exdulwicher

Over the course of about 10 years there were at least 4 consultations on Dulwich Square which finally ended with the only design that could actually meet the original brief. One of the early reports (2016? 2017?) gave 3 options: what the council went with something about multiple roundabouts which I think actually referenced a scheme in Poynton (a village near Manchester which, again after extensive back and forth, finally installed (sorry, "imposed"...) a weird double roundabout system which, depending on your point of view is either a brilliantly innovative success or a total disaster - absolute proof that you will NEVER achieve any sort of consensus). a couple of other vague half-way-house type options In 2018, after all of that consultation, a bunch of re-prioritisation, new road markings, some buildouts etc went in - a scheme which failed all of TfL's route guidance but which apparently satisfied some of the NIMBY issues. Back to the drawing board for yet more consultations, in 2019 there were 3 phases of consultations over about 18 months which then ran up against Covid and the change of plans anyway but did allow Southwark (and numerous other councils around the country) to rapidly deliver on Streetspace plans which all had live feedback consultation. Out of Covid and in 2021 there was yet more consultation, the scheme finally made permanent but with watered-down aspects to appease the Onesies. Then it was council elections - remember that, where the Tory boy standing on a specific "rip out the LTNs on Day 1" was going to annihilate the "Socialist Labour Clowncil", send them running for the hills? Just remind me how that went will you? Cos it was hilarious. And then miraculously, he turned up an a council meeting, this time as the "spokesperson for One Dulwich" - well I never. Claiming to "represent the community" And he got his arse handed to him on a plate when it was pointed out that the actual community representative was - gosh - the elected councillor, not him. More hilarity. That should have been the end of it but Southwark then embarked on another 18 months of consultation around final design which One Dulwich did everything possible to disrupt and water down before finally, there's a completed scheme. So yes - you have been endlessly consulted. Repeated extra consultations. You cannot argue that you have not been consulted. You can get upset that the majority did not agree with you but not about the consultation.

The council were voted in on a manifesto. That means they've been given tacit support for at least the broad brush promises made in that manifesto, they should not then need to seek yes/no answers to everything they do. Consultations are a tricky one. Done well, they can engage and bring the community along on a journey. Done badly, they're a major source of distrust, anger and misunderstanding. Part of it is down to the questions you ask. Asking people who are not policy experts questions such as "what would you like to see?" is painful - people don't know that or they can't imagine that. Steve Jobs famously said that he never asked the customers what they wanted because most people don't know. If he'd have asked people what they wanted before they invented the iPhone, the answer would have been "a phone with a longer cord". If he'd have asked people what they wanted before they invented the iPod, the answer would have been "a Walkman with longer battery life". They're pointless questions that can only ever give worthless answers. And when you don't deliver a Walkman with longer battery life, people go "what is this, I didn't ask for this" and get angry and frustrated that they've wasted their time on engagement but not been given the solution they wanted - even though an iPod is a vast improvement on a Walkman with longer battery life. And what the council should be doing is designing the borough equivalent of an iPod.

They're turtle-y different. 😉 They hibernate, burying themselves under mud or at the bottom of the pond. There have been regular sightings in there (and in Dulwich Park) for years and terrapins can live for 15-20 years in the wild, 30+ years in captivity. They are however an invasive species - whether or not the RSPCA or a local wildlife charity would come out to try and trap / remove them is another matter.

Judicial Review challenges the process - not the outcome or the result. The one aspect of it that was upheld was that the consultation was flawed and that only came about because the anti-group submitted a 53-page dossier outside of the normal consultation route and Lambeth have been unable to show that they took it into account - even though everything in it was bollocks. It doesn't make the LTN unlawful nor does it allow the fines to be recovered.

That's right Rockets "it's a bit less desirable / more difficult doing roadworks in December" absolutely translates to "thou shalt only do roadworks in June". 🙄

Well it does, you need to dig the road up to widen the pavement... It's not just the tarmac setting though, there's a host of related issues. More chance of bad weather delaying the work (which means it lasts longer, costs more and causes more disruption and we all know how much Rockets hates disruption...). Shorter working days because of less daylight so either you bring in lights and generators or the work just takes more days, either of which means more cost, more disruption. If you have to do it then fair enough - emergency stuff will always need fixing there and then - but if you can avoid it then it makes sense to do it when it needs less resource and less chance of bad weather causing delays. Added to which, as I said, tarmac doesn't set / cure as well when it's cold and wet.

