exdulwicher

Yes and look where such a "simple" question got us to in June 2016... There are far more complexities in it than just "do you want it?", not least the fact the Government (and by extension, councils) are committed to reducing emissions, reducing reliance on private cars, promoting active travel and attempting to mitigate some of the Covid-related impacts (like the requirement for social distancing). Some are very good - in fact many have existed for years in one form or another. Gilkes Crescent for example was closed off years ago at the Calton Avenue and Gilkes Place ends. Some are badly implemented undoubtedly, they'll need some modification (or removal!) but it's better to trial that with them now and then remove a few planters than it is to completely rebuild a junction at great cost and disruption and then go "oh no, we'll change it all again". Let the trials run their course. Complain / feedback through the official channels. If/when they are modified or removed then you're vindicated. Asking simple questions to complicated issues, especially when they run cross-borough, is never going to give you anything useful.

Not really. We touched on this a few pages ago re buses and public transport. In the last 15 years, public transport in London has far far outstripped anything else in the country, the investment and development has been staggering. Capped (and heavily subsidised) fares, firstly on Oyster, now on contactless bank card. The Hopper fare so even when there isn't a direct bus, you still only pay one fare. 24/7 bus operation on a lot of routes, increased frequency of trains, buses and tube, hugely increased roll-out of the cycle hire scheme, the Overground (taking some train routes into TfL operation), construction of CrossRail... And yet in spite of all that, between 2013 and 2019, the number of miles driven on Southwark's roads has increased by 69 million miles. https://roadtraffic.dft.gov.uk/local-authorities/103 (you can access all Local Authorities road use data via that). So in spite of the vast improvement in public transport across London, it's not mitigated the use of private vehicles. Some of that is increased population - Southwark's population increased by 6.2% in the same period but the vehicle mileage increase is 13.5% so population alone doesn't account for it. I accept that Dulwich itself isn't brilliant with E-W public transport in particular, the lack of a tube line, the fact that cycle hire only extends to Walworth etc comes up pretty regularly but it's far from "bad". There is of course the other factor right now that Covid means public transport capacity has been slashed by about 2/3rds - the whole point of LTNs and related emergency measures was the Government realising that if everyone who used to use PT got into their cars, it'd be absolute gridlock and therefore attempting to come up with alternatives. Obviously at such short notice of implementation, it's not going to be perfect first time round but it does give useful info as to what measures might work on a more permanent basis. Some sort of combination of LTNs, CPZ, camera-controlled gates (with resident permits), more / better bike lanes and more / better PT (as and when TfL might be able to afford things like that), and borough-wide enforced speed limits could all have a role to play in reducing vehicle use.

The disruption work? It was many years ago as part of a behavioural psychology study (which linked into modelling since it looks at how people behave or change their behaviours when faced with "disruption"). Educational, not a published study. 2011 Census Data which then gets used for the next 10 years until the next Census. There have been dozens of studies sometimes within a single city, sometimes off the back of Census data, sometimes as part of ongoing research. The National Travel Survey is the most up to date, that's done every 2 years. https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/national-travel-survey-2019 The 2017 one is here: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/729521/national-travel-survey-2017.pdf Lots of what is done is never intended to be published to the public; it's for councils, Government, planners etc to see trends, anticipate future patterns. Mostly though, it's there to find if you look for it. Interestingly, most urban areas show almost exactly the same percentages: 1/3rd under 2km, 1/3rd 2-5km and 1/3rd over 5km and that sort of matches what you'd expect. In an urban or suburban area, most people aren't more than about 5km from at least the majority of shops and services that they need on a day-to-day basis. Rural areas, that changes dramatically due to the larger distance between population centres and the more dispersed nature of the population.

Slightly off topic but moving traffic lights / removing the traffic island etc falls well outside of ETRO since it's not temporary and to do that sort of work means a lot of extra disruption in terms of roadworks, temporary lights and so on. It also requires the relevant legal stuff like planning, procurement, award of contract to be done and it would be expensive. No idea of the status of the land at that crossroads but taking some of it up to widen the road is likely to fall foul of all sorts of planning and environmental protection laws. Dulwich Estate would know that one - I'm guessing it's protected though. I know the finger-post at that junction, while not "Listed" is certainly noted as "an item of positive contribution towards the character of the area" which I suspect makes moving it to widen the road very problematic. The wands are temporary so fall within ETRO.

