Penguin68

Maybe because driving standards are already covered by things like adherence to the Highway code, speed limits etc. Clearly people who drive do breach these, but for them there are remedies, some quite stringent. There are very limited remedies on transgressing cyclists, indeed so much that cyclists do is not acted on by anyone in authority, nor even treated as a transgression. Nobody says 'something should be done about drivers who speed, or who jump lights', because on many occasions something is done - there are cameras on many traffic lights to do that for instance, as well as speed cameras. It's just a matter of installing more, or moving them where transgressions more frequently occur. Maybe someone should be reminding Southwark that they're missing out on another revenue stream?

Up until a couple or so years (possibly slightly longer) ago I was very able to distinguish a push bike from a moped, amongst other things the moped had a petrol engine (often two stroke) and sounded like a moped. It would only have been legally driven by someone with an appropriate licence (my car licence allowed me also to ride mopeds legally if, if I recall, under 50cc). It needed identity. Now there are low powered (speed limited) electric assisted cycles which are road legal for anyone with a credit or debit card, apparently, to drive without licence or test, and there are high powered, road illegal, electric vehicles which look pretty well identical, and again have no warning engine sounds. These are the modern equivalent to mopeds (save, unlike mopeds, they are not road legal and their drivers require no licence, as I understand it) but the ordinary joe would be hard pressed to distinguish them (unless speeding) from their legal brothers. I think this is the point that is trying to be made. If they are on the road (they are) and can't be readily distinguished from electric assisted bicycles to the casual and 'lay' observer then both classes of vehicle should be treated similarly, under the same rules.

I would have thought that if a normal car had hit this block at speed it would still have been wrapped round it when the photo was taken, I assume quite shortly afterwards. Which would suggest a much bigger vehicle with greater mass may have shifted it without a significant collision. Or possibly risk to others.

I think it may also be relevant to ask what time the incident took place, and whether there is any suggestion the vehicle was stolen. Dangerous driving is of course always dangerous driving, but where it happens in the small hours, and if the driver is also a car thief (and possibly a joy rider) may also be relevant, as appears to be the case in some incidents. The proximity to a school, for instance, is less of an issue if the event was after midnight than if it had been during school hours (and particularly school at start or end time of the school day). There is a tendency to assume all incidents are just caused by ordinary joes like the readership here - and that all drivers are the same under the skin. And that all incidents are as dangerous as each other, whenever they occur.

Yes, it does seem a step change and followed their recent significant uplift. It did used to be dire immediately before. You have to think back to the 1990s when there were some good dishes, but even then somewhat hit and miss.

My recent experience of The Dog suggests that their kitchen has been significantly improved. Most menu items seemed fine. Not fine dining, just fine relatively upmarket pub food.

We had a stolen car, many years ago, which turned up parked in Dawson Heights.

In this case the Oxford Mail carried out it's own research via Facebook, which of course is an unfiltered and unrepresentative sample, and not an ideal research medium but is different from just repeating something pasted on Facebook. I imagine, for instance, that it is mainly sampling people who have opted to see their posts, so probably people interested in Oxford and its surrounds.

Nice to see an AI fantasy in the New Year. And the late nineteenth century language model is well chosen. But what's being described is rubbish. Picturesque rubbish but rubbish nonetheless. Picking up after dogs is a very late 20th century habit, if even that - poo bags weren't a thing until then, even nappy sacks can't date back much earlier than the 1970s.

Actually, I'm also worried about the risk to cyclists to themselves caused by their own very poor road habits - jumping traffic lights, not signalling, not using lights or reflective clothing at dusk or after dark, not apparently looking where they are going, lack of hazard awareness through no training, using phones on bikes, wearing headphones so they are insulated from normal traffic noise, all of these habits reduce their own safety (let alone speeding above the legal speeds for other users on the roads they are on) - and setting bad examples for other cyclists- and will lead to accidents, and, has been rightly pointed out, in accidents cyclists are more likely to come out worse, unless they are accidents against other cyclists or pedestrians.

I go on about cyclists but not on a thread devoted to actual dangerous drivers. By all means start a thread of your own on 'drivers who annoy me'. Or is that all your threads?

I do think that reporting driver behaviour you don't like, or just think selfish here is unhelpful, in a thread which is pointed at actual dangerous behaviour, where third parties are at risk. It dilutes the value of this thread. There's hardly a day when someone doesn't do something on the road which I wouldn't recommend or do (which does, sorry, include cyclists!) but diverting this thread to report it would be a waste.

