exdulwicher

Yes! Same as the police deal with the million or so unlicenced / uninsured / untaxed drivers. Same way the police catch dangerous vehicles, burglars, shoplifters... I'd absolutely be up for any increase in policing. If it means a few cyclists are caught, have their illegal e-bikes / e-scooters confiscated and crushed, go for it. As an added bonus, while they're out and about, they could maybe deal with some of the countless mobile phone / speeding / drink driving offences. Maybe they'd catch a shoplifter running out of M&S as well. More policing is 100% OK by me. If some scrote on a private e-scooter is rugby-tackled to the ground and has their scooter taken away, I'd be there cheering.

It;s interesting from a wider perspective though. Calling for cycle licencing / registration plates etc for example. That idea is insane. It's been shown, time and time again to be insane. No other country does it. I posted a link with various reasons why which I'll put here again: https://cyclingfallacies.com/en/33/cycling-should-require-a-licence-and-registration There are numerous other articles about it, it's been raised repeatedly by various politicians and Governments of both colours have repeatedly explained why it won't happen: https://www.cycleassociation.uk/news/?id=3742 So the "argument" (such as it is) is bonkers on many many levels. But, in spite of being faced with all manner of evidence as to why it's bonkers, it's been repeated numerous times. It's a classic argument against all these requests for more data, more info, more research, we want the raw data, we want more consultation... The cycle registration thing is pretty straightforward, there is no logical case for it whatsoever. There's no nuance in it, no "well, some of it might be a good idea..." It's flat out wrong. At this stage, the only way anyone advancing a case for cycle registration could be more wrong is to go off and start a thread claiming the Earth is flat. No amount of data and info will ever appease this sort of person. So actually, yes, the simple answer is to say "you are not interested in any form of good faith discussion, you're ignoring every piece of evidence placed in front of you". That's not a personal insult. It's a simple statement of fact.

See my link above. And cyclist are not "above the law". I mean, pedestrians aren't registered and licenced yet a pedestrian can still be stopped and questioned by police if they suspect that person of being guilty of a crime. I've seen the police up in town pull cyclists over for running red lights. They were able to do that in spite of the cyclist not having a number plate. I saw the police stop two burglars once too, in spite of them having done everything possible to hide their identity! Incredible stuff really.

Here you go: https://cyclingfallacies.com/en/33/cycling-should-require-a-licence-and-registration No-one (other than maybe North Korea I think...?) requires cyclists to be licensed / registered. It's a total waste of time and effort to even try it and yet it pops up with monotonous regularity, often when some clueless politician desperate for a moment in the limelight comes up with this genius plan and is then shot down in flames. It's a useful "dead cat" thing though, it can often be used to hide any manner of political indiscretions because it invariably results in a week of radio phone ins and opinion column inches.

Because an e-bike (and by this I mean the correct use of the term in law, the legal Electrically Assisted Pedal Cycle (EAPC) with a motor that only works when pedalling, that provides <250W average power and that cuts out at 15.5mph / 25kph) is regarded in law as identical to a bicycle. So that includes Lime bikes, the e-cargo bikes you see kids being carried on etc. What it does not include is stuff like electric motorcycles, bikes that have been modified with the addition of a motor and throttle, bikes that can be powered to more than 25kph etc which are - in law - not "e-bikes" at all, they're electric mopeds, electric motorcycles or adapted cycles. They already need licencing. You can ride an electric motorbike but it needs to be registered, licenced and the driver / rider (whatever you want to call them) needs a driving licence and insurance. If they don't have that, it's already illegal and the powers already exist to deal with that, it's just it's very rarely enforced. I wish it was enforced! Problem is that if it was, there'd be an awful lot of people complaining to Deliveroo that their food hadn't turned up... Part of the problem is that literally anything on 2 wheels with a motor is referred to as an e-bike, often wrongly. It's a bit like calling every vehicle on the road a bus.

I was going to suggest line dancing but Rockets might cross the line when turning left so that's out...

I've got visions of this... Which one is Rockets?

