exdulwicher

To flip that around, what are the options? From reading this, it seems to be a very binary picture - "In my opinion, LTNs aren't working, therefore rip them all out". It's an either / or. There's been no specific options given (other than vague "holistic solutions that benefit everyone" phrases) to address it. How do you fix the existing problem that there is too much traffic, especially too many short journeys? Waiting 25 years until the queue of traffic is electric vehicles is also not an option by the way. And in case anyone has missed it in previous posts, I'll state it again: LTNs are not perfect. BUT - they are a key tool in the armoury of traffic reduction measures when used properly. That means with proper monitoring, consultation, adjustment and a certain amount of community buy-in, tied in with complementary measures such as increased/better cycle storage facilities, bus lanes that are properly managed with timed restrictions, work done with schools to encourage and enable safe walking and cycling (that can also include things like specific drop-off zones). Ripping them out is just going to return the streets to the gridlock that was seen previously. It'll remove at a stroke all the safe® cycling / walking options that have been created forcing people back into cars, it'll increase overall pollution and it'll go directly back to the "I'll just jump in the car" mentality that has become the default over the last 30 years or so of transport policy / government planning. Surely the correct campaign here is "this part of this particular LTN is not working as advertised, let's look to address it on a road-by-road level" ?? Bits of it won't be perfect first time out but you can't judge that in the space of a few months, especially a few months where we've had lockdowns, complete changes in working patterns, massively altered traffic patterns and so on. I'm not suggesting there's going to be one answer that will magically fix everything but I can categorically state that one answer that will NOT fix anything is "rip them all out". Some of what is being proposed by various posters on here about road charging, higher fuel tax, trams etc is Government policy and completely out of the control of local councillors. Some of it however (parking restrictions, alterations to LTNs, cycle lanes) IS within their control and should be used alongside LTNs as part of the solution. One of my greatest fears when driving is actually other drivists. I've had way more near misses with drivists than cyclists. How would you address that? In terms of car lanes, slower drivists can frustrate those on a speed mission. Fixed that for you. ;-)

1) PTAL is not wholly relevant in Dulwich because there simply aren't the E-W links you so desperately want. PTAL is low because the area has vast expanses of green space which block direct E-W access and - because PTAL is based on 100m grid squares which I covered a few pages back - you end up with loads of grid squares in the middle of places like Dulwich, Brockwell & Belair Parks, Alleyn's / JAGS / DC playing fields etc where fairly obviously, you're never going to be near a bus or train. Your E-W links are the South Circular, the DV junction/Turney Road which you can't get a bus down anyway and EDG/Half Moon Lane. Honourable mentions to Herne Hill / Denmark Hill which is NE/SW. You could put as many buses in as you want but they can still only go along S.Circ and EDG/Half Moon Lane. 2) and 3) - absolutely agree - in many cases the only way to get people cycling is to have proper safe segregated cycling infrastructure (not a painted lane down half a pavement) and proper secure bike storage/lock ups accessible at both home and destination (whether that be work or shops or school or whatever). Disagree about bikes and cars having to coexist though. That's been the main stumbling block in cycling advocacy for decades and the reason cycling has stubbornly stuck at 1% or so of modal share. Most people are not going to cycle if there are buses and cars thundering past them or they're having to negotiate major junctions. But if you put a safe segregated lane in, modal share jumps. That's been seen worldwide. Take the lane out (like Kensington & Chelsea did with their "flagship" pop-=up lane) and modal share crashes back through the floor. 4) is also vital but to be honest that's slightly less to do with councils. There's a bit of a battle going on with EV charging at the moment as car manufacturers, electricity suppliers, changepoint manufacturers etc are all fighting for a piece of the pie, trying to implement their own solutions and it risks becoming a very messy picture. It really needs a national policy, not individual councils agreeing to put in 5 of these chargers here and a supermarket agreeing to have 2 of those chargers there. Piecemeal EV charging will be like piecemeal cycle lanes. 5) Agree - so do many experts, there was a good piece in Transport Times on the subject the other week but that needs to be a national policy too. 6) That's sort of where lots of LTNs come in to be honest - as was the case with the standalone Loughborough Junction, that solved nothing but if you have a reasonable network of LTNs complementing each other then that's part of the area-wide solution. And "giving equal weighting to all road users" - no. We're in this situation because the only mode of transport catered for in the last 20 years has been cars. You want to balance it out, you need to drop the "consideration for all users" and concentrate on EQUITY which is absolutely not the same as equality. 7) Yes but as I mentioned back on page 151, that's the point of the LTN and the Experimental Traffic Order. Experiment, monitor, modify, resolve. LTNs are easier and cheaper than doing a massive road rebuild, can be "undone" or modified quickly and easily and pretty much anything you do is going to cause division somewhere - in some respects that actually means it's working well if car drivers are complaining it's more difficult to drive, that's part of the point! 8) Oh God, very much this - as I mentioned a page ago, I think that's where the council have fallen down more than the actual schemes themselves. Although, that said, there's no need for them to be telling residents data on every single car or traffic jam or breaking down pollution by individual postcode because it just doesn't work like that. It also takes a while to collate the data so sometimes "silence" while info is gathered and written up is mistaken for inaction. Again, that's down to communication though.

