exdulwicher

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.

It'll settle down. This happens with every form of road closure or blockage, whether it's roadworks, construction work, a serious accident etc. Short term ones (like an accident where a road might be closed for 6hrs say), you just accept the chaos cos there's not really a lot that can be done about it, there's certainly no consultation or warning. Medium term ones like roadworks, you get a mix of people who accept the delays and a mix who do all sorts of contorted driving around back roads to avoid it but actually end up no better off - the philosophy of "well I'm moving so I'm making progress" wins out of the logics. Long term ones like a road closure, you get no useful data at all in the first month. Loads of people don't know about it (in spite of consultations, info on the Southwark website and elsewhere, leaflets through doors (like all the Area A, B and C had about the original Healthy Streets) - there are loads of people who simply don't engage, seek info or know (likely because a lot are outside the borough). Again, short of writing to every single household in London saying "hey if you're thinking of driving through DV...." you will never reach everyone. Drivers then ignore road closure signs (obviously a mere sign doesn't apply to THEM), get to the end and oh look, it's closed. So you get this: There was one in DV earlier, as well (can't find the video now, someone drove right over the pavement across the front of the pharmacy then the pavement on the graveyard side of Court Lane. The signage is temporary, it's perfectly clear and yet they STILL ignore it. The issue with your story is not the road, the closure, the council or the signage - it's an entitled idiot dangerous DRIVER. Like the vast majority of problems on our roads. It will settle in though, there's nothing useful to be gained in terms of data from the first month of a closure. Let the idiots sort themselves out, the council fix any minor issues (adding to signage, putting extra bollards in across the pavements where required) and then the outcomes can begin to be examined.

https://tar1090.adsbexchange.com/ Aircraft tracking website which, unlike FlightRader24, shows military and police/emergency services. Air ambulance doesn't fly at night and if it was a Chinook, you'd really know about it! It's usually just police, the problem is they're providing support to ground units so they hang around for a while at about 1500ft. If the military are doing night flights, there's a couple of areas in Wales and Dartmoor where they can go and bother the sheep without annoying anyone else.

Same in Lewisham, there was a tweet earlier which got loads of retweets showing cars driving up over the pavement to get round a recently installed set of planters. A lot of the problem so far is people ignoring the No Through Road signs up at the top of Woodwarde, driving down there and turning left and then finding that actually the sign meant something. Possibly that there's no through road. 🤦 Then they turn round and race off in a cloud of frustration and exhaust fumes. No matter how many signs you put in, there's always a significant % of drivers think that somehow it doesn't apply to them... It'll settle in once people stop being such idiots.

Takes a while for Google's algorithms to sort things out and occasionally they get it wrong. A few years ago on the Dunwich Dynamo (night-time cycle ride from east London up to the Suffolk coast), Google Maps threw up a massive traffic jam on an A-road at about 3am. Turned out it was hundreds of cyclists (all moving relatively slowly compared to normal traffic speed on that road) which caused Google to think it was a traffic jam. Normally it's pretty good at working out modes of transport (which is why you can use anonymised / aggregated mobile phone data in traffic management studies) but with changes to road layouts, especially ones allowing pedestrians and cyclists to use large areas of main roads, it'll pick them up as lots of slow moving phones all together and assume that they're in cars and therefore a traffic jam. Again, give it a couple of weeks and the Maps thing sort of self-learns.

It'll take a month or so to bed in and for any changes in traffic patterns / flow / volume to settle down. Not much point in looking at it after <24hrs in place. @slartib is right, they should have done the whole Healthy Streets thing at the same time while traffic is relatively light. I appreciate that timed restrictions are difficult without camera controlled junctions which you can't put in at short notice but the principle of the HS is difficult to assess when you close one junction. However - it's in now, people will (gradually) adapt and in 6 months time a proper assessment can be done.

To be fair, it's no worse than most of SE London. South Circular all the way from Tulse Hill to LL is solid, Herne Hill is dark red around the main junction. Crystal Palace and The Triangle looks rammed as well. Might go for a bike ride one afternoon this week and see if I can get some pictures. The DV junction is already updated in Google Maps and Waze as closed so hopefully a lot of sat nav directed traffic will settle in quite quickly. It's the people who drive local trips without checking stuff like that that get caught out initially, they generally soon learn to re-route even if it's learning the hard way initially!

