exdulwicher

Some useful info here about theft of keyless vehicles. https://www.driving.co.uk/news/features/six-ways-thieves-can-break-into-a-car-and-how-to-prevent-it/

Induced demand and the inverse of it, reduced demand, are both very well documented transportation facts. Basic info on both because to be quite honest I don't have time to type out the maths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand#Reduced_demand The situation at the moment (nationwide, not just Dulwich or Southwark) is that residential roads have become a sponge soaking up the excess traffic from the strategic roads. The oft-ignored flipside to the consultation argument is that at no point were residents consulted on having the residential road network turned into a de facto commuter route. The modelling of this works worldwide - with some variations in the maths to accommodate things like housing density, population, the type of roads (A, B, residential...) However the key factor is to do it as one block. This is why Loughborough Junction didn't work because it was an isolated case and the faff factor of driving around it wasn't enough to persuade people to take another form of transport. You need a network of LTNs and London is at that critical point where there's enough LTN infrastructure being put in to annoy people but not enough to change travel patterns. It is getting there though. This article talks quite widely about it and references numerous studies: https://londonlivingstreets.com/2019/07/11/evaporating-traffic-impact-of-low-traffic-neighbourhoods-on-main-roads/ The old models for vehicle use were based on the "water through a pipe" analogy (which is why you get congestion after junctions - the common approach was to have a single lane road widen into 2 lanes at a junction then back to one after it, they're called high-throughput junctions and designed to avoid congestion at the junction. You simply end up with congestion AFTER the junction where the "pipe" narrows again). Where the modelling of individual tin boxes does work very well is trains and planes which follow pre-determined routes at pre-determined speeds and you don't have to worry about the movement of PEOPLE until they're at the airport or train station. It falls down with motor vehicles since you're actually considering individual humans who happen to be carrying a 2-ton box around with them. The modelling needs to focus on the people, not the box. As an aside, Streatham's LTN went live a few days ago, they used a picture of "Dulwich Square" to illustrate the principles. http://www.prera.org.uk/?p=2066

Depends on the pub which is part of what that Sky investigation in Manchester was trying to uncover. I went into a pub in Kennington a few weeks ago and they had a QR code which you scanned with your phone, it opened a single-page website and more or less self-populated it with the details from the phone (obviously your phone is signed into your Google or Apple account and can self-complete forms if prompted). Took about 15 seconds from start to finish, no need for pens / third party assistance / bits of paper etc and the webpage had https on it indicating it was secure. But I've heard of a couple of places with just a strip of paper: name, phone no, date you were there and you could write any old crap down, no-one to really check it. All sorts of potential issues there; firstly people writing down false info but also things like data protection, secure disposal of the info after 14 days and so on. Maybe all the fake info stuff is why Manchester is still under tighter lockdown, perhaps the fake names / lack of tracing is coming back to bite them. It'd be interesting to see.

I was using "we" as the paraphrasing of what they'll be saying.

There have been a lot of people called Mickey Mouse and other "hilarious" names going drinking in pubs. Basically, it's a complete farce - an awful lot of names, numbers and email addresses given have been fake. And that's before you take into account the fact that our "world-beating" contact tracing system is only "world-beating" if the criteria is "worst in the world". All of that was secondhand via a mate in medical research modelling and statistics. I don't know the exact job that Blah Blah on here does but he/she is the obvious expert on it and perhaps has some more info.

No, if they're damaged, they'll be replaced (at cost to the taxpayer) until the data is there. It'll just take longer to gather it. Whoever has damaged it (bored kids, angry locals, pro-closure, anti-closure - frankly I don't think throwing accusations and supposition around is at all helpful) hasn't thought through the repercussions because the answer will be one of two options: we'll keep repairing it until we can't afford it anymore and/or we have the required data or we were unable to gather any meaningful data therefore it's staying as is. Either way, damaging equipment that you might later be able to rely on to tell the council why the measures haven't worked is a pointless and stupid thing to be doing.

Pre-existing / pre-allocated funds. The ULEZ expansion has been in the pipeline for years. There are massive legal headaches involved in re-allocating funding with transport (in fact within a lot of Government). The money has been allocated, preliminary work (planning, design, installation timelines, software rollout and so on) will already be going on so to pull the scheme and try to re-allocate the money elsewhere to shore up suddenly collapsed finances just leaves you in a legal battle that you'll lose.

They can't afford NOT to expand ULEZ! TfL is about half funded from fares. The grant from Government ceased a few years ago and there's the political games of having a Conservative Government and a Labour Mayor. Covid has opened up a massive black hole where the fares used to be and there's no easy way of getting that back. The Government bail-out was on the condition of bringing back the (temporarily lifted) Congestion Charge and raising it to ?15. That was Government, not the Mayor. Hiring Capita is nothing new, it's standard procurement. TfL use dozens of partners, contractors etc to deliver schemes, it's certainly not all in-house. You can read about their funding breakdown here: https://tfl.gov.uk/corporate/about-tfl/how-we-work/how-we-are-funded Congestion Charge and ULEZ (pre-Covid) amounted to ?1.2bn of income. Expanding it = more income.

