bonaome

With ali2007. I've been through this three times now. Pimlico, Battersea, Brixton. Same thing each time. Starts off near the station, spreads and spreads. It costs residents money for a permit, it costs businesses heavilly as the permits are very expensive and it deters local shoppers and makes it a pain and an expense to have visitors. Moreover the proposals seem to be based on an assumption that a significant proportion of the parked traffic is commuter traffic, yet this is not well founded. Add to that the fact that the consultation document is in large part nonsense and irrelevance and you have all the ingredients of a really crap idea.

Please don't just confine your views to the forum, I urge you to make you views known at [email protected] and suggest you cc [email protected] and [email protected] with reference to "Grove Vale - proposed Controlled Parking Zone, GV" There are a number of things about the proposals which seem to me to be ill thought through. The consultation document reports that "The council have received feedback from residents indicating that parking demand has increased in uncontrolled streets around East Dulwich rail station." I'd say it's increased in all streets in East Dulwich over the last few years as the demographic profile of the area has changed. There's an underlying assumption that the problems reported are due to commuters parking near ED station. The consultation document says, "We have studied the pattern of parking in the area and have found that on average 20% of vehicles parked in the area during the daytime week are commuters or non-residents." The problems with this are: - - That's 2 in 10 cars, even if the statistic is true - deterring them wouldn't free up very much space - Of the 2 cars in 10, even if the statistic is true, we assume 1 of them is not a commuter but falls into the non-resident category - so, your friends who are visiting, the plumber who's fixing your boiler, the people who live at the other end of Lordship Lane but today have driven to park near the station to collect their elderly aunt who can't walk very far etc etc. - The statistic appears to be plucked from the imaginations of a few freelancers working for the council who were supposed to be doing something else (see here) Then there's some other odd bits of thinking and general irrelevance in the consultation document. "Our surveys have identified that parking occupancy is very high in all streets ..." - welcome to London. "... with many exceeding capacity" - does this mean that there are more cars parked on the streets than can be physically parked on the streets? Are they double parked? Are some cars parked on the pavement? Why aren't existing regulations being used to prevent this? A CPZ will, the consultation document says, offer ... + "Greater ease in finding parking spaces close to home for residents and their visitors" - for residents yes, at the cost of having to buy a permit, but for their visitors, no. It means that the visitors can only come and stay outside the CPZ hours or they have to fiddle about with scratch card permits or similar (at cost to the resident). I know it might only be a few quid for pay and display or a scratch card, but my personal experience as well as common sense tells me that that is making it a hassle to have people coming to visit you/workmen etc. It makes it harder, not easier. + "Easier parking near shops, schools and other amenities within the area with nearby pay and display bays ..." - ahhh, pay and display, yes, now I get how that makes it easier for me. + "Reduced traffic congestion with less obstructive parking as bays will show where it is safe to park and yellow lines where it is not ..." - Shouldn't yellow/red single/double lines already do this? This shouldn't be wrapped up together as a proposition with a CPZ. + "A safer road environment for all motorists, cyclists and pedestrians due to less dangerous parking." - As above, if it's safety that's an issue this should be addressed with double yellow lines, not a CPZ and I think it's misleading to position safety improvements as a benefit of the proposed CPZ. + "By reducing parking pressure, CPZs make other street improvements such as trees and on-street cycle parking more acceptable" - You couldn't make it up. If anyone can explain to me how having a CPZ makes having trees on the street more acceptable I would be eternally grateful. Is it because the extra trees can have all the parking notices and pay and display machines nailed to them? +"Yellow lines at junctions will ensure better visibility for all road users, including pedestrians, by keeping them clear of parked cars." - Again, yellow lines wrapped up with a residents' parking scheme. If visibility is an issue, then the yellow lines should go down independent of a residents' parking scheme. +"A safer road environment for all motorists, cyclists and pedestrians due to less dangerous parking." - As above, residents' parking scheme not the way to control dangerous parking. + "Greater access for emergency vehicles, as we will be able to maintain a safe width on narrow or busy roads." - So the bays will only be for narrower vehicles than those parking there now?? + "Improved public realm due to the reduction of parked cars." - Is the scheme about ensuring residents can park, or about reducing the overall number of vehicles? What's the reduction proposed to be? Is it more than 10%? In which case there's less parking for residents assuming the statistic about parking use above is true. In addition to the above, there's all the issues mentioned by other posters on this thread, including that the consultation appears to be very narrow, and if you were a cynic you might even think the documents and selection of those included seem designed to gain quick approval from those to whom the scheme will perhaps have braoad appeal without any real consideration of the wider impact on the East Dulwich community. In short, it's a shocker!

