exdulwicher

There's a stay of execution on all existing schemes while TfL appeals. What happens after that will depend on the ruling and any further appeals. The stay of execution means that everything done to date should stay in place but that new schemes are not progressed any further (unless they're in such a state that to leave them in that state would endanger the public. So for example if a junction is mid-way through having some works done on it they can progress or be reversed - and again that will depend on the works in question if they're intended to be permanent involving concrete or if it's just some planters/wands). Edit: should add actually, it depends on the exact scheme. Remember that some of this was specifically ordered by the Government and some of it was put in place by the council under their own steam and some of it was done by TfL so there's a need to separate out who is overall responsible for what. But all that will happen after the appeal.

Absolutely not. Fair, transparent, open, balanced consultation is a critical part of local Government. Petitions (done properly) can be a valid part of that in terms of showing a council the topics / areas that generate strong feelings for and against. A council will receive dozens, sometimes hundreds, of petitions a year on all sorts of stuff and obviously something with 3000 signatures (assuming of course they're all genuine) shows the council that there is a lot of support for / opposition against [the thing] (be that LTNs or a plans for a new supermarket or whatever). That should then act as a bit of a stick to the council to be extra careful with their consultations. Extend them, publicise them more, do more modelling, hold some open evenings, engage. But the petition itself should not be driving council policy as they're a flawed measure of pro/anti - by very definition the people signing a petition sit on one side of the fence.

Err - YES! Running council policy based on local opinion and petitions is not democracy! I'm advocating using both National (DfT) and London (TfL) reports plus the council's own local consultation based on things called statistics and facts over ONE petition from an anti-LTN group. I'd say the same for any petition on any subject, for or against, and so will the council! You said it yourself, the word opinion. A 3000-signature petition (for or against almost anything) sounds quite impressive. Break it down into what it actually represents, cross-reference it against peer-reviewed and statistically valid reports and it doesn't stand up as anything other than a bit of a "temperature gauge" of local opinion. That word opinion again. Which is why it's useful for councillors to note them, acknowledge that "the following petitions have been received" but then move onto their formal consultation. That should be the same for any petition on any subject, for or against it.

Actually I made no comment either way: for or against LTNs for or against any group campaigning either way on LTNs for or against any aspect of the that particular petition There's a DfT report here (November 2020) showing overall public attitudes towards traffic and road use in England, including attitudes towards government action in local neighbourhoods, views on reduction of traffic and reallocation of road space and perceptions of traffic and road problems in local neighbourhoods. It doesn't really back up the petition much... https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/934617/DfT-Public-Opinion-Survey-on-Traffic-and-Road-Use-Phase-1-Report.pdf Councils actually aren't really obliged to do much with petitions. Unless they're done through verified petition-management websites or by an independent agency, they're very easy to game - multiple signatures, fake names/addresses, circulation via known "friendly agencies" (so for example posting links to it on social media specifically aimed at that particular cause where it'll get more traction that usual). The most high-profile example recently was the anti-lockdown one from supposed medical practitioners: https://news.sky.com/story/coronavirus-dr-johnny-bananas-and-dr-person-fakename-among-medical-signatories-on-herd-immunity-open-letter-12099947 And please note that the remark about petitions being easy to game is not made to directly to any one petition or cause, for or against anything, it's a general comment about petitions - they're not consultations! And yes, both "sides" in most debates will know how to play them. But that's why councils might note them at a meeting but then refer directly to the formal consultations; especially if they do some basic stats and say that at best it's 1 in 4 of the population of Dulwich Ward. I agree with Nigello's comment above, it's way past time that "civic duties" lessons were had in schools including subjects like how the Government works (at every level from local to National and even up to International like European Court)

Southwark Council's website says that Southwark is home to more than 314,000 people so a 3000 signature petition is a little under 1%. Quite the opposite then - if they act on a 3000 signature petition, that's ignoring the 99% of people who haven't responded. Even if you focussed it right down to Dulwich Ward (population 11,255 according to ONS: link https://www.citypopulation.de/en/uk/london/wards/southwark/E05011100__dulwich_village/ ) it's 26% opposition. That's assuming of course that everyone opposed lives/works in Dulwich Ward; the reality is that there's always some cross platform signatures from "outside".