No, it's a popular myth though. Doing roadworks over winter is quite challenging, the (usually) wet / cold conditions mean that tarmac doesn't set properly. Fine if you have to do emergency stuff (although you usually need to come back and re-do it later) but winter is also the time that roads degrade the most. Freeze / thaw cycles, salt and grit etc mean there's always a load of remedial work to be done as soon as it's drier and marginally warmer. Hence a load more roadworks appear in March and everyone predictably goes "ooh, they're using the last of the budget..." 🙄 And because so many people have heard it so often, it's the one "fact" they remember. Much like how everyone knows that a swan can break your arm yet no-one actually suffers from swan-induced arm breaks. Funding comes from a number of sources, it's not always ring-fenced or time-constrained, there's no one pot which must be spent by 31st March.

So according to you, Southwark Council have limited resources all being spent on Dulwich Square; meanwhile on the gas works thread, Rockets is complaining that Southwark Council have so much surplus that they have to rush out and spend it all in March. Is it too much to ask for some sort of consistent narrative around all this? Schrodinger clearly worked at Southwark Council where they simultaneously have so much money they can do "non-essential" work but not enough money to fill a pothole.

Please define "non-essential". Why are they not needed (according to Rockets) but needed according to TfL / Southwark? The A205 works have been on the cards for years. Prevented by Covid initially, then by TfL's financial situation post-Covid, then by some unforeseen landowner / access issues. So these apparently non-essential works have been planned for years, it's not something that Southwark / TfL have gone "we're bored and have a million quid to spend, what can we dig up today?" You cannot go around claiming that something is non-essential. You don't know that at all. Neither do I to be fair although at least I'm not going round claiming it. And regarding the phasing of works, I assume you're thoroughly up to date on the council's pipeline of schemes, prioritisation principles, workforce availability (and the tender / procurement process and timelines), supply chain limitations, related nearby works (both highways and other general building works), scheduled community events (probably not relevant to the pavement outside ED station but very much a concern if you're going to do work outside somewhere like Dulwich or Brockwell Park...), funding availability... By all means ask the council though. Do post their reply up here.

I said nothing of the sort Rockets, stop trying to put words in my mouth. You could of course just ask Southwark Council - in fact their finances must be available on their website, why don't you go and have a look through that seeing as you're always saying how you "do your own research" and how much you love council data. Also the gas works will be paid for by the utilities company, not the council.

You could honestly make a conspiracy out of anything couldn't you?! That myth perpetuates because it's difficult doing roadworks over winter when it's cold and wet so once the weather improves a bit, they're out in force fixing winter defects so everyone goes "ooh they're using up the last of the budget..." 🙄 It's total nonsense.

There's a limit to how much coordination can be done though. Some of the works will have been planned a long time in advance. Some of them will be reactive and therefore urgent. And there's a strong argument that a relatively shorter period of higher disruption is better than massively prolonged lower disruption.

Well A205 is TfL and that's been on the cards to do for years, there have been safety concerns around that junction for a long time. "non-essential" - excellent, I'm glad that you can determine how essential these are. Can you share the Rocket's Scale of Essentiality? I assume it's based on all manner of calculations such as government funding, road safety, traffic management, contractor availability, weather, school holidays, neighbouring work times, complementary utility works and the council pipeline of schemes? Radical thought but you could have a look on their website or you could contact your councillor. And what would you do with that info? Demand that they come along personally and stop all disruption immediately? Like it or not, there will always be disruption of one sort or another - assuming of course that you want functional roads and utilities, they need maintaining. You've been given the necessary info around when and where it'll be, there is an element of personal responsibility now for you to minimise that disruption to yourself. Maybe think about re-routing your journey or re-timing it or perhaps going by a different mode of transport? I was given some info that central London might be really quite busy today so rather than try and get the bus into town or go for a bike ride along The Mall, I made other plans. Somehow managing not to post my outrage about this undemocratic infringement on my personal liberty on here.