http://www.charter.southwark.sch.uk/folders/admissions/do_we_have_a_catchment_.cfm

On the map, what do the fractions mean?

@Tarot: That should be, don't, and, can't, both with an apostrophe. They are respectively contractions of do not (don't) and cannot (can't).

If it continues you might benefit from getting a solicitor involved. There was an article from the Evening Standard's Homes & Property resident solicitor just last week which covered a lot of what you can do regarding noise and nuisance. You can see it here (p38), it's free but you have to register with an email address. Hope it gets better.

The Crawthew Grove crossing - I just don't see the benefit, when there's the zebra crossings on the roundabout a few yards down. But I can see the danger as outlined by Kford. All in all the crossing there strikes me as a bad idea. @JamesBarber: I think you've misinterpreted my earlier comment. I'm with Loz. I don't think I've ever managed to get up to dizzying speeds like 20mph on LL. That is of course because I'm driving on LL on a Saturday morning back from Sainsbury's and the world and it's dog is out and about. No doubt at 4am, I could get up a good lick in the olde jalope. Of course, even if I were to be about and about at 4am on Monday and find the lane free of obstacles, I'd still be inclined to keep to a reasonable speed that would, for example, allow me to break and not collide with another vehicle exiting an abutting road hidden by parked vans etc. Were I the kind of chap who wanted to do 40MPH down LL, I doubt a 20MPH limit would stop me. Is that why studies show that introducing 20MPH zones reduces average speed* by 1.3MPH? A study in Portsmouth I think showed that city wide introduction of 20MPH zones reduced casualties by 8% per year, but increased fatalities (by 1 - not %, actual number, i.e. had no real effect). Have a butcher's. *Average speed. Mean, mode, median? By day, by part of the day? Who knows? Who cares?

I found the plans. It wasn't easy. It's like Southwark are trying to hide them. Still can't find them on the website. Found on James Barber's blog/site here Personally I welcome the crossing outside the co-op, but I can't see the need for a second one a few meters down the road at the junction of East Dulwich Grove and LL. Perhaps I'm missing the point.

I'd love the opportunity to drive down Lordship Lane going as fast as 20MPH. I also couldn't find the proposals on the website - could someone post the link?

There's an Early Day Motion in Parliament this Thursday regarding revised EU rules and regs on fishing. The EDM asks the Govt. not to sign it off without something in it about bycatch and discards. You can read the EDM here. It's the second most signed EDM ever, apparently, though Tessa Jowel hasn't signed it. On the page here, there's a template you can use if you want to email her to ask her to vote with the EDM.

Thanks James. But you can't know that the 2 in 10 or so cars that are there all day aren't just those of residents who don't use their car everyday. I suppose that's the 'gut feel' part. May as well have just asked Hugenot and allowed the council contractors to be getting on with whatever we're paying them to do; unencumbered by having to speculate on people's parking habits.

Huguenot Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- >numpties arrive at 7am, park the car, and don't come back until 7pm. > Ahhh, so that's you standing there on a randomly sampled set of days large enough to give a representative data set, carefully recording the licence plates parked, noting their arrival and departure times and looking up the DVLA and insurance databases to cross match the data with the reported location at which the vehicles are kept. Very good work there.