Most people are really quite unaware of how easily noise can travel, especially through a building with thin walls / wooden floors etc. They may believe that they're being perfectly normal neighbours without realising how much you can hear. If that's the case, it might be worth inviting one of the adults up to your flat (assuming you can do this safely / social distancing / mask wearing etc) while the noise is going on and get them to experience the disruption first hand, I bet they'd be quite surprised. We had a neighbour (many years ago) who's dog howled relentlessly throughout the day when he was out. It never made a sound when he was at home so he genuinely didn't believe us when we told him about it. Was only when he left his house as normal and came to ours that he heard (a) how upset the dog was at being left alone and (b) how easily we could hear it. He was absolutely mortified both at the distress to the dog and the disruption to us.

Well that's the common sense answer but unfortunately as referenced several times in this thread, the owner is often of the persuasion that "oh look, Rover is being friendly" as the dog bounds all over you. There was a deer killed in Richmond Park in October by an out of control, off the lead dog; the owner got fined ?602 by Wimbledon Magistrates a couple of days ago. Royal Parks Police posted a snippet of video footage (heavily edited down as it was very upsetting) of walkers and cyclists forming a ring around the deer trying to protect it.

There's a good site in Isle of Dogs (Mudchute Farm) which has several surviving concrete emplacements and a restored battery there as a memorial to the area. https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/blog/2013/03/05/a-restored-ww2-anti-aircraft-gun-by-canary-wharf/ There's a huge site at Crayford Marshes in Bexley as well, just the remains of the concrete emplacements, shelters etc.

If he's impeached he loses his Presidential Pension and lifetime Secret Service protection. Coup doesn't always mean the military rolling into town and taking over. He's been laying the ground for this over the last 4 years, it was a self-coup. Been done often enough before although usually in countries with slightly more "flexible" morals... https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/01/11/capitol-riot-self-coup-trump-fiona-hill-457549

It's an opinion piece, written in the same slightly lazy stereotyped way of most opinion pieces. Used by papers/websites as a way of being controversial and therefore generating comments, clicks and ad-revenue without falling foul of anything so boring as sticking to facts, having to do research and when the complaints come in, the paper can simply say that they're not in breach of any editorial code, it's simply one of their regular columnists "opinion-ing". Step 1. Find [a thing] that has appeared in the new recently or is known to be controversial: LTNs, cycling/cyclists, dogs, the yoof of today. They're all rich veins to mine. Step 2. Your next step is to make some positive-sounding noises about how you actually love [the thing] (or sometimes that you like the idea of [the thing] but...). This makes you seem open-minded, even though you are not. Step 3. Having safely established that you aren?t a prejudiced moron (when of course you are), you can then move on to step three, which is to talk about [the thing] featuring in the news. The golden rule here is to focus on the negative. You can use either your own anecdotes or cherry pick a few stories that fit your point of view or a combination. Step 4. Having got this far, you?ve done the hard work, and you are now free to wibble on about how all [things] are innately bad. It doesn?t matter if you?ve still got hundreds of words to write to fill out your copy; the field is now open for you to crowbar in as many of the trite and overused clich?s about [the thing] as you can. Honestly, it's like Chapter One in the school of journalism, opinion pieces can be churned out more or less ad infinitum. Done well they can be quite funny - political satire is often where the better writers end up - but most are just playing to the crowd of populist opinion. They all have that thin veneer of sounding fairly reasonable and then you look more deeply at them, fact check a few of the statements and they all follow the same four steps above.