Your handy guide to all roadworks and road closures: https://one.network/

Surprising though this info may be to you, utility companies have to pay to access the road and to undertake repairs - it's called a Lane Rental Scheme - and they can be fined for exceeding the allowed duration. No-one is going out to deliberately cause as much disruption as possible or to make the work last as long as possible. The fact that they've publicised this work and explained what is going to happen and when is an indication that, wildly unfair though this may be to your personal liberty, you might wish to look at your own options for minimising disruption. You now know it's going to happen so you could sit in traffic and scream about how Southwark Council / the utilities companies set out every day with the sole aim of causing as much outrage to Penguin68 as possible or you could maybe think "I might not drive down this road today cos I know it'll be slower due to the roadworks, I might drive that way around instead".

Taxation pays for many many things in life, that doesn't entitle anyone to unlimited free access to them. I suspect the loss of gas (or worse, the existing main leaking and going BANG!) would be a considerably greater loss of utility...

There's quite a strong push for that to happen as a complementary part to the Oxford Street works. The success of outside dining during / after Covid is credited with keeping a number of the establishments there trading in the first place - and then it was all taken away again. https://www.timeout.com/london/news/soho-could-bring-back-its-pedestrianised-street-dining-zones-this-summer-041225 Well really, PEOPLE should be prioritised, no matter their mode of transport to actually get to Oxford Street or Soho or wherever. I mean, that's kind of how shopping centres operate. You travel to the shopping centre (via whatever mode of transport you choose) and then you actually get to go shopping in a traffic free environment. Now imagine that along Oxford Street.

At the risk of getting extremely technical, free-flowing traffic basically applies to motorways when you start to introduce number of vehicles per lane per mile, average speeds, distance between vehicles and so on - the whole point of residential and "shopping" streets is that you'll only ever have "free flow" in the middle of the night when there's sod all around. In fact you can argue that such streets should not have "free flow" at all since that would imply everyone was just driving straight through; no stopping, no parking, no "just waiting for my friend off the train", no loading, no pulling out or turning in, no waiting to overtake a bus, no stopping for a pedestrian to cross the road, no traffic lights.... Trying to claim that you should have "free flow" along LL is ridiculous - you *might* get some semblance of free-flow by driving down it at 2am and being lucky with the lights. And trying to blame lack of free flow on a slightly wider pavement is even more of a non-starter.

They occasionally have Penny Farthing races, exhibitions, demo days etc at Herne Hill Velodrome, there's at least a couple of people fairly locally who can occasionally be seen riding around on one. Stopping - you just sort of step off the back of it. As a general rule, to ride one of them you have to be pretty experienced anyway - to my mind someone on a PF is less of an issue than pretty much any other cyclist cos at least you know they're never going to be caning down a hill or jumping off a kerb or skidding to a stop outside the shops.

Is it expensive? I mean, I've not bothered to look at the costs but you haven't published any costs or compared it to other works so it sounds like an opinion. Feel free to correct me if you have actually got a list of costs and comparisons. Also, most transport costs are funded from a range of sources. DfT, TfL, special one-off awards from Treasury (usually for the really high cost stuff like a motorway junction), council funds, Section 106 funds from local developers, sometimes Network Rail if if involves work to a station as well... Two things - just because you don't know of any requests does not mean there haven't been any. You could ask the council for the reasoning behind this scheme and if there have indeed been campaigns / requests for such work... And also, councils do not have to wait until someone asks them in order to plan, develop and deliver a scheme. Crashmap shows a couple of dozen and they're only the reported ones with injuries, not near misses / no injuries / injuries so slight they're not reported. I think this is the point where Wikipedia would add "citation needed".

There are a couple of legal loopholes that can be exploited - basically developers put forward their case and proposal and then magically "discover" that they've overpaid for the land, that if they actually build the proposed affordable homes that their profit margin will drop below an acceptable level and in some cases that it doesn't "fit" - so if you're building 40 luxury homes, well the new owners won't want paupers living next door will they now! The consequence is that there are very few affordable new homes being built which, paradoxically, drives the prices of them ever higher. Really the only way they get built is to have them on greenfield sites out of the way but that then demands that the owners require a car to get anywhere or do anything - which is a very significant extra cost of living that many of the people buying these affordable new homes can't umm...afford. Gets brought up in a lot of transport matters - in an ideal world, you'd build on brownfield sites near to existing services (such as here) but that puts the price of the land up because it's more desirable, more convenient etc. And that makes affordable homes non-viable - in the exact place they're needed most. Pretty terrible planning system really, the Government have needed to get a grip on this for decades but house-ownership and house prices have become a very significant part of the UK economy.

