exdulwicher

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?

https://twitter.com/ColdWarCliff/status/1688462280302718976?t=DTItHwERTuI3Y8exqdGB1Q&s=19 Yes, I can see how effectively the lovely trustworthy licenced/taxed/insured drivers can self-police... One weekend on London roads (and that's nowhere close to all of it). Can you advise (as a good citizen policing drivers yourself) how one should attempt to address this behaviour? Maybe next time I'm riding to the shops, I'll abandon my journey and chase down every other road user I see breaking whatever rules I decide on and berate them. Wonder how that'd go...? 🤔 Somehow you're not calling these drivers out for their behaviour and the cost to the taxpayer in police, ambulance, NHS resources being occupied?! Obviously an oversight while you work on the true danger out there, some bloke on a Lime bike scooting harmlessly across a few yards of pavement.

Why are cyclists responsible for "policing" anything?! It's not a "community" or a "collective" or anything like that - when I am on a bike I have zero responsibility for any other cyclist behaviour. I'm not the police, I'm not i charge and frankly I dont care. In the same way that when I'm driving, I am not responsible for the illegal behaviour of any other driver. When I'm walking, I don't berate other pedestrians for not crossing at the zebra crossing. People who cycle are connected only by the fact that they sometimes use the same mode of transport so stop with the collective responsibility and blaming. Examples of bad driving aren't considered to reflect badly on everyone who drives a car – and rightly so. Similarly, it would be ridiculous to claim that everyone using public transport is a fare-dodger, simply because some people use public transport without paying. It is also a fallacy to believe that prejudiced views would disappear if the subjects of prejudice were to behave in a certain ‘approved’ way. It also blows a hole in the claim on the LTN thread that we should simply have "shared space for all" and "behave nicely". One person's idea of behaving nicely is someone else's idea of selfish idiocy.

No no no Chicken! We all know that the local election results were nothing to do with LTNs, it said so on here! That's in spite of 40 pages of forum thread in advance of the council elections about how the socialist dictators in Tooley Street would be sent running for the hills once the silent majority rose up and voted against the undemocratic LTNs and how the council elections would be a referendum on all things LTN, the final voice, the nail in the coffin for the likes of Cllr Rose. They and their ridiculous ideas would be expelled from Dulwich forever. And then the results came in and oh... erm... quick, spin it as anti-Tory votes, people still hate LTNs and want them ripped out but they voted Labour because of Partygate and Boris and Brexit and some other things. So yeah, nothing to do with LTNs at all, those elections. Honest. 😉

The only real doubts exist in the minds of anti-LTN folk for whom no data will ever be good enough. No matter what is produced, it'll be too vague, too precise, biased, flawed, manipulated, taken at the wrong time, the wrong place, the wrong time AND place, not taken for long enough or taken over too long a period. I'd fully expect a Cllr to look into the data - if people are asking for clarification on council business, be that bin collections, library opening hours, leisure centre fees and facilities, parks upkeep etc, I'd fully expect the Cllr to say "thank you for raising this important point, I'll look into it". That's his job. It does not mean he's going to come back and say "wow, you know what, as it turns out it's all lies and Southwark (who remember are too incompetent to run a bath never mind a borough) are actually running a vast data manipulation scam on the side, paid for by the famously wealthy Militant Cycling Lobby, well done on spotting that one!"

They're not - they're saying anything they think can get them some positive press, trying to spin the "we only just held onto Uxbridge" win as something something ULEZ, anti-green policies, we must be more pro-motorist... LTNs have been extensively looked into for decades, the research is always the same - broadly speaking they work well (better if you use them in conjunction with other measures such as CPZ, bus priority, neighbouring LTNs etc). You can have as many independent reviews as you like and all that'll happen is it'll show the same - at which point the small minority of very vocal people actively opposed to them will claim they're not independent and that the data is wrong. And a lot of it is not even in the hands of Government to dictate anyway. I think the oil, gas and auto industry donors must have been on the phone to Rishi recently as he seems to be taking ever more private jet and helicopter flights to appear for a photo op somewhere saying how he's going to max out the oil and gas reserves, end the "war on the motorist" and other vague soundbites that all lead to more pollution and more emissions. Quick, burn what's left of the planet while the donations keep coming!