The system is owned by TfL (although obviously with engagement with councils) and a lot of the direct day-to-day management (maintenance and re-location of bikes for example) is outsourced to Serco. Depending on location, installation requirements etc, it's about ?200,000 to install a docking station. There's also the need to consider the overall network. Fairly pointless installing a single docking station in (say) Dulwich Village - you'd want a couple in Dulwich Park (say one at Court Lane entrance, one at College Road entrance), one in the village, one up by Dulwich Library, three or four down the length of Lordship Lane, one each at ND and ED stations.... And then they'd need to link up with the next available docking points which are Brixton / Stockwell and up the Walworth Road, all of which are a reasonable distance away. So you'd probably need some "linking" docking points in Herne Hill, southern Camberwell / Denmark Hill and so on to tie it into the remaining network.

There's some recently released info, data, graphics etc here that do a good job of explaining the Low Traffic Neighbourhood plans. This is Strategic Neighbourhood Analysis: http://content.tfl.gov.uk/lsp-app-six-b-strategic-neighbourhoods-analysis-v1.pdf And here's the TfL guidance for Low Traffic Neighbourhoods: http://content.tfl.gov.uk/lsp-app-six-a-supplementary-guidance-ltns-v1.pdf London-wide look, not just Southwark but all councils are legally obliged to be doing this now.

https://amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/may/15/large-areas-of-london-to-be-made-car-free-as-lockdown-eased

DKH roadworks is this: https://consultations.southwark.gov.uk/environment-leisure/dog-kennel-hill-bus-lane-widening/ Think it was about a month later than planned in starting due to lockdown etc.

It's normally anonymised and collated by the time it gets to the council. You can separate out residents from non-residents by postcode / address / cross reference with voting/council records relatively easily to ensure that people are who they say they are and (depending on how the survey was done - in person, online, postal), there's some clever data management stuff that can tie specific responses to specific people if required but generally, the stuff the council see and act on has already had the statistical analyses done on it. Once residents / non-residents of any given road or postcode have been split out, you can weight accordingly so that residents get more weight given to their views than just some random person driving down the street once a day.

Agree with everything you say F.M. That's the part that needs removing, the parents driving right up to the school gates to drop their little darling off (and it's the same at JAGS, Alleyns, Hamlet etc). A significant part of the congestion around the Townley Road / EDG junction is exactly that, people driving all the way along Calton/EDG/Townley to drop the kids right at the school gate rather than 200m away. Suspect you're right with Melbourne as well, the road risks becoming a 2-way jam of 4x4's all going up, turning round and coming out again...

But then you can't fit as many people on the road. And we're back at the beginning with the fact that there is not enough road space to accommodate the current number of cars, never mind if all bus / rail passengers leave public transport and get into their cars.

Within reason (and depending a bit on the layout of the streets, the type of shopping (retail, leisure, restaurants etc), one sort of leads to the other. Remove on-street parking and a lot of the traffic disappears (they were driving down that street specifically to park on it). This does depend a lot on the street in question (LL for example has a mix of through traffic, buses and people wanting short-term kerbside parking to nip into a shop). Manchester have done it with parts of Deansgate too - there's long been a campaign to close that road as it's very polluted, very congested and actually there are other more appropriate roads to get around / through the city centre but part of their lockdown funding went into closing sections of it with big planters to allow the cafes and restaurants to spill out into the road while also allowing pedestrians to move up and down.

For road schemes, I've long been a fan of the "do it cheap and try it, then do it right" approach. Councils could save themselves a fortune and buy themselves a lot of goodwill with constituents if they said: here's the problem, here's our intended solution which will hopefully have the following effects, we'll put it in using these temporary measures and look at the impact over [timeframe] And then come back in 6, 12, 18 months and consult on it using their data and the experiences of residents / constituents. Residents give the absolute close up nitty gritty of it (albeit on a largely anecdotal level), the general data gives the wider feel around how much traffic is displaced elsewhere. You end up with a collaborative approach that responds well to (and actually fosters) respect between councils and residents, tests various options with minimum disruption and then picks the best one to be made permanent. Rarely used though as it spreads the spending out and an awful lot of council funding is grant money that's ringfenced for a particular scheme. Even if you then have to come back and dig it all up again 3 years later cos it's rubbish. Government spending on transport is an utter joke. Short-termist "bid for money" processes that pitch council against council, all desperately bidding for a piece of a small pie allowing them to do one junction or a single stretch of road. That's not Southwark at fault, it's central Government / DfT.

