exdulwicher

I'm talking about that specific case of the Newcastle one. It doesn't mean that all LTNs are bad or badly designed, we're referring to that specific one linked to in the news articles previously.

I was talking about that specific case. LTNs are specific to each circumstance - the basic principle works but how each one is implemented has a big effect. It's why the Loughborough Junction attempt a few years ago failed dramatically, because it was one tiny intervention on its own with no complementary or supporting measures.

No. And if they are, the point is they can be easily tweaked and the trial can continue. What was actually needed in the Newcastle one was an expansion. It covered a couple of residential streets but still allowed rat-running down others so naturally everyone kept using it as a cut through and the opportunity to enable more active travel was never realised. They were designed and emergency services are a statutory consultee.

The basic premise is that it was badly designed - classic case of not listening to the experts, seeing a bit of negative data (caused by the LTN being badly designed) and rather than investigate, modify etc, they just panicked and ripped it all out.

You do know it was @heartblock who said about the particulates a couple of posts back, yes? I'm not sure you could ever accuse heartblock of being in the "pro-lobby" (although actually I seem to remember he did say he was pro ULEZ).

I'd rather they didn't. It's a very inefficient use of public money to be subsidising private vehicles for individuals. You get far higher return on investment by subsidising public transport, active travel and general societal benefits rather than giving individuals a few £££ towards their own private car. This goes back to the parking argument - free parking is effectively a subsidy for those who own cars. No-one else gets given 10 square metres of free space in London. Those who travel around by public transport don't benefit from free parking. All the arguments about (eg) "NHS workers should get free parking at their workplace" stops adding up the minute you think about the countless number of NHS workers who commute by public transport or by bike - none of them get contributions to their travel costs. And the EV argument is related as well because the transition to EV is very much dependent on the simultaneous rollout of EV chargers and the fact that, in the very near future, there's going to be a parking war when it comes to finding an available (and functional) charger. Part of the whole CPZ thing is future proofing on that. It's already becoming a serious issue that many councils are struggling to resolve - trailing cables across pavements, yet more pavement clutter if EV chargers are installed on kerbs rather than in the road and the battle to park right outside your own home in order to charge your EV and finding some non-local has parked their ICE car there for the day.

They're still relatively rare, the problem is that when they do happen they tend to burn down a house which invariably attracts a lot of media attention. The issue is not the proper e-bikes and e-scooters you can buy from legitimate retailers - they go through the same safety checks, warranties etc as car batteries - it's the "plug and play" stuff you can buy online from China that you simply bolt to your bike. That's what the vast majority of those Deliveroo type contraptions are; basic mountain bikes illegally converted to "e-motorbikes" or "e-mopeds". Those are also the types of "vehicle" (using that term loosely!) that tend to be run ragged in all weathers, ad-hoc charging from a variety of sources and put together by the rider themselves rather than by anyone qualified. You occasionally hear of similar when people buy cheap mobile phone or laptop batteries from similar online sources and then wonder why their laptop bursts into flames.

Parking charges already raise revenue, they have done for decades. There's always an excess (at least, there is if the council have calculated it correctly because the system has to be self-financing so you run into problems if your system costs are X and your planned revenue for the year is also X because any shortfall means you're no longer self-financing). But the excess has to be reinvested into streets and transport so it's a very good and easy way of making up the shortfall (from austerity) in things like fixing potholes, street cleaning, council-run bus services (the little Dial-A-Ride minibus things for disabled residents for example).

It's not (usually) the primary aim of a CPZ but firstly, they have to generate revenue because Government guidance says that council parking controls must be self financing: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/civil-enforcement-of-parking-contraventions But secondly, they can also be used for behaviour change, encouraging less polluting / smaller vehicles via tiered charges and so on. Also, it's right there in the manifesto about smaller cars being charged less.