Still photos prove nothing (to either side of the pro / anti LTN argument). I could repeat that picture above for road, ferries, airports showing either total congestion or absolutely empty and none of it would prove anything either way. A picture of a traffic jam does not mean LTNs or a cycle lane are to blame; a picture of an empty road does not mean no vehicles ever use it. There was a short video on Twitter the other day demonstrating the principle. It started with 4 seconds of a completely empty cycle lane and then (as the lights behind where the camera-person was standing changed), a stream of cyclists passed. A still shot of either anytime in the first 4 seconds (empty) or anytime after that (very busy) would have been incomplete and misleading. Part of the reason they installed such visible counters on Embankment cycle lanes was to show clearly and obviously, the number of people using it, even though there were lots of stills circulating of empty cycle lanes and to get away from the accusations of biased / made up numbers. Edit: sort of agree with the comment above, that traffic island needs to come out to make the cycle lane work properly but then the lights need re-phasing to accommodate a complete walk across rather than a 2-stage walk where the pedestrian stops at the island half way so there's pros and cons (to drivers and pedestrians!)

Oh they do! We did some modelling work years ago on something similar and the actual inconvenience that an individual has to be subjected to to force change is quite incredible. This is part of the reason that LTNs and other traffic measures take months to bed in, not just a week or two. This has been mentioned before in these threads but as with most things, there's a series of reasons, it's never just one. For some people, they're in a warm comfy home entertainment centre on wheels and (especially if they're not paying fuel due to it being a company car or work vehicle or they view their car as a status symbol), they really don't care. Even if there are quicker ways to get from A to B, they'll take the car. "need" doesn't come into it. Sitting in traffic in your Aston Martin is simply an opportunity to show everybody else that you own an Aston Martin. A surprising minority actually HAVE to drive - there is no other way they could complete that particular journey without considerable extra expense / inconvenience. The problem is that most people see themselves as being in this category - there's a related sub-category of people who don't know any other way. They've grown up being taken to school / the shops / leisure trips by car and they just continue that, it's their comfort zone, what they've always known. They'll find it inconvenient, they'll moan about traffic but it takes quite a lot for them to actually think "hang on, there must be an other way". Usually (not always), these people are the ones convinced that everyone else should drive less, thus freeing up the road for them. There are people who WANT to do it by other means but they're scared (of traffic, usually) and there are plenty who have to use other options (public transport or active travel) because they don't own or have access to a car. Usually, the latter category have no choice other than to put up with conditions or not do [whatever]. A little over a third (35 per cent) of all car trips are shorter than 2 km, just under a third (32 per cent) are between 2 and 5km and the remaining third are longer than 5km. Data from TfL: http://content.tfl.gov.uk/technical-note-14-who-travels-by-car-in-london.pdf Fairly obviously, not all of those journeys are people carrying a fridge or a double bass or returning from the shops with a new 60" TV. They're not all disabled, they're not all taking 3 kids to 3 different activities, they're not all carrying precious cargo that simply could not be done any other way. At least half of them fit into the first two categories above - the "don't care and will drive anyway" and the "I'm convinced I have to drive".

There's further info from DfT (published yesterday) about their Inclusive Transport Strategy here: https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/inclusive-transport-strategy-year-2-update Primarily aimed at making travel easier for disabled users, it does also touch on Shared Space (and by extension, LTNs); the direct link to the letter is below but the whole link (above) is worth reading for info about the policies that DfT are pushing to councils for them to implement. https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/749116/ministerial-letter-about-shared_space.pdf

Rockets - absolutely! There's a real problem here in that Government and, to a lesser extent, councils have pottered along for years (decades...) doing things very gradually, very piecemeal. A lot of that is simply how Government functions anyway, it's all very slow progress for various reasons. That's not necessarily a criticism, just a factual statement. Austerity has removed the opportunity for councils to do anything like as much as they've wanted. Now, with Paris Agreement and kickstarted by Covid, there's sudden rapid changes in policy, urgent pressing need to "do things" (some of which is the more politically convenient "being seen to do things whether or not those things are positive"). It's the equivalent of living in a house for 30 years and doing little more than painting the skirting boards in that time and then suddenly discovering that the place is falling down and needs full scaffolding, re-plumbing, re-wiring and re-decorating. There's going to be disruption no matter which way you go about it.