mockingbird Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > wulfhound Wrote: > -------------------------------------------------- > ----- > > > Unlike OHS, this programme is a trial - they > can't > > make it permanent without a full consultation, > at > > which point those affected will be able to > report > > their lived experience of the outcome. > > Incorrect - Experimental Orders do not require > consultation and therefore the whole concern about > Southwark taking advantage of C-19 measures and > avoiding disclosure of the OHSD results and > impacts Experimental Orders do not require consultation but to make them permanent after the stated time, that DOES require consultation.

@slartib : https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jun/14/congestion-set-to-exceed-pre-lockdown-levels-as-cars-crowd-back-on-to-uk-roads There's that news item which has various links within it and there's stuff which I've got (not directly applicable to London, more a general trend of data from a range of sources): -------------------------------------------------------- This came from an analysis of home-working potential by occupation type and trip length, coupled with general reduced mobility during lockdown, and the implication is: Continued promotion of home-working for occupations where this is possible will: Keep car travel around 22% below pre-lockdown levels; Protect around 56% of rail capacity and around 17% of bus capacity for key workers who need to use it. Further policies that support active travel modes could: Reduce car travel by a further 1-18% Increase protected rail capacity to 58-63% and significantly increase protected bus capacity to 52-71% for key workers who need to use it. These scenarios include e-bikes that could be key to shifting middle-distance bus and rail trips to active trips. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- There's a lot of "could" and some rather wide percentage range stuff in there, the data simply isn't there to pull out much more at this stage and as I say this is NOT Southwark data, it's an amalgamation of patterns seen elsewhere and adjusted slightly based on a range of assumptions, information and observations. Personally I wouldn't read too much into it yet although it's an interesting baseline set of numbers to work off. Hope that helps.

We're back at what I said on Page 12: The problem is that most people want fewer cars - provided it's not THEIR car. Everyone thinks that the neighbourhood should be green and peaceful, provided that THEY don't have to change anything about THEIR life. Everyone else's children should walk/get the bus but THEY have to drop their little darling right at the school gates because.....

Actually it raises an interesting point of what is and is not acceptable (taking the thread off topic a moment). 5 people (on average) are killed on the roads of the UK every single day. Not just nationally, but globally, we seem to accept this. The price of each death varies a bit but is roughly ?1 million by the time you've factored in cost of the emergency services, clean-up, medical treatment for the injured / dying, insurance costs, lost productivity and so on, there's loads of factors. No-one really seems to care about this (up until a close relative is killed) but if there were 5 deaths a day happening on the railways, there'd be national outcry, the whole rail network would be shut down. But it's a case of perspective and what is considered "acceptable". To follow the Covid pattern, you really need to look at excess deaths - deaths over and above the national average - which is relatively stable at about 9-11,000 per week (England and Wales). At the infection peak it was running at nearly 30,000 deaths per week, 20,000 above normal: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1111804/weekly-deaths-in-england-and-wales/ That counts ALL deaths so it ignores false positives and negatives for Covid and is more reliable than just saying "we think this person probably died from Covid". Which brings us back to if that is considered acceptable or not. Without lockdown, it would have been much higher so life would not have continued as normal, there'd have been piles of bodies everywhere and in those circumstances, the economy is still going to fall to pieces except more people are dead.

jimlad48 Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > I don't for one second believe the 470K death > figure. The science behind it is deeply > questionable, there are real concerns over how the > figure was reached and the people behind it have a > very long track record of crying wolf over > previous incidents. How they got listened to or > taken seriously again is beyond me. > So it's all a big global conspiracy? Virtually every country in the world was in on it, the scientists had all collaborated beforehand to say "I know, what a terrific game it'd be if we could bring the planet to a standstill for a few months! You take these countries over here, we'll knock up some pretend figures, oh what a laugh we'll have!" ? Has the Flat Earth forum got a bit boring for you, thought you'd pop over here? What's your views on the Moon Landings? Just wondering if there's any other science you'd like to not believe in for us...