Quite possibly, somewhere, at sometime, someone is going to stand in front of a bunch of people and present the results of this survey and those people are going to decide where they spend money and where they cut back based on those results. As a research exercise it's poorly designed, but it's easy to see how the results could steer funding decisions. In any event, it's what they're doing. Probably because someone - who's well aware that the effort is less than ideal - is doing the best they can, with the time, skills and budget that's at their disposal. I've filled it in, and would encourage you to so so too.

It's a proposal, it seems, and if you want to object to it you can email [email protected] quoting reference PR/ND/RDH/TMO1011-037 but you need to email them by 24th March (Thursday). As regards Huguenot's points above ... I'm reminded of what happened at Brockwell Park recently. There, a very broad bunch of folks comprising the park using public, local residents, the anti-car lobby, the pro-cyclist lobby, opposition councillors and some people who really did genuinely have phds in traffic management (no, really), tried to stop the changes in the road layout at the corner of the park at Dulwich Road, Herne Hill and Norwood Road. Everyone said it was a bad idea. Except the councillors who had proposed it. Even their own internal investigation couldn't find anything that actually supported the plans. Didn't stop the council cracking on though. It would be nice to believe that our elected representatives only ever act in our best interests, objectively and intelligently, benevolently. Nice, but naive. Sometimes they just have a really bad idea that they get hell bent on executing.

@bloonoo: really sorry to hear about the break in. For anyone interested, have a look at this ... External hard drive, 1TB, and under ?50. I've got one and it's fab. As I think another poster mentions, when not in use unplug it, hide it!

I don't know what dust men get paid nowadays. Now, my old man's a dustman, really, but it would be rude to ask him and anyway he retired well over a decade ago. So outlandish assumption, if you know better, please correct, let's say ?10/hour (?18,200/year - seems a lot). So at ?10/hour ... ?700,000 deficit, for clarity let's call it debt ... means we (because it was us) have paid for the equivalent of 70,000 hours of work. Or 2,000 working weeks. Or 38 and a half years. Full time. No holidays. Someone, should be in prison. Or did my terrible maths mean they should just get a ticking off.

James, you say North Cross Road is making a surplus - but East Street market ... is making a loss. Hence why the drastic changes proposed to boost revenue to NCR to subsidise East Street market and stabalise the ... ?700k ... deficit." Other than a dustcart to sweep up afterwards, and a bit of electricity, what are the costs to the council of running a street market? My mind boggles as to how that 'account' can be ?700k in the red. That's a lot of sweeping up. Or have I misunderstood?

civilservant Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > As Twirly points out, it's chicken and > egg - you don't shop there, they reduce their > stock in response, and so it goes. ------------------------------------------------------- People who go in early find they have loads of stuff. People who go in later are saying they have nothing left. So it would seems to be a stock control / management problem rather than a deliberate reduction in stock levels to account for fewer people shopping there. There's plenty of people shopping, just not buying as they can find neither chicken nor egg.

aprayerforowenmeany Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > James. The results of a question posted in this > forum can hardly be hardly be held up as > representative of the wider community. I see in > the news this morning that Waitrose plan to open > 37 more stores this year. Do you know more than > you are letting on? There are thousands of people > in the area who probably aren't even aware of this > forums existence. What about their opinion? ----------------------------------------------------------- I agree with what aprayerforowenmeany said.

In defense of the co-op, maybe the prices there are a bit higher because their ethical stance means they pay reasonable rates to their suppliers and try to avoid being thoroughly despicable in their buying practices.

KidKruger Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Waitrose/M&S is just the next step to turning ED > into a shite hole. I suppose it's predictable > that it's part of the progression, just look at > other areas that stepped through the same > sequence. --------------------------------------------------------- Yeah - such as Brixton, Lewisham and the Walworth Road - just looks what's happened to those places since M&S moved in.

I'd love to see the market open on Sundays, especially a farmer's market. The one over in Brixton, also on Sundays, is great and seems to do very well.

Please can we have a Poundland instead.

I hope it's true too. Save me going to Brixton.

Sounds like Fridays are a bit quiet for trading, but I don;t think that's an indication of what might hpeen on Sundays. Wouldn't there be a lot of people in the area on Sundays who aren't around on Friday, or any other day in the week, being at work etc?