This guy is very good: https://www.youtube.com/c/NatsWhatIReckon/videos Nat's What I Reckon,. Australian comedian who turned his hand to cooking during lockdown and it went sort of viral over in Australia but he's got a decent following worldwide now. Warning - some of his videos are very sweary, not really one to have on if your kids are helping in the kitchen! He's not exactly Jamie Oliver! However, the stuff he makes is very good and (generally) pretty healthy. Stuff like chilli con carne (veggie versions also available), you can just make in bulk, split it into freezer bags and freeze until needed.

A lot of it is but it's a mixture of factors: 1) Short delivery times - retailers have for years sought to gain customers by offering express / next day and even same day delivery. The shorter the timeframe the more inefficient it is as the less likely it is to be able to fill a van. 2) Customers want / expect quick delivery which is a Catch-22 on the above. There are options on many online retailers where you can ask for your purchases to be delivered in the minimum number of parcels so instead of it being one delivery in 24hrs and a second in 48hrs, it'll be one in 48hrs which is obviously far more efficient. I've never seen any stats for how many customers take that option and I doubt retailers would give that info up without a fight. 3) Delivery companies are contracted to deliver the goods and the costs of running empty / half full are less than the fines they incur for failing to deliver on time. And that drives traffic because there are more vans doing multiple trips with the added downside that when you pull up in a residential street, there's usually nowhere to park and one van double parked, blocking or partially blocking a road, will cause congestion almost immediately. Rather ironically, LTNs can actually assist with that because there's less traffic within the LTN to actually get snarled up by a double parked van in the first place! With HGVs, empty running has sat around 1/3rd for the last 15+ years in spite of some advances in load-sharing and back-hauling. Vans etc in towns the figures vary wildly and of course some empty running is inevitable - once you've delivered all your parcels you go back to the depot and there isn't really much you can do to change that. As for your question about why there were 4 vans when one would have sufficed, it depends on the factors above, where each package was coming from, where to, the order-to-delivery timescale and the depot(s) used on its journey. Quite possible for one customer ordering several items from several companies to have multiple vans turning up, especially if each retailer has a contract with a different delivery company The Pedal-Me cargo bike company has some interesting info about logistics: https://cyclingindustry.news/pedalmes-data-snapshot-puts-beyond-doubt-cargo-bike-inner-city-efficiency/ Freight companies are notoriously hard to get any info out of at all as they're all operating on knife-edge margins and they're terrified that any of their data could find it's way to a competitor. This makes it very difficult for anyone to come in and offer logistical help to the whole sector. To make money, they have to work on delivery goals which is why they offer same-day delivery options to the retailers that contract them - it's a much easier sell than saying "we're far more efficient because we wait 2 days until we have one van full of goods to go to E.Dulwich therefore we can save you 24p per package".

OK, well building on that, what increase of cycle journeys along one street (in the example quoted here) would be sufficient for YOU personally to think that it had worked? Factor in the uncertainty of the whole situation at the moment and the steep decline in the use of P/T. Some of it has been massively impacted by the idiocy of Wandsworth and Lewisham in removing them before they'd had any chance of taking effect - neither of those boroughs are miraculously free-flowing, low-pollution utopia now, they're still solid with traffic, it's just *everywhere* rather than on main roads. You're right, they don't work in isolation which is why the oft-quoted Loughborough Junction scheme wasn't a success but tied into other areas, they're a well-known, well-researched part of the solution. There are exceptions to the isolation thing actually - Gilkes Crescent for example is an LTN that was put in place in the mid-90's and that was very successful right from implementation in removing a lot of the previous jams that used to occur on the Calton / Gilkes junction. Although obviously that's a very different model to Loughborough Junction, not directly comparable.

