West Dulwich LTN Action Group - needs your support

[Penguin68]

31 minutes ago, Earl Aelfheah said:

fairly sure the usual consultation requirements apply

The most useful sources are guidance provided by London Councils that bother to publish such guidance - all stemming from the Road Traffic Regulation Act 1984 (RTR Act) as amended. 

If you mean - those impacted should be consulted with - then the process of 'consultation' must evidence that a suitable proportion of households should have responded (I have seen figures of 20-30% quoted by different boroughs in their own guidance), and that a majority should be in favour. Special exemptions are given where roads in the middle of a proposed scheme object but where all the surrounding roads are in favour to impose the scheme on that road anyway, but equally where outlying roads are against to exclude them from the scheme. Where schemes are stimulated by residents then petitions with 51% or more in favour may be taken up for further examination by a council. What is clear is that real and relevant numbers actually matter in these 'consultations' so that inputs from special interest groups outside the area, council employees etc. are not meant to be allowed.

Throughout every council that makes things clear, it is clear that the requirements for decision are statistical, based in real (relevant) numbers. 'Consultations' which do not offer a chance to object, but ask only which method of punishment you might prefer (Southwark's preferred methods) are clearly not acceptable. Neither are the options to ignore results you don't like because 'it's a consultation, not a referendum'.  Or 'consultations' which include inputs from those not in the impacted roads (or adjacent roads). If it isn't statistically sound it isn't sufficient. If you don't follow the statistics, then you shouldn't be doing it. (0utwith, e.g. the sort of exceptions I have listed above).

What is clear is that the 'consultation' exercises that Southwark has gone through are fatally flawed compared with what is expected.

[malumbu]

25 minutes ago, Earl Aelfheah said:

It's not remotely balanced. It starts with the following opening sentence:

"Should cars be illegal? Are drivers evil? The way some councils have been imposing “low-traffic neighbourhoods” over the past five years, it seems their leaders definitely think so."

Really? Council leaders 'definitely' think cars should be illegal and drivers are evil? Hyperbole much?

It's an opinion piece, the Guardian includes these even the article does not agree with the general views expressed by the paper.  They had one praising LTNs, for example, by Andrew Gilligan 

[first mate]

2 hours ago, exdulwicher said:

The council were voted in on a manifesto. That means they've been given tacit support for at least the broad brush promises made in that manifesto, they should not then need to seek yes/no answers to everything they do. 

I think in law imposition of a CPZ requires a lot more than 'tacit support' and 'broad brush promises'.  

[Earl Aelfheah]

37 minutes ago, malumbu said:

It's an opinion piece, the Guardian includes these even the article does not agree with the general views expressed by the paper.  They had one praising LTNs, for example, by Andrew Gilligan 

Sure. That's exactly what it is. I was challenging the idea that it was balanced. 

49 minutes ago, Penguin68 said:

If you mean - those impacted should be consulted with - then the process of 'consultation' must evidence that a suitable proportion of households should have responded (I have seen figures of 20-30% quoted by different boroughs in their own guidance),

Ok, this is what I thought. You've quoted a council's own policy on how they conduct consultation exercises in relation to local parking schemes. I think some of what you've quoted comes specifically from Richmond Council. This is not the same thing as saying that:

Quote

When it comes to proposals to alter the conditions of particular streets, and particularly introducing a CPZ then a 'referendum' or something similarly accurate is required

...the implication being that this is a legal duty on all councils. 

There is no legal duty for councils to hold a referendum when it comes to introducing a CPZ as far as I'm aware. Again, happy to be corrected.

[malumbu]

It's an opinion, I expect many opinions from the lay person are not balanced, and will generally be influenced how this affects you and/or friends and family.

Although I am impressed with AI to date as generally it present both sides of the story without opinion, until it of course learns how my brain works and gives me the answer I want!

[Rockets]

Has the Guardian been hacked - that's the best LTN piece I have ever seen in the Guardian. I may have to frame it ;-)? Clearly they are trying to re-balance their coverage after years of  LTN "exclusives" trying to convince everyone they are great and working. One wonders if there was some frostiness in the Guardian canteen between Peter and Joseph this morning! 😉 

Come on @Earl Aelfheah you love the Guardian's coverage of LTNs so surely you must lap this one up too?

Anyone else think the worm is turning when even the Guardian goes in two-footed on a council and their LTN debacles.....

 

This sums it all up:

Ultimately, the main problem with the LTNs is that they are all stick, no carrot. For all the restrictions and the penalty notices, there has been almost zero improvement in public transport. There are no new bus routes to make travel easier; no extra trains; and in most of south London there is still no underground, a lack of investment that creates millions of unnecessary car journeys across the capital.

 

Many people will, of course, have little sympathy with drivers, especially if they don’t own a car. Yet there’s a hypocrisy here. Because I can’t think of anyone, car owner or not, who doesn’t regularly depend on a personal driver: be that the Uber driver, the person who delivers the online shopping, or the local plumber or electrician. The time wasted in queues, the frustration and the extra fuel consumption are all outsourced to the little guy.