Nope - tiered fees/charges are standard in lots of areas - council tax, income tax, vehicle excise duty, toll roads. Nothing wrong with it at all. Paris have a similar scheme where parking a 4x4 costs a fortune but parking a small city runabout costs very little. I think theirs is done on vehicle weight. None of this is new - CPZ have been in use for decades. The original intention was that you could control parking within a small area (sort of "several streets" type size) without having to mark out loads of parking bays, erect loads of signage and so on, you simply have one zone where signs at the boundary say what the parking rules are for that zone. However it does work well to begin to use (eg) tiered charges to encourage use of smaller/more efficient cars or to gradually reduce the number of permits over the years without going back and re-painting parking bays. Lambeth outlined it well in their kerbside strategy that got widely publicised last year; their intention is to gradually reduce the number of permits issued and convert what used to be kerbside parking into rainwater gardens, parklets, bike hanger spaces and so on.

That woke leftie agenda of "make the place a bit nicer and a bit less car-dominated". The wholly undemocratic agenda of "give people a few more options to travel around that don't rely on ownership and use of a car". Those agendas? The ones that many councils around the country are bringing in via one form or another? What evil bastards those councils are! Why can't they just plough a motorway through Dulwich College grounds to solve the South Circular problem? Honestly, no ambition...

It's right there in black and white - the council will look at tiered charges to favour smaller / less polluting vehicles. How that will be done is not spelled out (road user charges, parking charges??) but it's a clear indication of intent. What do you want in terms of trains? Again, that's a fairly broad statement, no detail in there. Since the council have almost no actual say in trains (that's the responsibility of Network Rail, DfT, Train Operating Companies and, on some lines, TfL), the statement "working with TfL to improve trains" could be anything - asking for more trains, more reliable trains, better station facilities/access, improved punctuality... Whole host of things, most of which goes on in the background as part of general council business and most of which - with trains anyway - takes years to come to fruition and relies on funding from DfT, the work being scheduled by Network Rail and TOCs agreeing to it all. Put it this way - you're not going to have a council election one week and 10 brand new trains per hour the week after! I note by the way that the Tory manifesto for the May 2022 council elections stood at a whole 7 pages, less than a quarter of the Labour one and is mostly aimed at slagging off Labour, it gives zero indication of how any of their pledges are to be met or any detail behind them... No wonder they got a kicking... 🤷‍♂️

They're not mentioned because they don't have to be. The various political parties running for election (council or Government level) are not obliged to spell out every last detail of every promise in a manifesto - they put it there in the broad brush strokes, people vote them in or out accordingly and then the details come through: "In our manifesto, we promised [thing], now let's discuss how to do that, the fine details, the costs, the logistics etc" That's when you work it up into more detail, consult on it (if required - not everything requires a consultation) and [thing] happens. Within the manifesto are references to safer streets, traffic reduction, climate emergency; there's this sentence (page 17) We will encourage people to switch to less polluting cars, with lower parking fees for zero emissions and smaller vehicles across the whole borough. That doesn't exactly spell out "we will have a borough-wide CPZ" but it's a pretty strong indication that less polluting vehicles will be charged less which implies that higher polluting vehicles will be charged more which implies that at some point, all (or most) vehicles will be charged something. It's put like that because it might not be a CPZ - maybe there were plans or ambitions or ideas for borough-wide road user charging instead of parking? Maybe there was a idea to have a borough-wide congestion charge instead? They'd all be valid means of meeting that manifesto pledge. It just leaves the door open for a bit of flexibility. Labour were voted in based (presumably) on that manifesto so we have (presumably) agreed to some form of charging somewhere along the line, details TBC. And in a way, the measures WERE mandated. There are all sorts of air pollution targets, active travel targets, modal shift targets in place. Government is providing very little direct leadership on the matter, it's more or less letting councils decide it for themselves, partly because Government knows that the councils will then take all the blame from the various anti-CPZ/ULEZ/LTN lot. But there are definitely plenty of mandates in place for it.