Abe_froeman Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Thanks Legal Alien > > That finally confirms the war on motorists that > has been denied on here for so long: > It's Government policy - Paris Agreement plus a couple of other sections of various policies commit Government to urgent decarbonisation / lowered carbon emissions. There's a summary of the dichotomoy here: https://theconversation.com/car-dependency-uk-government-cant-cut-driving-and-build-lots-of-roads-at-same-time-134965 On the one hand, lowering congestion / more efficient journeys / keeping the economy going; on the other hand the very pressing need to urgently cut emissions. Transport (vast majority of which is cars and vans) contributes about 28% of carbon emissions nationally. It's only perceived as a War on Motorists because literally nothing has been done to stop motoring (quite the opposite) over the last 30 years and now there's the first pockets of resistance (and that is all it is, it's far from a "war") that suddenly everyone is up in arms. Compared to what some cities have had to implement (like total or partial bans on all private vehicles on certain days), this is not a war, this is a few potshots! The council are implementing Government policy. Of course there's a debate to be had about HOW that policy is formulated by Government, fed down to councils and implemented by them which is the role of a Scrutiny Committee in public office.

KidKruger Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > DKHB - who cares, it was a stupid idea regardless. The politics behind it were that Government were chancing their arm - if Khan had accepted it, they could have painted him as the man who brought extra costs to millions of Londoners. Ultimately it was a half arsed shot and I think they probably knew it had little chance of sticking. However at some point it will come in - either as a Congestion Charge (perhaps a tiered approach of maybe ?8 inside the North and South Circulars and ?15 into the current CCZ) or, ideally, as a Road Pricing Scheme which looks at things like time of day, length of journey, type of vehicle, occupancy and so on. There will have to be something to replace / supplement the loss of income from fuel duty, Vehicle Excise Duty and ULEZ as people move to hybrid and electric vehicles. Some more details on the funding including the postponement (cancellation?) of CrossRail 2 in here: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/nov/02/crossrail-2-plans-shelved-transport-for-london-funding-deal

They're not - ULEZ was always going to be coming in October 2021 (not 2020 - maybe KidKruger is thinking of the beginning of the installation phase?), the idea of adding the CCZ in at the same time was one of Government's usual back-of-an-envelope ideas. On another note, it's the anniversary of Mayor Boris Johnson introducing the uncosted Over 60's concession which Prime Minister Boris Johnson has just told Sadiq Khan to cut as evidence of London's bad financial management.

RichH Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > The one thing that would make a difference to you > above everything else is becoming a better, more > experienced cyclist, rather than blaming others > for your own shortcomings. That's a pretty disgraceful attitude to be honest and it's the reason that so few people are willing to try cycling or they try it and are put off almost immediately. If/when you're subject to a close pass, a driver yelling at you to pay road tax or use the cycle lane, if you're having to fight for roadspace in amongst trucks and buses, you don't think "gosh, I should become a better cyclist". You think "**** me this is insane, I'm certainly not letting my kids ride to school!" And then you pop them into the car for the 1 mile drive to school and add to the congestion and the circle continues. @malumbu makes some excellent points and the topic of integrated transport has been touched upon as well. The problem with Government is that it is incredibly silo'd thinking where they'll consider "cycling" as the actual bit of riding from A to B. Having a nice bit of segregated cycle lane to do that is brilliant BUT - what happens at B? Where do you park the bike, is it secure? For far too many destinations (cinema, supermarket, leisure centre, train station etc) the cycle parking is a couple of Sheffield stands round the back "out of the way" - right where it can be stolen with minimal fuss and effort. In that situation, no-one is going to ride in spite of the nice lane, which then leads onto accusations of building a cycle lane that's never used and it should be ripped up. Conversely, a forward thinking business might supply a lovely secure cycle parking facility but if that destination is just off a busy A road with no safe way of getting there you get the reverse - no one will cycle because the journey is dangerous. They have to be done in conjunction.