Yes and no. Most housing developments in the last 30 years or so have been on the basic principles of LTNs: things like cul-de-sacs with half a dozen houses down each one, one way in and out via a central roundabout or similar. You can see it on any A-Z or city map, there'll be loads of examples to varying degrees. It works there because it's designed in from the start. To "undesign" a street that people have been used to driving down for years takes a bit more doing but LTNs are a simple, cheap and easy way of testing things out. Put them in using an Experimental Traffic Order, monitor, modify, resolve. That process takes a few months and it needs quality engagement (which is primarily where the trust has broken down here, it's been far better done elsewhere). I don't think anyone has ever said that they're perfect. Most aren't (at least not at first), they take time to bed in, they take time for the major issues to show up in a consistent manner (far too many people are very quick to blame any traffic jam on a nearby LTN rather than actually examining the causes and any "hidden" issues like a broken down bus blocking a road a mile away for example). Most people will accept that they will need some alterations - that might be filtering an additional street, it might be replacing a planter with an ANPR gate, it might be moving a planter from X to Y or it might be removing it altogether. The point is, it's on an Experimental Order so lets experiment! It's far quicker and cheaper than digging up a junction, remodelling the entire thing and only then realising that it's caused an issue over there. It's easier to drive change, engage with people, gather the data etc while it's in place than it is to consult, modify, consult etc then do a big expensive permanent change. Ultimately, the ONLY solution that benefits everyone is driving less. How you get people to drive less is a combination of making it more expensive (not very equal), making it more difficult (affects everyone to some degree) and/or making the alternatives more attractive (benefits everyone, even those who still need to drive). The 2nd and 3rd go hand in hand because as mentioned above, if you make it more difficult to drive you automatically create better conditions for other options like walking and cycling. Sadly @Rockets, the "making it more difficult to drive" IS the halfway house that you're after...

It's not being charged more - or at least if it's done right it's not. The report is talking about replacing one source of tax revenue (VED and fuel duty) with another source (road user charging). At some point it'll have to happen with the shift to EV - they already pay ?0 VED and they obviously use no fuel so it's a massive black hole in finances. It won't happen overnight but it'll be a gradual decline in tax revenue over the next 20 years as petrol and diesel is phased out. It's not necessarily about "driving" or "use of the roads", more just a general taxation issue. Currently, roads are paid for out of general taxes; there's no ring-fencing of VED or fuel duty to be specifically spent on the roads. All taxes just go into the central pot for Boris to redecorate his flat and distribute to all his mates. But if you're going to lose ?30bn of annual revenue, you need to find another source for it.