They're PART of the answer. There is no one answer, one silver bullet that solves everything. Electric vehicles are part of the solution, more walking and cycling (enabled by things like LTNs, more cycle lanes etc) is part of it, increases in cost of motoring (congestion charging, ULEZ, CPZ, fuel duty, road tolls - any combination/permutation of that), better public transport (sort of ignoring the minor pandemic thing at the moment which has absolutely destroyed both P/T usage and confidence) and so on. They're all PART of the solution but none of them are THE answer in themselves.

Rockets, I'm sorry but placing all this onto "the pro-closure lobby" is disingenuous at best if not a simple outright lie. The vandalism of planters, the cutting of traffic count cables, the mis-use of data (and related to that the shouting down of any data that they don't like by claiming it's old, biased, flawed, produced by a cycling group, written by a cyclist...) and the creation of "echo chamber" debating spaces (primarily Facebook where it's easy for anyone to set up a group and then post inflammatory content, banning anyone who disagrees), the willingness to jump on any article by the Daily Mail, the use of hyperbole and opinion over factual debate and even the occasional violent threats against councillors can all be pointed solely at the anti-LTN lobby. It's got to the point in some areas where trying to have a rational debate about LTNs is like trying to have a rational debate about Brexit. Fact-based issues get shouted down as Project Fear and there's an emotive "WE WON YOU LOST!" contingent of Leavers (not all of them certainly but a vocal minority) who refuse to listen and simply revert back to the hyperbole and opinion and mentions of the war. That's what a lot of the anti-LTN rhetoric comes across as and I'm not just referring to this forum or Dulwich, I've seen similar all over the UK. Splitting it into pro/anti is not helpful to any of this - you'll find that most people have a range of opinion that places them pro some measures, anti others, ambivalent about some. I think what is agreed by the vast majority of posters on here though is that as a general rule, something has to be done to curb the unacceptably high levels of traffic and that, coming out of a pandemic where public transport usage is at an all time low, it doesn't help anyone if we all revert to driving everywhere.

Partly that but partly because, with everyone staying off public transport, there was a very high risk that people who used to use P/T to get around would replace that journey by one in a private vehicle. And if everyone did that, the results would be catastrophic gridlock and pollution. There was an urgent need to promote active travel and build on the huge increases in cycling seen during the first lockdown which was primarily due to walking/cycling being one of the few things you could actually do coupled with the roads being far quieter and therefore far safer - tempting people who would like to cycle but were afraid of the traffic danger out on to the roads once more.

https://www.transporttimes.co.uk/news.php/If-nothing-is-done-this-pandemic-will-make-air-quality-worse-not-better-595 The publication of this report coincidentally ties in with the Ella Kissi- Debrah case linked to above.

I was thinking the same except that still relies on the homeowner getting out there at crack of dawn, tampering with his own milk/juice and then leaving it there for the culprit and while it might be entertaining it still leaves the poor soul in the same situation of having no milk! You can get very good tripwire burglar alarms too but again, you can't install/activate them the previous evening because the milkman will set them off when delivering. Otto2: is there any way the milkman can deliver your order to a neighbour's house or perhaps get some sort of lockable metal crate put there for the milkman to leave it in? Might be worth checking with neighbours too because if the thief is doing this to one house, chances are it's being done to a few.

It's dreadful everywhere. Pull up a Google Maps of London with the traffic layer enabled, everything is red. Not quite sure why yet unless everyone has taken this opportunity to go out for some Brexit stockpiling and before London moves into Tier 3 at midnight on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. Desperate last rush.

There's this myth that "passing trade" is only motorists (as though everyone driving through Dulwich Village is randomly spotting Proud Sow Butchers or The Art Stationers and thinking "oh wow, I'll just park up and pop in for a steak here and some paintbrushes there!") Trade comes from people - that's kind of the basis of out of town shopping centres and pedestrianised high streets. How people get there is certainly a discussion point but basically, trade is people. If you make it more attractive for people to hang around the area then they'll stay longer and spend more. There are already several studies showing that cyclists and pedestrians spend more: https://tfl.gov.uk/info-for/media/press-releases/2018/november/getting-more-people-walking-and-cycling-could-help-save-our-high-streets That's been seen elsewhere in the UK and abroad as well. The EV industry is worth billions and it's growing at a rapid rate. It won't be defined by a few people buying or not buying EVs or hybrids compared to schemes like car clubs, fleet vehicles, industry and subsidiaries like electric bikes and scooters. There's a wider issue as to what impact Brexit will have on the car industry and that is still very uncertain.