Page 6. The definition of Suburban / Urban / Central, each split into 3 sub-tiers of Habitable Rooms per Unit (a unit being a house, block of flats, apartments etc) per Hectare. As I mentioned previously, the original use was as a planning tool to aid in calculating the number of parking spaces that should be provided in new developments which is why housing density is a part of it. Have a read of Page 10 which explains some of the limitations of PTAL as well.

It was on the cards for YEARS - originally proposed as part of a Healthy Streets plan (I think), that then got swallowed by Covid and redesigned as part of the Covid / active travel stuff. It was proposed because nothing else will ever make that junction work. The council had tinkered with it for years, they tried to to re-prioritise bits of it, I'm sure at one point there was a yellow box junction within it, there were corresponding measure like speed humps on Court Lane, banning the school coaches from using it, closing off the old cut through around the back via Gilkes Crescent (which was done WAY back, basically making Gilkes one long LTN, before "LTN" was a term) Nothing worked, it remained a congested and dangerous junction. There were also the plans for a network of Quietway cycle routes (this also going way back) and in fact it was branded as such, the laughable bit being that while Turney Road was OK and Calton up to Greendale was OK, the bit through the village was chaos, far from what TfL were proposing as "Quietways". Basically, the work done has mitigated all the issues in one go. Its not perfect but then no road scheme ever is. CPZ is a complementary measure to the other parts. Like treating an illness - you don't "just" have surgery, you have a range of treatments that work together. Surgery on it's own is not as effective as surgery plus chemotherapy for example. And, as has been studied and reported on numerous times, the best ways of reducing car use, congestion, road danger etc are Congestion Charging, limited traffic interventions (such as LTNs but can also included School Streets, cul-de-sacs etc) and parking controls. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/16/12-most-effective-ways-cars-cities-europe And by the way, the consultation was not "should we do a CPZ? Yes/No", it was "we are doing a CPZ, what roads do you think it should cover and what times would you prefer?"

I love how you try to use PTAL. 🙄 It was originally a planning tool, actually to help developers work out car park spaces. It's a very basic system and while it's still useful for "at a glance" stuff, it's long been superseded by accessibility matrices and spatial heatmap tools. PTAL calculates walking distance from bus and train (inc tube, DLR etc) stops assuming: an average walking speed of 80m / min that people are willing to walk up to 8 min for a bus and 12 mins for a train so distances of 640m and 960m respectively. It does take into account service level (so a bus every 10 mins is better than one every 15 mins) but it doesn't take into account the destination. Therefore, as pointed out, an area like Dulwich made up of large open spaces like the Park, school playing fields etc will NEVER have a "good" PTAL score. So you could improve PTAL by building over all of that then running some roads (and bus stops) through it. Or... You know what does improve PTAL? Making it easier to walk (and cycle, although that's not explicitly calculated by PTAL). If you have to cross 3 busy roads, each with a wait of 3 minutes before the green man, that's a serious limitation on PTAL, people are less likely to walk. If you can create a direct walking route - maybe by, oh I dunno, removing the traffic from Dulwich Square say - you can eliminate the wait and effectively shorten the walking time. This works for cycling too (although as I say, it's not specifically included in the calculation) but if you can make it easy to cycle (minimising through traffic, more cycle routes, e-bike/e-scooter hire...) then it's easy to pick a bike up and ride a distance that would be annoyingly far to walk, like to HH or West Dulwich stations or to bus stops on the South Circular. Decent active travel infrastructure widens the catchment area for public transport by up to 10x therefore dramatically increasing PTAL And by the way, "poor" PTAL does not mean poor public transport. It's a comparison tool and PTAL of 5, 6a and 6b is basically "the centre of London". And even there, you have blocks of space like Kensington Gardens, Regent's Park etc with PTAL of 1a, 1b and 2.