She's lovely - well done for caring for her so well. Please let us know the outcome!

A lot of people are bored and frustrated. Furloughed or WFH, schools are now properly on holiday too, a lot of people will have had foreign holidays cancelled or changed and it's lovely weather. So basically a lot of people with a lot of time on their hands. Most of the time it's fairly harmless - someone walking round on stilts is a bit eccentric but not really an issue. Having impromptu music gatherings and Strictly Come Dancing re-enactments without thinking about the fact that, y'know there is still a global pandemic and this is still a ROAD and people still want to travel along it is towards the more selfish end of the spectrum. I doubt anyone has even thought of it has an event or campaigning - to them it'll just be "a bit of harmless fun". It's that national lack of common sense on display again.

They don't. They were part of the original Healthy Streets plan (link below) which was suspended due to Covid. The measures being undertaken here (and elsewhere) are sort of related (in that a lot of councils had Healthy Streets / Low Traffic Neighbourhood plans in the pipeline) but they're currently being put in as trial / temporary measures as everything stumbles back to some sort of post-pandemic "normal". https://www.southwark.gov.uk/transport-and-roads/improving-our-streets/live-projects/our-healthy-streets/our-healthy-streets-dulwich However timed restrictions is different to what they're doing now; it's not part of the current plan because it costs a lot and the emergency legislation being used at the moment doesn't cover it. To answer your question (it's in the link above as well), peak hours in that area were reported as between 7am to 10am and 3pm to 8pm although whether the timed restrictions would have been across those exact periods I don't think was ever explicitly stated.

Probably on holiday, he's a schoolteacher so this is officially his time off. The goings on at that junction are annoying now - there was some sort of musical duet there a couple of weeks ago, people standing around. It's still a road - there were still cyclists and pedestrians and a couple of people on mobility scooters looking to get through it all and finding it quite difficult, especially to maintain social distancing. Not going to be long before some idiot dancing in the "square" collides with a scooter or cyclist and blames the legitimate road user.

Yes and no. The problem with the transport system at the moment is that for years (decades) it has not been "equal" at all, it's been very skewed towards private motor vehicles. (This is not unique to Dulwich or Southwark or London or the UK, this happened worldwide from about the 70's onwards). To address decades of inequality skewed to car use, there's a need to "over-promote" other options (active travel basically). It's not equality, it's equity. If you treat driving = cycling = walking, everyone goes for driving which then means that cycling and walking get marginalised and people are scared to walk / cycle along the now dangerously busy and congested roads. To get back to the equity status, you need to be dis-incentivising car use. There's a posh term for it, Nudge Theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nudge_theory Got quite a following at first (like Chaos Theory) but it's really just a description of behavioural influence.

Tomorrow's World (and/or Back to the Future...) had definitely promised me a hoverboard by now.

A councillor stopped a cyclist there a couple of weeks ago and asked why he was on the pavement. He pointed at the signs saying ROAD CLOSED and said that as the road was closed he'd jumped the pavement to go round it. This got mentioned previously by other posters commenting on the change from the red ROAD CLOSED to the green ROAD OPEN TO [symbols of pedestrians, cyclists, wheelchair etc]. That is why. Ultimately it just shows that common sense isn't very common!

Most of the surveys being done nationwide by a variety of means (online, social media, by post) are returning an average of about 5:1 in favour of low traffic neighbourhoods. It also acknowledges that the "1" part of that are likely to be much more vocal than the "5" part so the initial impression of everyone being against it is often a case of a shouty minority. Again, this is an average of the schemes nationwide; I've seen outliers as well - Islington were claiming 90% in favour on a survey they did although that was 10,000 posted leaflets and a response of about 350 so that upsets my data OCD. There's a councillor in Hackney, Jon Burke (@jonburkeUK on Twitter) who's worth a follow for some good updates of their LTN and the general ideas behind it. Our own James McAsh is also on Twitter, @mcash although much less active on there. Less about traffic and LTNs.

They do seem to have altered the timing on the lights. I cycled through it from Turney Road straight on through the closure and up Calton the other morning, it was pretty quiet. The vehicle and cycle lights were both red so I waited in the cycle lane bit, a car pulled up next to me and waited at his red light. The cycling light turned green, pedestrian and vehicle lights remained on red. Vehicle light went green about 5 seconds after mine. Not been through it often enough and at varied enough times recently to test it more thoroughly but I have ended up in the middle of that junction on my green with pedestrians crossing in their green in the past.

Because that has been in the pipeline for decades through successive Conservative and Labour Governments and all the London Mayors. https://www.crossrail.co.uk/route/crossrail-from-its-early-beginnings Also, Boris was the one who was proudly posing with a shovel as the first actual building work started so I doubt he wants too much to do with any sort of inquiry into it... TfL just run the thing (or they will when it actually opens). Any massive infrastructure build is a consortium of public and private investment, there's simply no other way to finance it. It might be overbudget and late but at least there's something tangible at the end of it, not like a Boris Garden Bridge (finally abandoned by Khan as soon as he became Mayor but with ?43m of public money wasted, thanks Boris). There's a theme with Boris and his white elephant plans like Island Airports and the Docklands cable car.