There should be a way around this, but the first step would be to listen. Lambeth has been exposed for ignoring its residents. Those who oppose LTNs are not rabid petrol-headed rightwingers who want to burn up the planet: they’re mostly just ordinary people trying to go about their daily business whose life has been made miserable. They have a right to be heard. And those in power should remember: car ownership is not a crime. Drivers are not evil.

[Earl Aelfheah]

29 minutes ago, Rockets said:

Come on @Earl Aelfheah you love the Guardian's coverage of LTNs so surely you must lap this one up too?

Why do I love the Guardian? Your reaction to that article kind of proves my point. I've not made any comment on it, except to say that it is not:

Quote

A very balanced article

...as it was described. It's not meant to be - as Mal says it's an opinion piece.

Edited May 15 by Earl Aelfheah

[Rockets]

It's been a bad couple of weeks for the week for the LTN lobby - first the high-court ruling on the unlawful West Dulwich LTN and now the Guardian publishing that - surely there must be an LTN "exclusive" in the wings waiting to be posted.....

[Earl Aelfheah]

'The LTN lobby'. LOL

someone can’t just have a different opinion to you, they have to be a ‘lobbyist’ or an ‘activist’ or a ‘secret councillor’. 🙄

Edited May 15 by Earl Aelfheah

[Rockets]

2 hours ago, malumbu said:

It's an opinion piece

Some argue that all articles in The Guardian are opinion pieces....whether they have that tagline or not 😉

[Penguin68]

2 hours ago, Earl Aelfheah said:

There is no legal duty for councils to hold a referendum when it comes to introducing a CPZ as far as I'm aware. Again, happy to be corrected.

There is no legal duty for a council to hold 'a referendum' - there is a duty for a council to ascertain, numerically and to a court challengeable standard that a majority of those impacted by a CPZ (i.e. residents in a road which is to have a CPZ imposed) are in agreement with this proposal. Of which the simplest and least challengeable route is to provide all affected households with a suitably phrased questionnaire (not one which does not allow objection per se) to complete. But this 'consultation' does not have to be 'a referendum'.

Just voting a council in does not equate to a majority agreeing to all individual aspects of their actions, whether or not adumbrated upon in any election material. Indeed, anyone not in an impacted CPZ road, or an adjacent one would have no interest, or indeed right, to take that decision away from impacted residents.

[malumbu]

Hmm, where did you get that from.  The court judgment draws on silly 'war on woke' draft guidance under Sunak's last stand.  If you made everything that the council did that was controversial subject to community agreement then nothing would get done.  And this could be extended to national infrastructure such as pylons and wind farms.  Very much the way Reform expects to do things.  

1 hour ago, Rockets said:

Some argue that all articles in The Guardian are opinion pieces....whether they have that tagline or not 😉

Do you agree with the Guardian on anything?  Or are you Times or Telegraph, not sure how their respective politics differs.

[Rockets]

1 hour ago, malumbu said:

Do you agree with the Guardian on anything?  Or are you Times or Telegraph, not sure how their respective politics differs.

Yes. That brilliant and absolutely spot-on opinion piece! And I think the headline of that piece sums things up beautifully:

 

 

 

Opposing LTNs doesn’t make you a ‘culture war’ petrol-head. Just look at what happened in Lambeth

And on that - just because someone opposes LTNs doesn't make them a right-wing zealot - despite you desperately trying to make that connection at every opportunity.

I read articles from the Guardian, Times, Telegraph and a whole range of media but I am smart enough to realise that each one of them skews their interpretation of the news to their readership's political and ideological leanings - so I fully understand why members of the pro-LTN/pro-cycling/active travel lobby would give an "exclusive" to Peter Walker. But by the same measure I understand why the Daily Mail would go to town on a story about an old lady being killed by a cyclist who avoided prosecution on the basis that "the speed limit did not apply to me as I am a cyclist".  And I am also media savvy enough to understand why neither of them would cover the other one's story.

My most trusted news source: the BBC. Why? Because it upsets the right and left in equal measure so it's clearly doing the right thing and as a left-leaning centrist that works for me!

 

And if the BBC say the West Dulwich LTN is unlawful then that's what I am going to believe despite what a lot of folks on here like to claim! 😉

[malumbu]

It had already been posted.  We've already looked at it.  Calm down..

I could find you Andrew Gilligan's opinion piece if you line.

[jazzer]

It's a journo's opinion, pointless, a bit like the rag it's come from, equally pointless.

Why do you base discussions on some journo's opinion, you have your own opinion, express that, not someone else's.  How about not being influenced by others.

 

 

 

Vic Jaryczewski

[march46]

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/15/ignore-myths-low-traffic-neighbourhoods-ltn

It’s encouraging to see this thoughtful opinion piece in the Guardian, which highlights evidence and data around Low Traffic Neighbourhoods. The inclusion of a photo of Dulwich Square is a nice touch as well. Whatever your view on the topic, it’s always helpful to have well-researched information to inform this discussion.

Edited May 15 by march46
Typo

[Rockets]

Its actually good to have well researched information on the authors of such Opinion pieces so you can determine what vested interest they have in that view point.