Firstly, beyond a bit of inconvenience and irritation, what issues actually ARE there? Pedestrians are not being scattered to the winds, mobility scooters are not being overturned and, while I absolutely agree that some cyclists jump red lights, they're not barrelling through at 20mph forcing emergency stops all around them. And secondly, in answer to your question - more and better infrastructure, defined and segregated. The (very few) issues that arise in Amsterdam as per the Bloomberg article are usually as a result of people being outside "their" zone. Ride a bike along a car-priority road (and there are plenty of those) you'll get arrested (after being thoroughly hooted at for ages. Walk in a cycle lane, you'll get dinged at and told to walk on the pavement. The issues come solely from areas that haven't fully benefitted from retrofitting proper infrastructure. Sometimes from creating a shared space that, initially, was absolutely fine with lower numbers but now doesn't work as well and needs some re-design. In the UK, because so many "zones" are very ill-defined, we end up with the pavement issue where cyclists are allowed on some sections (thanks councils for painting that white line there!) and not on other sections but it's not clear, it's not enforced and neither pedestrians nor cyclists are clear on the issue. And that's before you look at the other pavement clutter like parked cars, street furniture, bins, uneven pavements and advertising boards.

1) The Highway Code already says that and it's already enforceable. 2) A PSPO has to relate to a specific area. You can't just apply it to "all pavements in Southwark". They're also something of a last resort. https://asbhelp.co.uk/home-practitioners/public-spaces-protection-order/

Have you missed or misinterpreted everything I've said?! For a Council Officer to enforce no cycling, you need a PSPO: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_spaces_protection_order#:~:text=Public%20spaces%20protection%20orders%20 It needs to be specific so it has to specify the act you're attempting to control (dogs not on leads, cycling, etc) and the area in which it applies. You can't just say "pavements". If there's not a PSPO in place, the only legal enforcement is through police officers and (to a certain extent) police community support officers. Not traffic wardens, parking enforcement officers, street cleaners etc. Guidance - well it depends how much you're looking for it. That applies to everything, to a certain extent you're going to have to search for it. Guidance on using the Tube in London - well if you've never used it before, you're going to need some sort of help and yes it'll be "out there" in as much as it's a public website but anyone who doesn't use the Tube would have no reason to look for it. As it happens, the Lime bikes and Santander apps both require you to go through a host of rules before they'll let you hire a bike but again, the kids jacking them are not using the app, not using the bikes legally and don't care anyway. It would be handy if cars made the driver run through a Highway Code refresher every time they started the engine too.... Maybe some geofenced speed limits like you get on hire bikes and scooters! Penalties apply for both cycling and driving if you're caught. Usually they're considerably more draconian for cycling! (believe it or not). For example : https://road.cc/content/news/cyclist-fined-ps1000-riding-bike-town-centre-302721

You have to create Public Space Protection Order for the council to enforce anything. They're used occasionally in defined spaces like a pedestrianised high street but they can't just blanket apply to "pavements". There's plenty of guidance out there from Sustrans, British Cycling, Cycling UK, London Cycling Campaign etc about rules of the road but the people who need reminding of it are the ones who don't care anyway. Much like there is plenty of guidance around not speeding, parking on pavements, blocking junctions, using mobile phones while driving etc and still people do it. Which brings us right back to the earlier point. Asking nicely doesn't work.

Yep but as discussed earlier, those things are already illegal no matter where they are. But society seems to want a Big Mac or a vindaloo delivered to their door in 15 mins and as a result all the gig economy workers are effectively being incentivised to ride "creatively" in order to fulfil this.

Very much agree with this but part of the issue is that for years councils have positively encouraged pavement cycling by creating "shared spaces" (in practice, usually a woeful mix of painted lines and badly drawn bike symbols) along pavements in order to "cater for active travel". It's a practice that is now thankfully recognised as being way below standard but it's created a total mish mash of "well it's OK to cycle along this bit but we've decided you can't ride along that identical bit so we've put a small blue "cyclists dismount" sign up". What they were there for was mostly to get cyclists out of the way of drivers and it's not too bad when there's very few cyclists. As soon as it reaches a critical mass, it becomes inconvenient for everyone. Cyclists dodging pedestrians, pedestrians dodging cyclists, no-one making any progress. Cyclists get back on the roads, drivers get upset because they're not using the "cycle lane" and the council is under fire for wasting taxpayers money on such useless "infrastructure". Plus as mentioned earlier, cycling on pavements is essentially decriminalised anyway - it's been touched on in this thread but the actual risk is very very small. Surprisingly cyclists don't actually want to hit pedestrians or lampposts or dogs because they'll fall off and hurt themselves. Self preservation usually minimises the real stupid stuff! I can't find it at the moment but there was an incident a few years ago where a cyclist hit a pedestrian (no idea who's fault it was, can't remember the details) but the cyclist died and the pedestrian was basically uninjured. So it goes both ways.