exdulwicher

I said a few pages ago that still pics and even short videos were near useless from either "side" of the debate. I can go out and film a massive line of traffic or an empty road, loads of cyclists or none at all and use them for whatever purpose I want in order to "show" a particular outcome. Rubbish - it's a public place and no-one is directly identifiable. There is no law against photographing or filming children (or indeed adults) in a public place, provided the images are decent in nature. Different rules apply in private places such as schools. Shopping centres are also very strict about that although more from a security point of view than any privacy concerns.

legalalien Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > That Twitter thread...words fail me. Would you prefer this one?

The anti-groups are doing exactly the same Metallic, you can't pretend that there's one side of saintly people who would do no wrong and one side of militant liars. It's been badly managed, allowed to descend into a Brexit-style "I'm right, you're wrong" / "we won, you lost". One of the anti-groups supplied a template email to Grant Shapps and at the very bottom was a clause that they would "vet" all submissions - essentially to weed out all the positive comments. As was mentioned a page or two back, Lambeth have done very well generally - they've managed the narrative well enough to largely kill off a lot of the fake news although they obviously can't reach the Daily Mail hatchet jobs.

You're VERY cynical this morning Rockets! Yes, normal format is a 2-week grace period where letters get sent out saying something along the lines of "doing this after [date] will result in a fine." Depends on how the data was gathered and by who. Older data is usually less reliable as the tech back before about 2000 wasn't really up to today's standards so getting an absolute direct comparison is difficult. It's still pretty sound and you can extrapolate a lot but it's like comparing anything across big timelines. Cars on the road as a comparison - cars 20-30 years ago were far smaller, lighter etc so as malumbu mentions above, the increases in engine efficiency have been wiped out by increases in weight and tech. You can still count numbers of cars and its still valid as a direct comparison but when it comes to roads and the space occupied, you also need to look at the size/weight of the vehicle and that's changed significantly (an increase of about 25% on average). So 1000 cars now occupy 25% more space than 1000 cars 20 years ago even though all other factors remain unchanged. Some data is derived from other data so measuring Parameter A will give you a good indication of what Parameter B would be without actually going out and measuring it. Pollution and traffic is one example - if you measure traffic and have the flow rates you can make a reasonable estimate of pollution without putting a monitoring station in (they're expensive and often prone to peaks and troughs caused by external factors like temperature, wind and other non-vehicle pollution - it irons out over long periods but for short term monitoring, they're not brilliant) More recently, mobile phone and satnav data has given much clearer pictures of routing and use of streets, Strava does the same for active travel, Uber has a map of travel times which is based on millions of anonymised journeys. There's been a few studies on using crowd-sourced data - this one specifically mentions the issues of where the data is gathered and in comparing results. https://findingspress.org/article/5115-comparing-google-maps-and-uber-movement-travel-time-data Bringing it all together is a challenge and DIRECT comparisons aren't easy but the general trendlines are pretty consistent across various data sources. Combinations of them will give something that is called an estimate but which is actually pretty solid. Same way that the word Theory is used to describe evolution, the Big Bang and so on. It doesn't mean it's wrong or a wild guess - it means that not all aspects of it are fully understood or they're open to further study but the underlying principles are basically all there.

That's about right - varies depending on how you measure it, if it's a rolling road or real-world; also real-world things like temperature, speed, manner of driving but tank-to-wheel efficiency is about 16 - 20%. The TTW efficiency is determined by the total amount of losses, which in a combustion engine comprise thermal losses, pump losses and mechanical losses. The thermal losses occur as not all of the fuel energy is transformed to mechanical energy, and most of these losses are dissipated through the exhaust. The combustion process is unable to utilize all the thermal energy, and the exhaust ends up at a higher temperature and pressure than the ambient air. All the rotating parts of the engine creates friction when moving and results in mechanical losses, which increase with the speed of the engine. It's a massive pain modelling that ofr all types of vehicle though so generally an average figure is used. Diesel engines on biodiesel can get up to 35% efficiency in absolutely ideal running conditions. Not my area but useful to understand the basics when politicians start banging on about "net-zero" or how cars are more efficient now therefore there's less pollution per car therefore we can build more roads and have more cars....

I'm reminded of the scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade where he tells his class that archaeology is the search for FACTS. Not TRUTH. "If it's truth you're interested in, the philosophy class is right down the hall."

It does and it doesn't. If you look at the data for Southwark: https://roadtraffic.dft.gov.uk/local-authorities/103 If you go to the Summary page: https://roadtraffic.dft.gov.uk/summary and filter traffic by Road Type on C-roads, there's a massive increase. The raw counts don't always pick this up because they're at fixed locations so what is measured as a decrease in traffic passing a fixed point on an A-road is actually measured as an increase in traffic along a C-road. Basically rat-running. The physical counts of how many vehicles have gone down a certain road need to be tied into other measures like phone data, traffic flow, congestion charge counts, ANPR, temporary traffic counts (the little boxes with a sensor cable stretched across the road) plus things a bit more removed like census data, surveys and car sales figures. Here's London overall as one Region: https://roadtraffic.dft.gov.uk/regions/6 Again, you can filter by road type, traffic type etc.. It's 3.6 BILLION more miles driven on London's roads in the space of 10 years. There's a huge amount of info and data in there to go through and just saying "oh there's been a decrease in traffic" is not true. There might be a decrease past a fixed point but it's not shown in the bigger picture. Residential streets (where there are generally no traffic counts) have become sponges to absorb the arterial route traffic. Everyone is on Waze and Google Maps being shown all these little cut throughs to save a minute here or there. The result being that they're directed off the A-roads, away from the traffic counters and into the residential streets. Traffic displacement in reverse. There's a few articles out at the moment. The Peter Green one linked above. This one which mentions Railton Road: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/nov/16/i-got-it-wrong-since-the-changes-its-become-more-vibrant-life-in-an-ltn The guy in Daily Mail article has form for this, he was saying the same about segregated cycle lanes in London in about 2017. None of his scare-mongering has been shown to be true. As a general rule the Daily Mail isn't really interested in truth. ;-)

I don't have an agenda. Asking what, on the face of it is a simple question with a binary yes/no answer is not going to give you anything like the answers that are actually needed. Firstly it's quite quaint that you think the councils are there to do what you / we want. They're not, they're there to run the borough by (as near as possible) democratic means but democracy does not mean that they have to ask everyone their opinion on everything. They were democratically elected and they'll do what the democratically elected Government tell them to do mixed in with their own local issues based on the funding they can obtain for it all. Secondly, it is not a simple answer. I said this above. Some LTNs are very good, they've had very positive effects. Some are not so good and either get removed after a while or modified. Some impact certain people more than others. A resident on Calton Avenue with no private car will have a very different view to a resident on Court Lane with 2 vehicles even though they may live only 200m from each other. Some residents and businesses will love their own LTN but hate the one that forces them to drive an extra mile to get to a shop or school. There is literally no one answer to this. You're trying to make an incredibly complicated matter (that is linked in to other traffic considerations not just in Southwark but across neighbouring boroughs) a simple yes/no and sadly, the world doesn't work like that unless it's just "do you want more pudding?" I know what the answer will be by the way - 52:48 (and that could go either way). It pretty much always is when you try to break down a divisive issue to a simple question which is why it's a terrible idea. If it's more pudding then it's easier, it's always yes. ;-)

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.