Walworth Road and the estates around the back of it have had a fair bit done. Similar thing with planters. https://www.southwarknews.co.uk/news/covid-19-legislation-sees-major-road-changes-including-car-free-junctions-new-cycle-lanes-and-traffic-bans-outside-schools/ Southwark News website (linked above) is worth keeping an eye on, quite often has quotes from councillors. There's also a link to the Streetspace page for comments.

Absolutely correct on both counts. Can help with traffic flow but with a corresponding increase in speeds - and the vast majority of drivers on all those roads I mentioned already exceed the notional 20mph limit.

Some of it is down to time - it takes a few months for behavioural change to kick in properly so there has to be a period of "getting used to it". Basically, the temporary disruption is modelled in. Some of it will be planned phasing of a scheme that's already been decided and approved but for various reasons (resourcing, costs, too much initial disruption etc), they can't put in all at once.

There was a report in October last year which is widely available (I've linked to an easy-to-read BBC article on it below) basically saying that the increased number of SUVs on the roads has cancelled out any gain made from some slight switch to EV. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-50713616 This one comes up quite a bit in councils and Local Transport Authorities as a pro-roads weapon - they'll propose a road scheme, the complaints will come in about building more roads, congestion, pollution etc and the council / LTA says "oh it's OK, by the time it's built, many of the vehicles driving on it will be electric therefore it's all fine". While it's sounds like a good argument to use, it's actually mostly wrong, certainly the way the current market is going. Increased use of ULEZ *might* have an impact in a few years time but as most cars on the road are leased / on finance, it's not always a case of just being able to go out and swap a car; people are often tied into 3 or 5 year "deals" - which is part of the reason that behavioural change takes so long because on a high-price item like a car, it's a major purchase decision. Ironically, the rise in SUVs is because the roads are congested so they're sold on the high driving position to see over the traffic, the safety ("there are so many cars on the road that it's unsafe; here, have a bigger heavier car for protection against it all!") and before you know it, you're back at square one except everyone is in a car that's twice as big as it was before. Edit: EV use and uptake is driven by infrastructure. The main concerns are obviously range and charging so to push for pure EV, you need a network of charge points (like at supermarkets, shopping centres, stations etc), otherwise the uptake will be incredibly low. Self-charging hybrids get around that but then you're back with a petrol engine again. Catch-22.

Nowhere close to it. Fuel duty (which has been frozen for 10 years now as a Government easy-win for "the hard-working motorist") brings in about ?28bn a year. Had it risen in line with inflation, as train and bus fares have done, it would have brought in an extra ?19bn over that 10-year period. VED is about ?6.5bn a year at the moment; the way it was calculated changed recently so the impact is taking a while to filter through. Depending on how you count the rest, if you include VAT on essential motoring things like products and services, insurance premium tax on the car insurance you pay and exactly how car purchases are accounted (company cars as BIK, lease cars etc) is about another ?4-5bn. Rough total income, ?38bn. Again, depending on how you count some of the costs and externalities, if you just focus on "road building" or include road improvement, basic maintenance (eg potholes) and if you factor in pollution, costs of road accidents, congestion (as a cost to the economy), the use of often valuable public space for storage of cars (be that residential parking or purpose-built car parks) and then less measurable issues like visual and noise pollution, you run at about ?48-50bn annual costs. So no, it doesn't cover it. The problem with taxation as an argument is it creates a them/us scenario, a sense of entitlement for those that pay ("I've paid to use my car therefore I will use it and sod the consequences to the rest of you" and "I've already paid taxes, why should I have to pay again to park?"). It makes it very difficult re-allocating road space to pedestrians and cyclists because "they don't pay road tax". As a counter-analogy, it does work with smoking - no-one argues now that they've paid cigarette tax therefore they should be allowed to smoke wherever they want or they should get priority hospital treatment because their extra taxes have paid more to the NHS. Normal roads (ie not motorways or highways) are the responsibility of the relevant local council and are paid for out of general taxation anyway (ie, council tax). Strategic roads (like Lordship Lane which is managed by TfL), are partly council and partly TfL funded. Road improvement schemes can be match funded or grant funded by Government too, the whole "I pay [x] tax therefore..." is a bit of a strawman argument because the funds can come from a variety of sources. In the next few years, taxation from motoring is going to drop off more as the (gradual) shift to electric / hybrid vehicles means less VED and less fuel duty coming in. Ideally, there'd be a conversation going on already about this but the Government seem to have got too stuck in a rabbit hole marked "Brexit" to do anything useful like work out how motoring payments need to change to keep taxes income the same or higher. Road pricing, increases on fuel duty are both options, albeit very unfavourable ones - which is partly why no-one dares touch it. In politics, parking is known as "the third rail". Touch it and you die.

Oh this one popped up a while ago... Here we go! /forum/read.php?20,2094901,2094901#msg-2094901 This might provide some options or ideas? https://www.homecrux.com/bike-storage-ideas-tiny-apartment/34738/