exdulwicher

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/

I agree in part but "democracy" tends to fall apart a bit when there's no trust between "the people" and "the powers that be" (whether that's local or national Government). Obviously we're well past that stage with both local and national. Locally, the council have been accused of fudging figures, not consulting properly etc; nationally I think most people know that the Government has spent the last 4 years lying solidly about pretty much everything. The other thing is that democracy really doesn't work when things HAVE to be done. There are ways and means of hiding behind consultations that legally have to be done but if the council has been directed to do something (in this case by Government to say "we're really in trouble if everyone who used to use public transport now decides to get in their car; have some funding to try and embrace the changes in working practices, active travel etc seen during lockdown, help people with social distancing and so on") and "the people" don't want it to be done, there's only one winner and it's the statutory requirement to do it. Which leads straight back to the breakdown of trust issue and it's Catch-22. The council have to promote active travel wherever possible because it's a directive from Government and they're getting funding for it (and because if even a small % of those previous public transport journeys transfer to private car, the roads will be gridlocked anyway, interventions or not). The people don't like the lack of consultation and as a general rule, people object to any restrictions on driving or parking anyway. The council do it anyway, everyone complains bitterly. Next time the council want to do something, the response is overwhelmingly negative. And so on. Ultimately, some of this is behavioural psychology - people don't like change and often have to be forced into doing things differently otherwise everyone just carries on as normal. I'm not sure what the actual answers are - the transport models for this don't exist yet and because most councils (nationally, not just Southwark) are so woefully behind the curve on promoting active travel, they're sort of starting from a very low baseline, not with an idea of what works, what doesn't. Again all of that ^^ is just facts of the matter; it can be applied across a lot of councils at the moment, not specific to this situation.

Depends on when the school was built and the planning that went into it. Back in the 70's and 80's it would have been unthinkable to build offices or a school or a new residential development without a load of car parking. The general requirement now is to remove on-site (staff) car parking as they expand - but that of course assumes that the school wants or needs to expand. Schools are required to produce Transport Plans showing how they're committed to reducing vehicle use. If you can be bothered to go trawling through the Governance webpages of JAGS, Alleyn's, College, Hamlet and so on, they're usually buried in there somewhere. Department for Education produces statutory guidance on the subject: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/575323/Home_to_school_travel_and_transport_guidance.pdf The challenge is that you don't just "remove" car parking; the school needs to plan what goes in its place in terms of buildings, sports pitches etc, get permission and funding for it, and then implement it. Just for info, in terms of transport modelling it's counted separately - a journey travelling to school for the purposes of working or studying there vs a journey to drop a child off there (either en route to another destination or to return home afterwards). Sometimes confuses the figures a bit until you really delve into the details.

I've said it before on this thread and others. I don't work for Southwark or TfL. I don't even work directly in traffic planning, I do data modelling and statistics - just that at the moment a fair bit of it is to do with roads. I've been critical of Southwark (and several other authorities nationwide) on traffic schemes if you read back through the posting history. All I generally do is post FACTS about traffic schemes and how modal filters are supposed to work, the general principles of survey work, data gathering, how its modelled. I try to stay away from my personal opinion of whether it's working or not for the fairly obvious reason that it could be construed as conflict of interest. There's a lot of "general" stats in what I write although obviously I can apply it locally.

Public transport, at the moment, is running at way below the capacity it had pre-Covid and certainly suffering a major collapse in public confidence. From the centre of Dulwich Village, it's <2km to Herne Hill, West Dulwich and East Dulwich stations, and to the South Circular / LL junction. 15-20 min walk, maybe 8-10 min bike ride. The reason that many people don't do it is not because they can't (the vast majority of people CAN), it's a mix of laziness, ignorance (of distance, of any other means of transport) and ingrained habit of just jumping in the car. Chiswick is a lovely ride. 12 miles, about an hour no matter what time of day or night. Either along the river and back over Vauxhall Bridge all on the CS or drop down to Richmond and back in that way (avoid the S.Circ by going round the back of Wandsworth, over Wandsworth and Clapham Commons, then cross Brixton Hill and through Brockwell Park). Actually a really "green" ride. Not practical for all journeys all the time, no. But it's about finding the ones that can be done another way and using that in the right way. Unfortunately, people need to be directed towards that because leaving people to "work it out for themselves" or asking people to please not drive as much simply doesn't work.

There is a middle ground. You can be "mostly" or "broadly" in favour of the current measures (or if not actually "these current measures as put in last week", you can be generally in favour of the principle of fewer cars / less pollution on the road however that might be achieved). You can also own a car but not use it to drive half a mile to Gails for your morning pastries or 1/2 mile to JAGS to drop your little child right at the school gate. We can argue about the implementation of this one til the cows come home but the principle behind any such modal filter / pedestrianisation / closure is to actually force change because, as has been amply demonstrated dozens of times recently, people have no common sense and will continue to do what they've always done until such time as they physically can't do it anymore. That was the main reason behind closing off Gilkes Crescent / Place years ago, it was being used as a rat run to avoid RPH / EDG junction and people were endlessly circling around the village end of it looking for parking spots.

It's GOVERNMENT POLICY. Nationwide, not just London or Southwark or Dulwich. Even the woeful bunch of incompetents in Government have realised that, if the post-Covid comeback / recovery is car-based, the roads will not be able to cope. If even a fraction of journeys done by public transport pre-Covid switch to cars there'll be absolute gridlock with the associated knock-on to pollution and air quality. During lockdown, there was a massive increase in walking and cycling - now a lot of that was cos there was simply nothing else to do so people that would normally have gone to the gym switched to walking and cycling. But a fair chunk of it was also families, kids, people who would never normally be on a bike because the roads are too hostile. And key workers found it invaluable, even if there was a spike in bike thefts from outside hospitals. The goal is to attempt to continue that and minimise the explosion of vehicle use. Already it's back up to 80-90% of "normal" with the return of a cloud of pollution hanging over London. Just for once, there is now a strong push towards Active Travel as literally the only way that towns and cities can cope as people return under socially distanced requirements. You can argue about the implementation but the POLICY of closing roads, minimising traffic, promoting active travel is a nationwide one from Government. Lambeth have managed it quite well. Manchester did a mostly good job in the outer stretches but central Manchester (where the councillor has a stake in NCP Car Parks!) have refused to do much or just done it so badly that it's pointless. Dudley completely screwed up their high street by putting in metal crowd control barriers (to block off parking) but it then meant that shoppers couldn't cross the road. Believe me, there's been good and bad implementation of this throughout the country. Doing it now is a) essential and b) the best time to do it while things are already disrupted, while not all traffic is there to better allow it to bed in. Give it a few months. Trying to ascertain exact effect now, only a week after it was put in is pointless. And trust me, when it comes to looking at comments in those maps, the date they were input will be taken into account. Earlier comments are down-weighted because the disruption is already expected and the early comments are all knee-jerk responses from vocal NIMBYs.

All good advice above. While it doesn't replicate the learning experience of 1-1 tuition as offered by a couple of posters above, British Cycling has several pages of videos covering all sorts of riding skills, info etc. These 3 pages are all commute and leisure based; some good videos in there about road positioning, negotiating junctions and roundabouts, planning safe commuting routes and so on. https://www.britishcycling.org.uk/knowledge/skills/commuting-leisure?&page=1

Three men go fishing, realise they need a bigger boat.