Would you like a personal one? Me. Our car (well OK, it's MY car but whatever) is going. Several reasons. 1) It's not ULEZ compliant. It's still a great car, reliable, economical and it'll go for years yet but it's not compliant. Currently, to avoid charges, it's parked on a friend's driveway just outside the S. Circular. We rarely use it anyway but occasionally it's been handy to have, however we also don't want to be paying £12.50 every time it moves so that's the current situation - we walk or ride out to it and drive off outside London on the rare occasions it's needed. Friend doesn't own a car (elderly, no longer drives, has lived in the house for many years) so it's not an issue that there's a car on their driveway. However, having it out there, not immediately available also means we can't "just jump in the car" to go somewhere so we actually think - can we do this without a car? Almost always, the answer is yes. 2) further ULEZ expansion means that (1) will no longer be practical as of next month. 3) we don't have / can't have a driveway (front garden not big enough plus cost) 4) with the CPZ coming in as well, we'd be paying for parking AND to drive it. 5) can't really justify the cost of a replacement compliant car given how rarely it gets used. It'd be cheaper to hire a car for longer journeys or to use ZipCar locally. So there you are - you've had a go at me and others on here before for owning / using a car while also being pro-car reduction methods so there's a personal one for you. Anecdote of one admittedly but that's how it's worked. To be fair we rarely drove anyway so the LTN had little effect - walking / cycling / PT was the default way of getting around, the car was only ever for longer or more loaded journeys. The first ULEZ expansion out to the N and S Circ presented a problem hence the friend's driveway solution but it virtually stopped us driving within S. Circ overnight unless there really was absolutely no other option. Traffic reduction right there. And now a combination of ULEZ expansion AND the promise of a CPZ - car gone. What it also shows is how these solutions work together, it's not just having an LTN, it's not just putting in a CPZ, it's everything working together over a period of time. Hope that helps!

And you're never going to get that for several reasons - partly because what you're asking for is so far above what is needed to demonstrate "reasonably" that they work that there's no point in doing it, partly the cost and resources of doing it and partly the myriad of other factors behind it including the use (or otherwise) of complementary measures such as CPZ. It's not a medical study, it does not need medical grade data behind it. We're going straight back to policy perfectionism and the old "I don't believe the data" argument. We shouldn't do anything unless it is absolutely perfect in every way, has zero negative impact on anyone and receives 100% support across literally every demographic we can think of and probably a few we can't. Not going to happen, ever, in any area of life. Coupled with a quick dose of the data not being good enough where the goalposts on what is and isn't good enough are constantly shifting. It's been absolutely standard this for years not just in ED but across the country. Data is produced showing that - in general - LTNs work to varying degrees. The data is decried as being manipulated, contrived, flawed, biased, paid for... More data of ever more esoteric and precise nature is requested - double blind trials (really?!) - but nothing is ever sufficient. If someone ever came up with empirical data and double-blinded analysis on a pre and post methodology that proves that pollution over a specified area that includes boundary roads and LTNs, proves a significant drop in overall car, exhaust and tyre wear pollution post implementation you'd claim that it was flawed, a poor example, only one case study, we should wait for more data and the charade would continue. It's like trying to convince a Flat Earther. More evidence that the earth is round (yes, OK, it's an oblate spheroid...) is simply another clever NASA ruse, another case of paid actors pretending to be astronauts and so on and every time more footage from the ISS is aired, that's simply another Great Fake in the Great Globe Earth Scam.

