exdulwicher

Rockets - you hit the nail on the head in your last sentence there. Trust in politics is at an all time low. We've got a Government that lives day-to-day on lies, U-Turns, slogans, simple answers to complex problems, incompetence and self-interest. The councils (believe it or not) are not as bad but it comes under the same general feeling of not trusting politicians. The consultation thing is a bit of a dead cat to be honest - the timeframes and legislation mean that it has to be done alongside the changes, not in advance of them. However the impression that it gives (rightly or wrongly) is of changes being railroaded through which erodes trust and you're in a Catch-22...

Like what? Genuine question - what is the solution that keeps everyone happy? This has been asked before by others over on the Healthy Streets thread where people are talking about "holistic solutions" without actually coming up with any "solution" (holistic or otherwise) that is not just "reopen the streets so I can drive anywhere I want". Sometimes it's masked behind "concerns" for the elderly, the disabled, BAME and/or children but it basically all boils down to "I am being inconvenienced and that's terrible". There are countless studies from all over the world that show that pedestrianising streets or at least seriously restricting traffic along them (whether that's via LTNs, one-way systems, bus/taxi only etc) leads to more pleasant retail environments, higher average spend and higher number of visits. Most shopkeepers dramatically over-estimate how many customers arrive by car (because a lot of vehicle movement is through-traffic that has zero benefit to the area but does make it look busy). But what is this mythical solution? Genuine question - I'm interested! Again, it got mentioned elsewhere but every single person sitting in a traffic jam is saying to themselves "this is terrible, they (as in the council, the Government) should do something about it, they (as in every other driver) should be walking or cycling or travelling outside rush hour". But never that they (the person behind the wheel) should change their travel habits, not be driving 2km, not be making three trips when one, better planned one could suffice... And now that something is being done about it, the answer is to re-open all roads immediately? There are a load of factors in this. We're in a climate crisis. We're in breach of all sorts of UK, EU and WHO targets / limits on pollution. We're in a pandemic - one that is quite closely linked to air quality but has also had a major impact on travel patterns. The traffic models are currently struggling to catch up to a massive change from "the daily commute" / "the school run" (via whatever means that takes) to "only essential travel" to the current rather mixed message about trying to get back to work and school but trying to avoid public transport but also trying not to all jump into cars - which would result in gridlock whether the roads were closed or not. I don't think there's one answer to any of this, I think there's a range of answers - some of which will work better in some areas than others - but I also KNOW that there's early disruption and complaints to be expected because this happens globally as soon as you try things like this. It happened in The Netherlands 40-50 years ago when they started moving away from their initial plans of roads and cars everywhere; it happened in New York when they pedestrianised Times Square and brought in a bike-share scheme; in San Francisco when bike lanes were introduced at the expense of car parking... Worldwide, you get this graph: I'm not saying that the closures are all right and perfect but actually, as a process, this is the ideal situation. It's far easier and cheaper to introduce temporary change, model it, consult on it as it happens, be able to physically SEE the changes (good and bad), adjust it than it is to simply keep digging up bits of road in futile attempts to micro-manage (like DV junction, Loughborough Junction etc). And if you want some advice on changing things, as a business you can keep (accurate) diaries of things like visitor numbers, spend, footfall and so on and you have some data to show to council about how it's affected you / your business. Anecdotes don't count for a lot...

Depends how it was measured and what was meant by it (I've not actually seen his comment anywhere, just taking it from that post above). 2.7 million fewer journeys (per a defined timeframe - annually / monthly / weekly?) vs 2.7 million vehicles just disappearing forever; the former being much more likely than the latter! Congestion Charge, when that was introduced, resulted in an almost immediate (within a month) reduction in traffic of 15% although that's crept up steadily since then with occasional spikes down as the price increased and a drift upwards mostly due to the sheer number of PHVs (predominantly Uber) being registered and an increase in van deliveries, especially to offices. That's dropped back down again now, replaced by van deliveries to homes since very few people are actually in offices!

Sympathies - in some respects it just highlights to thieves that you have something worthwhile nicking. The reviews on Asgard's website are quite mixed and there are a few threads on various cycling forums about them - one here: https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/asgard-sheds-not-as-secure-as-we-think-they-are/ The weak point of most sheds is the roof - most people think about the doors and hinges, putting a big padlock on there but the roof will pop off in seconds with a crowbar. Certainly worth a complaint to Asgard.

I've had a lovely couple of weeks on holiday. What have I missed...?

spider69 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Perhaps instead of using all these wonderful > computer systems having someone stand on the > side of the road and saying what if I screwed > this flow up what would happen. > For similar sorts of reasons that the congestion charge is not handled by people standing at the side of the road with clipboards writing down number plates...

From page 4 of the pdf I linked to earlier: "The mean average was a reduction of 21?9% and the median ? which is a better measure of central tendency here, given the variability of results ? was a reduction of 10?6%. In other words, in half the cases, over 11% of the vehicles which were previously using the road or the area where roadspace for general traffic was reduced, could not be found in the surrounding area afterwards." That's from a collation of 60 high quality studies (the pdf references 100 but when analysing them, 40 were not of suitably high quality or not long-term enough). Further info and details in the pdf. It can be quite heavily dependent on the area, the measures imposed, the ratio of population with / without cars and so on but the figures are broadly comparable worldwide indicating that weather is not really a factor. That is the current elephant in the room. Trains are back up to about 30% of pre-Covid levels now which is beginning to make social distancing a problem on some services. However the pattern of use has changed - the morning rush is more spread out and (because it's summer holidays, because a lot of offices are not fully open) some of the issues are on services down to the coast - basically people going to the beach for a day out. Buses are still a bit of an unknown quantity - TfL was reckoning about 20% of pre-Covid levels of use overall but that's offset by a significant drop in usage in the city as there are far fewer people there at the moment. That said, it does exist as an option - I've used ND to London Bridge a few times and the 176, 40 and 185 services with no issues. In fact public transport at the moment is as good as it's ever going to get. Far fewer passengers, no queues, no standing and, because there are fewer people the level of service (in terms of on-time) is excellent. :-)

You're conflating displacement (where the same amount of traffic is moved from Route A to Route B) and evaporation (where some vehicle journeys previously made on the now inaccessible Route A are made by alternative means - the active travel plans obviously focus on cycling and walking but it could also be car-sharing, public transport or simply that people change their habits - for example only driving to the shops once a week rather than three times). Hammersmith Bridge is quite a good example, it's been closed long enough to have some reasonably in depth assessment done on surrounding traffic and pollution levels. https://www.hammersmithbridge.org.uk/p/179/traffic-evaporation https://www.citymetric.com/horizons/has-closing-hammersmith-bridge-really-improved-london-s-air-quality-4731 There's a PDF of a metadata study on the subject here which, although rather wordy, also manages to keep the maths to a minimum. https://www.hammersmithbridge.org.uk/Uploads/2019-05-23-5343-Disappearing%20traffic%20-%20the%20story%20so%20far.pdf There's a reasonable chunk of data and info from places like Hackney and Waltham Forest which have had similar measures (back when the popular term was Mini-Holland) for a lot longer than Dulwich as well.

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.