Not really. You and Penguin have gone down the route of nitpicking and pedantry over what exactly qualifies as "SUV", arguing that they're not as big as US trucks therefore they're not SUVs whereas the article (and the usage of the term SUV in the UK) is much broader and encompasses everything from a Nissan Qashqai / Vauxhall Mokka at one end right up to Porsche Cayenne / BMW X7 etc at the other end. Maybe a more accurate term is "car bloat" where vehicles get marginally bigger / higher / heavier each year. If you look at a first gen BMW X5 for example, it looks a right baby next to the current X5. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-25/bigger-heavier-suvs-worsen-traffic-congestion-in-us That's a US article but the argument holds true over here, in fact more so cos the UK generally has much narrower streets and less off-street parking than the US. It's noticeable now along residential streets how unbelievably narrow the actual usable lane is due to parked cars each side - cars which are way bigger now than they were 10-15 years ago.

I'm struggling to work it out too. It started as a nonsense conspiracy theory that the consultation had somehow been infiltrated by a top secret pro-cycling cabal who successfully swung it to.... oh wait a minute, it was already positive even if you completely discount the "out of area" and "not answered" responses. Then it became an equally nonsensical point that "I have never seen anyone using it" somehow equals "no-one ever uses it" in spite of my analogy of infrastructure that Rockets agreed WAS used in spite of the pictures at that moment showing no usage. Apparently " I can't see anyone using it at this moment" when applied to literally any other bit of infrastructure means "people do use it, they're just not there at the moment" but when applied to cycle lanes it actually means that they're never used. Go figure. I mentioned Strava not because of the exact numbers (which I pointed out are not representative for a number of reasons) but because it's an easy and free way for anyone to have a quick check. Also, in relation to numbers.... What is the "right" number Rockets? How many cyclists need to use the cycle lane for you to consider it worthwhile? If 1000 people use it every week is that OK but if only 10 use it then it needs to ripped out and... what, converted back to roadspace for cars? Converted to pedestrian space? Do you apply this logic to any other infrastructure? Do you sit outside the library and count the number of people using the wheelchair / pushchair ramp to determine if that is also "worthwhile"? What about parking spaces? If one of those is empty, do you demand that some motorist parks there immediately because a valuable bit of land has been allocated to them and therefore it should be used 24/7?

What exactly are you getting at here? I have no idea of the point you're trying to prove other than you seem to have moved on from the conspiracy theory that the cycle lane was "forced through" by some underhand cycle campaign manipulation and now you're trying to prove that it's not used? I'll repeat the questions I posed to Penguin earlier - what constitutes an acceptable level of use? What arbitrary number is the minimum for you and why? It's actually interesting that people say things like "ooh it's a lovely quiet road" or conversely "this road is so busy, it's very unpleasant" but as soon as it's a cycle lane, it's the opposite. Apparently it needs to be rammed with cyclists 24/7 in order to justify it's existence? As soon as it's quiet, it needs to be ripped out? And no, I'm not going to give you the figures from Strava because it's not representative. You will of course know all about this because you're very keen on representative accurate verified data, you've said so many times. As I explained, it's only counting active Strava users who ride the whole segment, it won't be picking up people who ride half of it and turn off, people not using Strava, people who are using it but have set their ride to Private etc, nor is it distinguishing between the cycle lane and the road. In fact the segment I looked at is one way so it's ignoring people going the other way too. It's like counting all the blue cars driving this way -----> along a road and trying to use that as a basis for overall traffic. I know exactly what'll happen if I say "X number of Strava users rode the whole segment this week", you'll twist it to say "only X number of cyclists ever use this lane!" And on that note, I'm off for the weekend. Why don't you pop up there and have a ride along it, see what you can see? Bonus for riding it is that as you descend Sydenham Hill, you can't be caught by the bus lane camera if you're on your bike...

Look at that, there's no-one using Turney Road either! Why aren't motorists using that expensive infrastructure that has been provided for them? It's a lovely day, surely they should be out in droves enjoying their roads?