation allows for up to 18 months. As @DulwichCentral mentions, the travel and traffic patterns at the moment are completely changed from "normal" so a longer baseline period is essential in order to work out the actual effects and perhaps extrapolate back to "normal". Whether or not we return to normal any time in the next 6 months is very much up in the air but that's possibly a discussion for a Covid or politics thread. ;-)

Strongly disagree @malumbu. It's imperative that people with opinions (good and bad) use that official Southwark website consultation. Shout about it on a forum or on Twitter or on any other website and Southwark can quite legitimately ignore it (it's not formal feedback). I actually said many (many...) pages ago - not sure if it was on this thread or the related Melbourne Grove one - that talking about it on here was all well and good but the only thing Southwark are obliged to use is the consultation. I also said to post constructive comments because if you write "it's ****, I hate it all, you're all ****" then it'll get deleted as being abusive. Well the consultation period is "up to 18 months" so there's no official requirement to produce a "results so far" tally. It's not the American elections! ;-)

The papers for the next TfL Board meeting (3rd Feb) are online now and it includes a mention of the Judicial Review (Edit - should have clarified, the Healthy Streets / Streetscape case brought by the Taxi trade against TfL). http://content.tfl.gov.uk/board-20210203-agenda-papers.pdf It's in the Commissioner's Report section.

rupert james Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > LJC56 Wrote: > -------------------------------------------------- > ----- > > There?s actually going to be a bakery opposite, > > according to signs in a window. It implies it?s > to > > be a healthy bakery, whatever that means! > > > Very expensive bread . 😂 There was talk for a while that Dough Bakehouse in Herne Hill was looking to open a branch in Dulwich. They opened a branch in Beckenham... The woman who runs it was the winner on The Apprentice in 2019. However their website makes no mention of any plans for Dulwich...

I'm no legal expert so it might be one for someone like @legalalien to answer but you can't NOT respond to an FOI. https://www.foi.directory/freedom-information-request-responded-20-working-days/ And I don't think Covid (and the associated Working From Home etc) has given any leeway in those timeframes. The council can however request extensions if they need to gather more information so long as they still respond within the original 20-day time frame to explain this. And there are exceptions - they can for example refuse to disclose information on certain grounds: https://www.foi.directory/exemptions-freedom-information-act/ But they still have to explain to the person requesting the information why it's being withheld and give the details of how they can appeal this decision, they can't simply not respond.

They were different schemes - the originally proposed OHS was put on hold and a similar set of options (although not an identical scheme) was put in place through the emergency funding granted by Government. IIRC, there was actually something in the T&Cs of that funding to say it could not be used to push already planned options; it was specifically designed to be temporary measures (so LTNs which can be installed, amended and removed relatively quickly and cheaply) rather than the full scale measures of OHS. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/making-traffic-regulation-orders-during-coronavirus-covid-19 Camera controlled / permit systems are the worst of all worlds to be honest. You don't get any of the active travel benefits of an actual LTN because the road is effectively still open to through traffic, it's just that it's exclusively for residents. It actually creates more of a ghetto / exclusive gated compound feel because the residents are not remotely impacted by it so they'll continue to use cars for short journeys (the very thing you're trying to avoid). The only way they do work is if it's specifically a bus gate and it's either too expensive or too inconvenient to install those Rising Bollards (the ones that routinely get broken by idiots attempting to tailgate buses through them which then closes the road for a week while they're repaired). ANPR cameras have become a much easier option for those. But using them outside of very specific conditions (like a bus gate) risks creating extra confusion for drivers plus a whole load of extra work within councils in managing permits, signage, appeals and running costs plus the inevitable negative publicity. Rather amusingly, an opposition councillor in Ealing was trumpeting ANPR gates as the answer to everything a few months ago; now that they're in place he's outraged that the council have "raked in" tens of thousands of pounds in fines from "poor innocent motorists".