Modelling, in its raw form, is never transparent. It's heavily maths and probability based, it gets written up into a technical document and then it gets re-written according to the audience to say things like "we project a journey time improvement of 90 seconds if [x] is done". "we project a reduction in traffic of 18% along Road X if Road Y is built". "we project an increase in traffic of 12% along Road X if the new supermarket is built". That's the transparent bit. Under normal circumstances (ie not in the middle of a pandemic), councils have a mix of proposed new schemes (like a new leisure centre / supermarket / housing estate) and various "would like to do" schemes (improving a junction, implementing a 20mph zone or CPZ) knocking around, usually waiting for funding and they run them past planners, modellers etc to gain an idea of what will happen. Models usually require specific programming for specific schemes - there's loads of tried and tested methods and some fairly universal maths for basic stuff like "putting x vehicles through a junction over y time with z roadspace - now change one parameter" but that is not junction specific. Once you get beyond that into area-wide LTNs across neighbouring boroughs, it gets much more complicated much more quickly. There's not the time to do any of that, the instruction and requirement from Government was that this gets done NOW. The whole point of ETRO is that the consultation and modelling runs in parallel with the temporary measures and you assess, potentially revise, re-assess and so on and you have 18 months to do that. It CANNOT be done in 2-3 months, that's not enough time to assess the changes and take on board the feedback. If the council react within days or weeks to every complaint, they'd be chasing things around even more and then end up like Wandsworth where they removed the LTNs and traffic is still gridlocked on all the roads and pollution is still just as bad. No time to see the changes, they've lost the funding and they're back at square one except now it's going to be even harder for them to do anything about it. Be interesting to see how second lockdown affects all this - schools are still open so one assumes that the "school run" will still be happening more or less as normal but that the commute to work and shopping trips will be much reduced and potentially an increase in home deliveries, especially in the run up to Christmas.

https://www.london.gov.uk/press-releases/mayoral/mayor-reaches-deal-on-tfl-funding No extension to Congestion Charge Zone. However it looks like there will have to be a consultation on keeping the new extended hours and price of the current CCZ if TfL is to make up the shortfall as requested in that link above.

The cost and effort that's been put into trying to make that work in Manchester (and surrounds) is unbelievable and it's so far achieved...not very much. Quite a few cities have tried similar and to integrate trams and buses in particular but none of them have the devolved powers to actually make it stick, they're all ultimately taking orders from Department for Transport. TfL, for all its detractors on here, is very very good indeed. You only need to head outside London and board a bus that costs ?3.60 to go 5 miles and then you can only get one out of the 4 buses going back (even though they're running on exactly the same route, you can only use that return ticket on Company A, not B, C or D, even if it means waiting 40 minutes for the next Company A bus to run) to see how good London has it. Same with trains (albeit the franchise model on trains does work nationwide). Imagine if you got the 185 from ED up to Camberwell Green. You can then only return on the 185, even if there's a 40 and a 176 sitting there at the bus stop. Well it's like that. It's not perfect - of course it isn't - and it's been badly run in the past, notably by one Mr B Johnson, but as a general rule, TfL is doing very well in spite of Government rather than because of it. Kind of feel sorry for them really - they're effectively not much more than a utility company. Like your broadband or water - when it works, no-one really notices; when it goes wrong or they're caught in the middle of a political bunfight, they cop all the flak.

Not very! ;-) Bus companies don't like it cos their profits go down - in the big cities on deregulated bus services the average profit is over 8%; in non-metropolitan areas the figure is over 6%; whereas in London (where services are regulated) it is less than 4%. Gets a bit more complicated when you factor in public subsidy and also how much of that profit ends up going out to shareholders rather than being reinvested but you can see why bus companies are opposed to franchising.