It's entirely separate to the point of the thread which is CPZ but it came from the Southwark's Streets for People strategy: https://www.southwark.gov.uk/parking-streets-and-transport/improving-streets-and-spaces/streets-people/dulwich-projects/dulwich-village which is funded from a variety of sources. DfT, what used to be (under the previous Government) called the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC), TfL (via their Liveable Neighbourhoods Programme) and the Government's Safer Streets Fund which I think is on Tranche 5 now (since it was launched in 2020) https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/safer-streets-fund-round-five/safer-streets-fund. There's probably something from Active Travel England in there too. That;s entirely normal for any large-scale intervention like that, there's no way it could be funded from CPZ surplus. Edit: none of the above is any great secret or conspiracy by the way, it's literally all there on Southwark's website. I'm sure if you emailed the highways team they could probably supply you a breakdown of which funds came from where.

You could just read the Parking Reports, they're all online: https://www.southwark.gov.uk/parking-streets-and-transport/parking/parking-annual-monitoring-reports Re the funding - almost all transport interventions come from grants. It's a bit more confusing in London because TfL will often pay some of it so there'll be some money from central Government in the form of a pot of money for sustainable transport or highways repair or community projects which councils (from anywhere) can bid for. Government announce this sort of thing all the time - a pot of £1bn for this, that or the other, councils bid for a portion of it and are awarded some money if the bid is accepted. Councils can supplement that with their own money, money from developers (called a Section 106 which you can read about here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/planning-obligations ) and, in London, maybe some cash from TfL as well.

Because it can't be used for that. Government regulations require CPZ schemes to be self-financing: they cannot be financed from council tax. The charge will need to cover the implementation of the scheme, administration and enforcement costs. Any cash surplus goes into a ‘parking fund’, which is primarily used to fund the concessionary fares which provides free travel for elderly and disabled people. The CPZ is not (directly) connected to LTNs or to Dulwich Square. However, parking restrictions can form part of a range of measures such as LTNs to generally discourage parking especially around hotspot areas like schools and stations which, by their very nature, tend to attract short periods of very high usage (like school drop-off / pick-up times). With schools, you can sometimes address this by use of School Streets (short term "closures" of the road in front of the school to prevent the stereotypical School Run Mum parking the SUV eight inches from the gate) however in an area such as Dulwich where you have many schools within a very short distance of each other, a CPZ makes more sense than trying to close off areas in front of Alleyn's, JAGS, Dulwich Hamlet etc.

Let me know when a cyclist destroys a marble fountain and we can discuss it.

It isn't, they use RTC. Road Traffic Collision. Accident would imply that no-one was at fault but in a road collision, especially one with injuries, there may be a future criminal prosecution (for, eg, careless driving, driving under the influence etc) so they deliberately do NOT use accident.

I reckon that if that was 46 recorded incidents of Lime bikes / Lime e-scooters hitting "things" (be that people walking or cycling, cars, solid objects) you'd be calling it a bloodbath of epic proportions and wanting them banned immediately.

Bear in mind, while you're all discussing whether it's 60 or 200 or whatever, that CrashMap only relates to personal injury accidents on public roads that are reported to the police, and subsequently recorded, using the STATS19 accident reporting form. Information on damage-only accidents, with no human casualties or accidents on private roads or in car parks are not included. So the poor fountain died for nothing cos it won't be recorded on there. Which means that the number of actual crashes will be significantly higher than shown on that map.

It's clearly the fault of the fountain cos it's not wearing a helmet or hi-vis and doesn't pay any road tax. Really, it got what it deserved. Equally likely of course is that a poor innocent driver was proceeding entirely legally when suddenly a swarm (herd? flock?) of e-scooterists, Lime bikers and e-cargo bikes hurtled out of nowhere forcing the poor fountain into taking evasive action and it leapt into the path of the car. Could happen to any driver.

Oh God, I can already visualise this in an estate agent window: "nestled in the heart of the Upper Dulwich quadrant is this modest 7 bedroom 5 bathroom apartment...." And then overhearing a conversation, maybe at a posh cafe, along the lines of "well, I live in Upper Dulwich you know...yes it's a charming little place, only the 7 bedrooms but we get by... Nanny of course has the attic room..."