Heartblock is, on this occasion, wrong and in defending him/her, you are also wrong. Induced and reduced demand are very well studied, not just in transport but in other areas of life as well - closely related to supply and demand. Unless you want to overturn centuries of economic policy as well in opining that that is also "pish"...? This meta-study of hundreds of other transport studies from all over the world (and guess what, it *wasn't* written by Rachel Aldred!) clearly showed the most effective transport interventions for reducing car usage and encouraging/enabling public transport and active travel: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213624X22000281 There's another (longer read) one about effectiveness of carrot vs stick solutions but it reaches the same conclusions: https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(22)00220-0/fulltext And, as I know you're not going to trawl through such a complicated document when you've clearly decided that you can simply declare something as "pish" based on your opinion, here's a pretty picture to sum it up: https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/2022/the-most-effective-way-1.jpg

If you're really against cosy nepotistic worlds, you want to be looking a bit more closely at Westminster! An Environment Secretary with £70,000 shares in Shell, appointments for mates, MPs walking into senior consultancy roles at various shady organisations immediately after stepping down... And it's not getting a spotlight shone on it at all, it's simply another culture war. Look over here at these dodgy cyclists! Don't look over here as I receive another all-expenses-paid weekend away courtesy of a fossil fuel company... Shapps did the same last year - can't remember what the actual Government cock-up was this time around (there have been so many) but it got effectively hidden when Shapps said he'd "look again" at mandatory helmets or number plates for cyclists or something. That generated hours of radio phone in tirades, miles of opinion columns, a wave of anti-cyclist rhetoric on social media all of which detracted nicely from the latest round of Government cronyism and corruption. This simply goes back to the data argument. You don't like the data and the answers therefore it must be false, biased, manipulated, flawed, not enough data, too much data and above all "not independent". Someone truly independent wouldn't have a clue what they were assessing - no matter what industry you work in, the people doing the assessing are experts in that field. I can assess a transport scheme cos I know what I'm looking for, what data is required and how to use it. I wouldn't have the first clue of what to do if someone asked me to assess a nuclear power station nor would I ever think I knew better than the people that actually do this. Transport gets it worse than other areas because everyone uses transport and everyone can say "oh the trains are crap" and "oh this traffic is really bad". But they won't understand it or know how to actually measure and assess it and come up with plans to fix it. It's purely a culture war which unfortunately has degenerated to nasty personal attacks on the experts in that area.

The answer is to do more. The problem is that what has been delivered so far is quite piecemeal, it goes to consultation, gets watered down, re-consulted, and eventually, years later, something gets half delivered with the remaining half subject to further funding. And each iteration, each development, gets a couple more % cycling so the objections of "well it hasn't worked, it hasn't delivered" get louder and populist politicians start wavering and dithering so nothing more gets done. The answer is to do what they've done in Paris, Oslo and various other cities. Go in hard, go in big and just get it done. Everyone knows what works, it's almost always got big majority support and in a lot of cases, quick win stuff like LTNs can be tweaked further down the line if required. The UK is largely terrible at infrastructure and long term strategic planning.

CPZ are designed to apply to a relatively small area (think sort of LTN size). That's because each area will have different requirements in terms of permits, parking availability and so on but a CPZ is easier than having multiple signs covering individual parking bays. So you can't really have "a borough wide CPZ" - what you can have is a collection of individual CPZs which apply across the whole borough. So you might have one CPZ around (eg) North Dulwich, then a neighbouring CPZ applying over (eg) Dulwich Village, then another one maybe from Court Lane over to Townley. And so on. Not necessarily the same timings for each one.

It's also non sense. Everything you've written is wrong. Natural?! Traffic is a function of the environment. If you make it easy to drive, people will drive. If you make it easy to walk and cycle, people will walk and cycle. There's nothing "natural" about any of that. Traffic (of any description - walking, cycling, driving) is not a fixed constant. And you're wrong about the "little usage outside rush hour" too, I've seen God only knows how many traffic counts for cycle lanes over the years split down into 15, 30, 60, 120 and 180 minute intervals throughout days and weeks for London and elsewhere. There are definitely peaks and troughs, as there with cars, public transport ridership and even walking but it's not "little usage".