Yes and no - London had the massive advantage that it escaped Thatcher's deregulation of the buses in 1986. Outside London, not only are the buses are run by private companies, but local authorities can't regulate those private companies so fares are high and the bus companies can pick their routes so they all aim for the profitable / busy routes which ironically adds to congestion. As bus funding gets cut, it is more and more difficult for local authorities to pay for private bus companies to run extra 'socially necessary' routes - which is why so many vital bus services have been lost. In the last 10 years, local authorities in England and Wales have cut ?78 million in funding and over 2,400 routes have been reduced or withdrawn altogether. The idea behind bus deregulation was that competition would lead to the best results. Sometimes there have been 'bus wars' where companies fight for passengers, sometimes, there is no competition, fares are high and people have little control or choice over the bus service the company chooses to provide. In London, it's a franchise and as a result bus use has risen while falling elsewhere. TfL gets to decide on what services are needed for its network and has some control over fares and routes. Running the buses as a network is more efficient because profitable routes can subsidise the routes that don't make money. Manchester at one point had about 25 different bus companies and over 100 different types of ticket / fare, none of which were cross compatible. Utterly bewildering for the travelling public.

Hopper in itself was a result of already cutting or shortening some bus routes and a recognition that people might now have to get 2 buses where previously it was only one. The reason behind cutting the buses or having some terminate earlier than before was to free up capacity in central London. Strand, Oxford Road and Trafalgar Square where a lot of buses terminated was rammed solid so the answer was to remove some of the buses going there which would also increase reliability. But equally, it would mean ?3 fare where previously it was ?1.50 so that wasn't an acceptable result. You're right with CrossRail - that was supposed to be operational now but it was always going to result in a second bus reshuffle and probably some train timetabling re-work as well. The delayed opening of that has cost a lot in lost revenue as well.

You run a fine balancing act on this. It costs ?xx to run the train service in the timetable. Keeping fares low encourages use of public transport so you end up with more people paying a (relatively) low fare which gets you close to the required ?xx. However if too many people try and use it, the system breaks down - it's unpleasant to be crammed into the armpits of strangers every morning and evening so (some) people will find an alternative. It sort of self balances eventually and you can actually use ticket price as a way of managing this. Putting fares up discourages use of public transport. There are some people who'll more or less pay whatever (office workers in the City for example), there are some who won't be able to afford that (minimum wage / gig economy people potentially working anti-social hours) so you end up with fewer people paying a (relatively) higher fare which again should get you close to the required ?xx. The trick is balancing all that while still having a PUBLIC transport system, not one for the wealthy. Which is why it needs subsidy, it's not a traditional business. The railway costs money whether its being used or not. One of the arguments doing the rounds now is that there's a lot of air being transported around London by near-empty trains but reducing the number of trains running, because of the complex way it's all delivered, does not make it cheaper to run. Plus drivers still need their minimum hours to maintain currency, tracks and trains need maintaining at set intervals whether they're being used or not. To within a fairly small percentage range, "the railway" still costs ?xx whether it's sitting there unused or whether it's running a full timetable. And some of it is political too of course - put the fares up and you're "hurting hard-working Londoners", keep the fares artificially low and you're "running a bad business".

There's also the ?24 million cost to taxpayers of the cable car in spite of BJ's promise that it was going to be funded by private finance. The bendy bus saga. BJ can't even claim credit for the cycle hire scheme, that was all sorted by Ken Livingstone. Khan is far from useless - he's a bit uninspiring at times and possibly less ambitious than required (certainly there were several shovel-ready schemes good to go when he came into power which he then put on hold for more consultations and eventually dropped altogether) but he's generally a decent guy doing a broadly very successful job. Obviously as a Labour Mayor under a Conservative Government he's had to put up with a lot of negative press too which hasn't helped his image or popularity ratings. Whereas for Boris, the job was solely about image and with no thought given to how much money he was spaffing against the wall on pointless vanity projects...

Well so far Khan has managed not to spend ?53m on a non-existent Garden Bridge, not spend public money on having an affair with a "technology entrepreneur", not spend ?300,000 on unusable water cannons and not carry out expensive "studies" into blatantly unviable projects like Boris Island Airport so he's already doing far better than BJ. Factor in the phasing out of the ?700m grant from Government and the fact that Khan inherited a ?1.5 BILLION deficit from Boris (which he's reduced by 71% since 2016). Some of the planned funding did depend on CrossRail being operational by now but ultimately, Khan has done FAR better at running TfL than Boris ever managed. TfL's deficit before Covid was down to about ?200 million which, compared to what he took on from Boris, is excellent management. As usual with Boris, he's lying, lying some more and distracting as much as possible from his own multitude of failings. TfL funding depends mostly on fares. That's collapsed by 90% and it would have done that under any Mayor in the world.