I feel I'm being misquoted or at least selectively quoted. It is very easy to check for and compensate for inaccuracies by cross-referencing with other sources of data. No-one is using these in isolation, they are there to support other sources. If there are wild disagreements between what the sensor is saying and what congestion monitoring, manual traffic counts, video feeds, bus journey times etc are all saying then you can investigate further, maybe disregard the bad stuff, reposition the sensor, apply a correction factor etc. You would also have a look for local events that could have caused a change to the normal traffic pattern. And as I also mentioned, you do not need to count every vehicle on every road and the idea that even a single vehicle missed is some kind of "OMG, teh D4tA i5 BAD!!!" gotcha is simply not true. The fact is that even "bad data" can be very useful in highlighting issues and errors.

That's called sound methodology. It accepts and explains that not all data is good and - once again - there is a wider context. It's not specifically about tube counters, it's more to do with the overall data supplied by some (not all) councils not being up to the required standard for analysis so it gets discarded, ignored from the overall review. This is entirely normal in statistics, you invariably get some data that is corrupt, insufficient etc so, unless it can be properly validated and revised, it gets discarded. This should actually play into the hands of the anti-LTN folk cos there are fewer chances to prove LTNs are good. However the overall review of all the schemes using all the data that is available, was still overwhelmingly positive. Back to the tube counter stuff. They get extensively tested and validated by the councils, authorities etc that buy them. No-one is going to buy into a scheme that gives duff data but these counters are used all over the world. It's very easy to validate this stuff - you can run test scenarios, cross-reference with other independent sources of data and apply corrective factors if required, none of this is in any way unusual or radical. The tubes do more than just count vehicles. They measure speed (so it's easy to tell if it's free-flowing traffic or congestion), vehicle type and (depending on placement) they can also determine things like queue length and you can extrapolate from that delay times which is why it's actually quite handy to have them near junctions sometimes; it can measure how far back from the junction is routinely becoming congested. And as I said before, the info that the tube counters gives is cross-referenced with other data and compiled to give an overall picture. You're not after counting every vehicle on every road; you're after overall trends and patterns, increases and decreases over time and the reasons behind that - reasons which could include a new housing estate / school / supermarket etc causing an increase or a School Street / LTN causing a decrease. As a quick example, the most common "road load" number is called AADT - Annual Average Daily Traffic. It's basically a count of X vehicles use this road in a week then it must be X x 52 in a year or X/7 per day. That's useful for calculating expected wear and tear on the road, roadworks frequencies etc but it doesn't give the exact pattern of use because it's not (eg) 1200 vehicles per day spread neatly as 50 vehicles per hour 24/7. It's a very uneven load of <10 vehicles per hour at night rising to maybe 300 per hour for 90 mins in morning peak and then dropping off sharply during the day then rising again in the afternoon. However the AADT figure is widely used as an overall number. It's a good example of how you need a number of data points to give you the overall picture of road use. So in short, yes, the counters are fine.