In the main professional criminals tend to just use stolen cars, stolen for just that purpose, although there are a group of criminals who used cloned number plates to elude speed cameras etc. Apart from ram raiding, cars are rarely otherwise used as a direct part of a criminal attack, but rather as transport to and from the scene of crime, unlike two wheeled based criminals, and by no mean just phone hijackers stealing phones on the go.

I think you may have meant to type 'none' - but the hand of god...

No Rockets, there is a conflict here, as cyclists, as represented on these boards at least, do not accept anything from the Highway Code as being applicable to them, so pedestrians DO NOT have any rights as regards the rights of cyclists, which transcend all other rights. They must do, as the Highway Code and any other usage restrictions such as speed limits don't apply to them. They've made that very clear. And pointed out that any attempts to remedy this will fail as they preserve their god-given anonymity as road users.

I'm rather changing my mind on this. Cyclists being excluded (in their minds) from any of the safety requirements placed on other road users - no need for helmets, for lights (apparently, in my experience) or visible clothing, for training in road usage, in hazard awareness, even in simple ability, in signaling intentions, for abiding by any of the highway code rules as regards red lights, zebra crossings, limited speeds, driving on pavements - well I'm beginning to take a Darwinian approach to this - clearly the Government, in not wishing cyclists to take care of or even be aware of any of the hazards and requirements of safe road usage has an agenda! Let's hear it for the Government!

But the point being constantly made by your side is that cycling is virtually risk free and poses no dangers, you've argued if I recall about relative weights of vehicles. Nobody suggests that cars can't kill. Numbers of posters do seem to suggest that bikes can't. Clearly combine fast speeds with the weight of bike and rider and they can kill.

So don't expect it to be there...

Because cars are registered to indiduals who are prosecuted for offences unless they can show it was someone else at the wheel. It's the drivers they are after, not the vehicles. They are just a handy shortcut as they are immediately identifiable.

As regards speeds on urban roads, and indeed all other highway code etc. restrictions on urban roads, we do. It is only on motorways and dual carriage ways where HGVs have differing speed restrictions. And you are quite wrong to suggest that you would need licensing specifically to restrict cyclist speeds. Only identification. Licensing is just one route to that.

Maybe because this is an East Dulwich Forum site and we are discussing issues of concern in East Dulwich. Of which, thankfully, road deaths are not top of our agenda, whereas poor cycling is. Because of the local incidence levels.

Other than acting as 'interested parties' Southwark Councillors have no responsibility for water issues. And no real leverage either. Considering the complete disdain with which Thames Water treats its own Regulator, and the government, (let alone its customers) I doubt very much whether an entire battalion of councillors would have much impact. What powers could they exercise?

That may not be so - many on this site are experts in many areas - you yourself claim huge traffic management (or similar) expertise for instance. And I think you will find that Southwark employees are unlikely to support criticism or challenges to Southwark policy - why, you don't and you apparently neither live in, or vote in, the borough. Do you, however, work for it, as you are such a cheerleader? If not, then you are the most passionate disinterested person on this site, as regards so many aspects, not just traffic.

Without entering into the spat above, I think it's worthwhile considering the fact that Southwark determined that it was worth investing in a camera and other necessary expenditures e.g. by a turn 'through' a bus lane - one where (I live reasonably close) I have not heard of any incidents which suggest there was before a traffic problem here. Other things suggest that the Southwark and the TFL approach is very different in gauging offences cause by legitimate and legal turns across a bus lane. We also know that other impediments and changes to traffic rules in our bits of Southwark seem inevitably to be accompanied by cameras and fines - some of the signposting of which has been attacked as being confusing and obscured. And yet, in the past, changes to road priorities and usage, also signed, have not been inevitably accompanied by cameras and fines. Ths would suggest that Southwark is investing (the cameras cost money) in road traps - and that investment does not seem linked (as many speed traps are and are meant to be) to driver behaviour which is causing e.g., accidents (and which speed cameras are normally allowed, and signposted, to stop such behaviour) but as a revenue raising exercise. Of course Southwark is suffering from underfunding, but the way the law works at the moment any fines excess (and there is not meant to be an excess) is quite strictly hypothecated. An hypothecation which does appear somewhat stretched in Southwark's case. I don't think, for instance, that excessively expensive prettification of a tiny part of the borough was top of the minds of the legislators when they set the rules about use of excess revenues over and above the cost of scheme administration.

When the rules set are unfair and do not reflect rules of a similar authority which allow e.g. legal turns into side streets with normal safe driving behaviour then they are designed not to penalise illegal activity but to raise revenues in ways not common or normal, or, actually possibly, legal. Cars are not designed, or safe, to make 90 degree (right angle) turns, which is what is required here if you are to proceed 'in the rules'.