Modelling sort of relies on monitoring too. I mean, it's kind of helpful to have data either to base the models on or to further develop them later on. Various ways of doing that of course, most of them relying on a period of time to gather said data but modelling and monitoring are related.

macutd Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > why don't they > make public transport free > legalize electric scooters > increase the number of busses > extend the underground into the area > > Instead of just closing roads without giving a real alternative Surprisingly, the main factor of public transport usage is not cost, it's reliability. That said, at the moment people are just avoiding public transport because of Covid and on top of that there's not really much to go and do - not like people are out at all hours in pubs and clubs, at concerts, visiting attractions etc and commuting is way down on normal so usage is down due to that rather than cost. Besides, the money to run it has to come from somewhere so free public transit, while workable on small schemes (like Park & Ride or little CityHopper type buses) just means increased taxes/costs elsewhere. Agree on electric scooters, they're a definite part of micro-mobility. More buses takes us back to the cost aspect - who is going to fund all of that? You also end up with the buses themselves causing congestion which was why the bus routes into central London got revised a few years ago because there were simply too many buses going to places like Oxford Street, Regent Street etc and it was just clogging everything up. It takes 10-20 years to get a new Tube line plus a few billion ??. Camberwell has been talked about since the days of Ken as London Mayor and it's still no closer to actually happening. Old Kent Road is (probably) going ahead although it's on a much less certain timeframe now. Even that has been in the "planning" stages for about the last 10 years and it'll be 2030 at the earliest before it's in place (if at all) so Camberwell (and by extension, Dulwich) won't see a Tube until 2040 at the absolute earliest. Frankly I want a jetpack by then, I was definitely promised a jetpack as a kid watching Tomorrow's World. https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/how-we-work/planning-for-the-future/bakerloo-line-extension Unfortunately, change on a short timescale is not really related to public transport, it's much more about forcing change locally via traffic management options. Besides, there's funding for LTNs and pop-up cycle lanes so that's what the council is limited to.

Same as if a parent drives from home to school to drop a child off and then drives home, that's 2 journeys. To the parent, it probably counts a one trip as in "I'm just taking [child] to school darling, back soon!" For traffic counting, it's two distinct journeys.

Decarbon8 have done a lot of good work so far, sadly the politicians got to the bit about "electric vehicles" and "technology" and went "yay, EVs are the answer to everything, we can build a load more roads!" As described in that article though, a queue of EVs is still a queue of cars, it's still the same congestion and while it removes the location-specific pollution issue, it doesn't answer the other problems of congestion, parking space, storage when not in use (almost invariably kerb-side) and the obvious one of social inclusion - as mentioned in that article and also in a recent RAC report, EVs are very expensive and not everyone can afford them, you still end up with the wealth inequality problem.

Wandsworth didn't show anything conclusive - @DulwichCentral covered this point in his/her post above ^^ referencing the Telegraph article. The measures were in place about 3-4 weeks at most before the council pulled them out again based on nothing more than populist noise. Tellingly, the streets of Wandsworth are not now some free-flowing utopia of calm, they're still solid with crawling traffic and the pollution is no different. Besides, as pointed out many pages ago, this is how it works. You get some short term disruption as people get used to it, changes are made etc and then it settles down. How long that takes depends on all sorts of factors and most of the predictions have been shot to pieces by pandemic / lockdown / decline in public transport use. It's all very well saying the Dulwich needs better public transport but at the moment very few people are using it and there's not really a consistent baseline to go off.