More people were moved across Blackfriars Bridge once the Cycle Superhighway was put in than before it - it increased the capacity of the bridge by over 15%. To do that with traffic lanes only, you'd have had to have widened the bridge by 3 lanes. The CS moves 70% of people across the bridge daily in spite of only taking up about 20% of the space. Buses take a significant percentage of the rest, private cars move the least in the least efficient manner. Imagine if all those pedestrians and cyclists got into cars or got the bus... Now THAT would have a detrimental impact on congestion! Of course it helps if there are controlled parking zones/paid for parking etc at the destination as well to discourage car trips (free parking is a huge enabler of car journeys) and options such as LTNs, segregated cycle lanes etc to enable the cycle journeys from start to finish. Basically humans are lazy and cheap - they'll usually select the easiest and cheapest travel options. If you make that cars, they'll use cars, no matter how nicely you ask them not to.

I half agree with you - I don't think for a moment it was all about LTNs at all, there'll have been a while host of issues in there (very probably *including* LTNs). My point is more that OD and the like we're spinning it as very much all about the LTNs until the results were announced. As to why there was nothing about it in the manifesto - they were already in place and Labour had no plans to remove them. What more is there to say in a manifesto? It should be all about the things you're promising if elected. What can't be denied though is that standing solely on a platform of removing the LTNs is not a vote winner. The two Tories in Dulwich Village ward got a fraction over 1000 votes each. Maybe some of One Dulwich's claimed "over 2000 supporters" don't live in Dulwich/Southwark and weren't able to vote? Surely not, that'd be hypocritical...

And yet for months before the council elections, it was being spun by anti-LTN folk as exactly that. The final word on all things LTN, the big local issue, we won't stand for these undemocratic impositions on our freedom, vote to tell the Labour Communists the truth, the silent majority will be heard, the majority want LTNs ripped out, this will be a referendum on the hated LTNs. And then 5 minutes after the election results, it was suddenly nothing to do with LTNs. There's 40 pages of it if you look back at the earlier LTN threads.

Speed limits don't apply to bicycles.

OK but we're going back to my previous question - what exactly are you looking to "manage"? Cycling on pavements - essentially decriminalised, it's allowed anyway in some places (shared space which some people on here seem very keen on when they want it to apply to cars) and kids are allowed to do it anyway so ... 🤷🏻‍♂️ The usual argument is if you don't want cyclists to use pavements, build proper cycle lanes. But then you kick off about loss of parking and loss of road space... Pedestrians/blind/elderly are not being scattered to the winds, knocked flying etc, mostly because cyclists, no matter how selfish and ignorant they are, generally look out for #1 anyway and they know that if they hit anyone or anything, they'll likely get injured too. Running red lights - depends on the scenario but plenty of places allow turns on red or to use a red light as a Stop sign and "proceed if safe". As a general rule once you have pedestrians and cyclists, you don't really need red lights since they'll just self-manage. For example: https://youtu.be/RTLDfBS9xH8 And again, as a general rule it causes no inconvenience to anyone - if anything it's quite helpful for bikes to bugger off out the way at junctions which is why there are advanced stop lights at some - like GreendaleEDG/Townley for example which essentially legitimises RLJ by creating a bike phase. Green for bike, red for vehicles. Now imagine that same junction without the advance green and imagine cyclists creating their own 5second head start. Same principle. Speeding - speed limits don't apply to bikes, and they not going faster than the cars and buses so largely irrelevant. Riding without lights at night - already illegal, can already be prosecuted. Riding without helmet - not illegal, mind your own business. Riding 2 abreast - not illegal, no different to a vehicle in front. I'm not saying all cyclists are saints because they're not. But in terms of priorities you've got drivers - killing 1700 people per year nationally; and cyclists - killing 1 person per year. TfL has all sorts of collision and fatality statistics on London and overwhelmingly, it's pedestrians and cyclists being killed/injured by drivers. So we're back to the original question - what "bad cycling" are you seeking to police?