OP: have a look at this thread which specifically mentions that road along with a description of the suspect: /forum/read.php?5,2200997 Worth seeing if Oddbox will do specified delivery times and ensuring they always deliver to a person rather than just leaving them outside.

They should be for ALL cyclists. Chris Boardman had a good quote about the desired standard: https://www.britishcycling.org.uk/campaigning/article/20180123-campaigning-news-Made-to-move--Chris-Boardman-presents-walking-and-cycling-report-to-MPs-0 And yes, I'd be absolutely happy for mobility scooters to use them too - which goes back to the standards thing of ensuring they're fit for purpose. I'd be fine with e-scooters too but I know that'll probably be less well received! More info about the Swytch thing that @snowy mentioned here: https://www.swytchbike.com/p/universal-ebike-conversion-kit/ There's a review of it here with some pictures and video: https://www.cyclist.co.uk/reviews/6026/swytch-universal-ebike-conversion-kit-review

No, where did I suggest that this was specific to Dulwich? If you define "disability" as "Blue Badge Holder" then you're missing out on a LOT of people who have disabilities in one form or another (visible or not) who do not meet the criteria which I linked to above for getting a BB. And to turn the argument the other way around, simply looking at an area and saying "there are x Blue Badge holders, that is the number of disabled people who live in that area" is simplistic and wrong.

Depends on how you define disability. This has been mentioned before on here - it definitely cropped up in the thread on parking charges being introduced to Southwark Parks (inc. Dulwich Park) and there were examples on there of people saying they were disabled (or had a form of disability etc) yet not being eligible for a Blue Badge. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/blue-badge-can-i-get-one/can-i-get-a-blue-badge It's a big problem in defining travel as well because "disability" is usually used as politically-correct shorthand for "this person needs a wheelchair to get around" which is patently incorrect, can actually be quite offensive and doesn't begin to examine the wide range of social mobility problems that can occur. Transport For All published a report on it a couple of months back https://www.transportforall.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Pave-The-Way-full-report.pdf Again, if you want transparency (and to be fair, they state this in the report), it's based on 84 participants although they do note some of the limitations (like not being able to visit community hubs etc due to lockdown) and acknowledge that anyone without access to the internet was de facto unable to participate in their research. They also mention (page 14) that it's very difficult to formally categorise "impairment" and they back it up with a graph showing that half the people who participated were not Blue Badge holders. It's an interesting read to fill some of the gaps around understanding of disability, especially in terms of everyday travel.

The topic popped up this time last year in a Dulwich Society newsletter. https://www.dulwichsociety.com/journal-archive/130-spring-2020/1872-the-grove-tavern-saga-by-mike-foster Good skatepark though, it's nice that it's been so positively received.

That is just not happening. There are not squadrons of cyclists out there riding back and forth, up and down a road for the fairly simple reasons that people have far better things to do and most people barely even notice the tube counters never mind actively ride back and forth over them! I have never heard of anywhere posting out info publicly to say: "we are going to be counting cars/bikes/trucks/people along this road between 10am and 11am on Thursday, feel free to pop along". A lot of the time, counts are just done off CCTV - that way you can just pull footage for an hour, count it all up, repeat as often as needed. Some of the more modern systems will even identify vehicles / bikes for you and log it automatically. Easy work for the intern... ;-) Occasionally you might have cause to go and put one of those council CCTV vans out there for an hour or (last resort) have someone sitting there with a pen and paper. I can't believe I'm even replying to that level of conspiracy theory - the idea that someone from LCC or Southwark Cyclists is phoning all their mates going "quick, there's someone sitting on Calton Avenue counting bikes, get your lycra on, bring the kids, we'll ride up and down for an hour!"

Yes, there's a fair bit of stuff online about their use - they can differentiate between bicycles and other vehicles. Depending on the exact model of the counter being used and the weight / speed of the bike going over it they may sometimes undercount but that can be corrected by doing a manual count over a defined period and comparing it to the automated count and then applying a correction factor. This urban myth is popular amongst cab drivers too, not a surprise that the various One... groups have picked up on it.

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.