Oh bless. II think I've found the post you're referring to in the Streetspace thread, 15th May 2023? Feel free to tell me if it's another one of mine that you've found though. Right - accuracy. Tube counters work to supplement other sources of data (including, but not limited to) mobile phone/satnav data, roadworks databases, information from other sensors (such as Vivacity, independent traffic counts, TfL cameras etc) and their advantage is that a number of them can be deployed pretty quickly and at any location. They're left in place for a period of time, come of them upload data to the cloud of their own accord, some of the older ones need collecting and downloading. Location: You can NEVER have a free-flowing road by the way. Any road, from the smallest cul-de-sac off LL to the M1 can be subject to "congestion", it might be 5 minutes cos Amazon and DPD can't agree on which of them needs to back up, it might be 30 minutes while the refuse collection truck potters along the street or it might be a day cos some idiot has rammed their SUV into the bollards along EDG again. The data: you look at the traffic counts and cross-reference. Example: Oh look, there's a 30-min period on Tuesday morning when only 6 cars went across it. What does it look like either side of that timeframe? What does it look like on other days? What was the counter up the road saying about traffic going the other way? What would we *expect* at this time on a Tuesday morning? But rather than look at that one 30-min timeframe, you're doing it over the whole of the period it was left in place, looking for TRENDS. It doesn't matter if one day there's 1000 vehicles and every other day there's only 850 - trends like that are pretty regular (Friday afternoons!), you can often pick out individual events (such as a football match or a school open day, which is another source of cross-reference) and, if you do that often enough over a period of months, you gain a very good understanding of traffic trends that smooths out the short notice congestion stuff like a particularly busy day or a single accident or a 2 week period of roadworks. Crucially, they are as accurate as they need to be for supplementing other sources of data and for being rapidly deployed on pretty much any road in the borough, unlike more permanent sensors such as the Vivacity ones which need wiring into the lamp column, calibrating and verifying. Quick analogy is that a pilot doesn't just rely on one instrument to show their speed; they'll have GPS, air speed indicator (uncalibrated), True Airspeed (which is the uncalibrated figure corrected for altitude and temperature), Ground speed (which is True adjusted for wind speed and direction), mach number indicator... It's the same here. What's also the same is that no matter how much data there is and how much the council publish, the anti-folk will always claim it's not enough, it's not in the right place, or the right time, it's not representative, it's not accurate, it's fake... Except if the data shows an increase in traffic at which point it'll be 100% valid and all traffic schemes should instantly be removed cos it's a dead-cert that they've failed.

This argument that "the council are overreaching their legal powers" has taken on the same sort of myth as some of that Magna Carta "freeman of the land" nonsense that was doing the rounds during Covid... The council have a statutory duty to manage the roads in the borough that don't come under the jurisdiction of National Highways or TfL (and even there, they all have to work together). That includes maintenance, lighting, pavements, traffic orders (for things like roadworks, street parties, markets etc) and also the basics that people rarely think about - parking be a big one in that. Paid for vs free, unlimited vs time limited and so on. If a road has unlimited free parking and it's filling up to the detriment of residents, tradespeople etc then putting in some form of restriction is a logical way of dealing with some of the issues - not all of them all of the time but many of these measures work together. Councils have been doing CPZ for decades - the main point of one is actually to avoid loads of signage and street clutter from painting out individual bays and putting parking meters etc in, it's not some radical new idea. It's not an overreach of legal powers, it's doing their statutory duty.

https://tfl.gov.uk/bus/status/ There's a search bar to put in the bus service number and it shows you the full route with any diversions. The permit for the Thames Water works has been extended from the original date of 12th September to a new date of 26th September so, although it's open at the moment, I guess further closures can't be ruled out.

That would be just as disingenuous as no consultation, you're providing answers that simply aren't an option. Link here to an article in SE22 magazine from Cllr McCash which mentions the CPZ being in the manifesto. https://twitter.com/CleanAirDulwich/status/1698991374614368326?t=bNTkkVq8bntxjgDwOFQzhQ&s=19 There's further reasons why it's needed - reallocation of roadspace for various other purposes (EV charging bays, cycle hangers, parklets etc) general nudging away from cars most of which tie in with the overall Mayor's London transport strategy and Southwark's declared climate emergency and their own streetspace strategies. So having "no CPZ" as a possible answer isn't an option, there's going to be a CPZ. A lot of public consultation, in it's current form, is a waste of time; it's an insult to the population (most of whom are being asked questions that they're not equipped to answer because they're not experts) and it's an insult to the experts who have dedicated their time and careers to the matter in question (this applies to most consultations, not just transport or roads). But consultations are done, the results come out and then something else happens because the "answers" that were given are nonsense. That corrodes the trust between the authorities and the population. So to prevent, or at least minimise that, you don't ask open ended questions and you don't provide impossible options. It's like asking your kids what they want for tea; sooner or later you're going to get an answer of "brontosaurus on toast" or "a bucket of ice cream" and the kid is going to be disappointed when that turns out not to be an option. So you don't ask the open ended "what do you want for tea?", you ask a much more focused "do you want fish & chips or pizza?" Both of those are reasonable options, a choice has been given but it doesn't permit stupid answers. It's still a valid consultation. Just because you don't like it doesn't make it any less valid.