Agree on the road pricing front. Lose the "road tax" (Vehicle Excise Duty) and run a toll system based on vehicle type, time of day, distance and so on - could even bring occupancy into it so single occupant pays more than a full car. In this country though it'd be political suicide and you'd need fairly careful management of data / privacy as well as it's essentially a tracking system. The fact that people post their locations on Facebook / Instagram and it can be tracked via Oyster Card, spending on bank card, ANPR, CCTV, mobile phone etc is generally missed in all of that complaining... I genuinely can't see Congestion Charge being extended at this time. It *will* happen at some point (whether the original CC or a fairer Road Pricing system or potentially just an increase in ULEZ cost) but the Government are under attack from all sides at the moment and while it's useful to them to pretend that it's all the fault of a Labour Mayor, that smokescreen won't hold for long.

Hi Rockets. The legal / consultation side of things is a little outside my area really but in general... Emergency are used when there's a threat to life and they can be dropped in literally there and then - the police can arrive on scene of an emergency like a car crash, fire in a building adjacent to the road etc and they can close it. No issues with any of that, it sits a little to one side of the other TROs and although it can last a while (like if there's a danger of a crane collapse until its made safe), generally it's a few hours only. Experimental - these are planned anyway, you don't just turn up, drop a planter and wander off again, they are mapped out and, by their very definition, some of them will have elements of the previous Healthy Streets plan. What's gone in is NOT the full HS plan - that included a filter at the Plough junction (Dulwich Library / Eynella) and it had camera filters with residents passes. The current Experimental doesn't (no time to process the residents passes). The idea behind Experimental is that it happens alongside a consultation and sometimes a bit of on-the-fly adaptations as required. Personally I'm a big fan of them as it makes things vastly cheaper than consulting, revising, re-consulting etc, then obtaining planning permission and roadworks clearance, putting up with months of roadworks and then finding that it doesn't work and you need to re-do it. Councils really need to do a lot more of this although the political side of things (for example the perceived lack of consultation) needs careful management. Lambeth seem to have managed that better than Southwark to be honest. It also really helps with modelling work, there's far less theory involved as you can almost see what is happening in real time, work the predictions and mitigations far more accurately and then use that to extrapolate other methods. Usually, one measure on its own is insufficient - like putting ion a 20mph zone, that's often useless on its own as everyone ignores it; you need to do it in conjunction with traffic calming / cameras / a filter. They're not unlawful - obviously they do get people's backs up but equally many people are in favour of them. That often depends on exactly which roads people live on, want to use and the way they want to use it (walking, cycling, driving etc). The challenge here (and elsewhere in London and nationally) is that it's dropped into a very pro and anti entrenched position, there's seemingly little middle ground. As I say, the political aspects of it are kind of outside my area of modelling. Generally though, the councils know what they're doing from a legal point of view - usually because it's incredibly expensive for them if they get the legal side of things wrong!

legalalien Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Yes, spotted it there this morning but it seems to > have popped up after the batch of documents that > accompanied the decision notice at > http://moderngov.southwark.gov.uk/mgIssueHistoryHo > me.aspx?IId=50023654&Opt=0 which is where I had > been looking... it?s not mentioned in the table to > the report that is approved in the decision notice > either as far as I can tell. Surely it can?t just > be randomly added into the TMO having not been > included in that decision process? Is there a > supplementary decision? It was definitely in there when the document went live on 15th October although I admit I only scanned the text and concentrated more on the maps.

legalalien Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > As an aside, I hadn?t appreciated that > there was now a bus gate at the Burbage/ Gallery > intersection - don?t think that appeared on the > maps that accompanied the Southwark decision but > is included in the traffic order? It's on Page 8 of the document here: https://www.southwark.gov.uk/transport-and-roads/traffic-orders-licensing-strategies-and-regulation/traffic-management-orders?chapter=5&article Hopefully that link should work, if not it's the LSP Dulwich Trail phase 2 link on Southwark's TMO page. The map for the southern village junction (Burbage / Gallery) is page 8.