Joseph is a Guardian journalist and Lambeth resident seeing the impacts of the LTNs first-hand. Izzy, on the other hand, is paid to promote LTNs - and an LTN gun for hire.

She is an active travel campaigner who is a member of the LCC and is the sustainable travel campaign manager for We Are Possible who, you might remember, worked with Rachel Aldred's Univeristy of Westminster Active Travel Academy to publish the "most extensive study of LTNs" which showed that....wait for it..."streets within LTNs experienced a significant drop in traffic....". Well I never...if you close streets to traffic then you will never guess what happens to traffic levels within the streets closed to traffic....

She is the very definition of an LTN lobbyist....Peter Walker must have been too busy to pen the Joseph opinon rebuttal so they bought Izzy in....

I love where she points out that London's road have been the most congested in Europe for years. What she fails to mention is that, despite all the LTNs going in, congestion is getting worse not better - despite there being fewer cars on the roads! One wonders what might be causing that....

I think Joseph's Opinion piece is a far more realistic reflection of life with LTNs than Izzy's.

 

 

 

Edited May 15 by Rockets

[Earl Aelfheah]

17 hours ago, malumbu said:

Hmm, where did you get that from.  The court judgment draws on silly 'war on woke' draft guidance under Sunak's last stand.  If you made everything that the council did that was controversial subject to community agreement then nothing would get done.  And this could be extended to national infrastructure such as pylons and wind farms.  Very much the way Reform expects to do things. 

Exactly. Sunak's draft guidance was little more than a NIMBYs charter and a desperate last stand. I don't think it was relied on in this case though, and I don't believe it's legally binding in any way. The issue in the Lambeth case is that they couldn't demonstrate that they'd taken account of a 53 page presentation, before making a decision.

17 hours ago, Penguin68 said:

a majority of those impacted by a CPZ (i.e. residents in a road which is to have a CPZ imposed) are in agreement with this proposal

I really don't think you're right about this. Again, I stand to be corrected, but I suspect you've relied on the AI summary Google generates, which from what I can tell, refers not to any legal requirement, but has scraped information from Richmond councils guidance which it applies to itself. As Mal points out, Sunak issued draft statutory guidance, his "Plan for Drivers," which included around 30 measures to try and make it more difficult for local authorities to try and improve road safety (in a nakedly populist last stand before he was booted); Richmond have decided to make it local policy. My understanding however, is that it is not legally binding statutory guidance or legislation. Again, if I've got that wrong, please do point me in the right direction.

Edited May 16 by Earl Aelfheah

[Rockets]

What is interesting when you read the judge's summary is that he was criitical of the way the consultation was held but that it did not meet the high-water mark to make it unlawful in that regard.

He cited issues with:

• The URNs on the outside of the envelope - but said that those who got the letter but lost the envelope could still contact the council
• The geographic boundaries were selected arbitrarily - but the judge said there were other physical notices and word of mouth
• Poor distribution of letters - judge said something clearly went wrong between the council drawing up the list, instructing the delivery of the letters and the letters actually arriving
• The LTN library event - the judge described the reporting of it, and the weight of feeling against the measures it as " a masterclass in selective partial reporting".
• Complaints about the way the 67.5% of people dissatisfied with the proposals was reported - “a minority of people who completed the survey were not in support of some part of this scheme …” when in fact "a majority of people were clearly not in support of part of the scheme"
• Difficulty in getting a meeting with Cllr Chowdury and claims that she said she would not do so because of “vehemently anti-LTN views” expressed by members of the group in the past. Judge basically said this was a he said/she said and did not determine that this was was a pre-desposition to the fact that an agreement Cllr Chowdury made to pass the 53-page document shared with her and others during a meeting that took place was not upheld as other council officers at another meeting said they had not received anything from her.
• The consultation unfairly shepherded respondents respondents so that they could only comment on how the proposals should be implemented, not on whether they should be.  - judge said that "It is true that many of the questions required respondents to accept the premise of the question when responding".  However he concluded that there were still some opportunities to enter free-text answers in which general opposition could be expressed.  In addition it is plain that responding to the consultation form was not the only opportunity afforded to objectors to express their opposition to the proposals. 

 

So many of these issues are exactly the same issues many of us have had with the way Southwark has run it's consultations - letter snot being delivered, misleading reporting of the opposition to schemes, demonisation by the council of anyone in opposition to the measures, consultations that you can't reply no to......it's clear there may well have been a playbook these councils were following as they tried to manipulate the process as this can't just be co-incidence....

[malumbu]

10 hours ago, Rockets said:

Its actually good to have well researched information on the authors of such Opinion pieces so you can determine what vested interest they have in that view point.

Joseph is a Guardian journalist and Lambeth resident seeing the impacts of the LTNs first-hand. Izzy, on the other hand, is paid to promote LTNs - and an LTN gun for hire.

She is an active travel campaigner who is a member of the LCC and is the sustainable travel campaign manager for We Are Possible who, you might remember, worked with Rachel Aldred's Univeristy of Westminster Active Travel Academy to publish the "most extensive study of LTNs" which showed that....wait for it..."streets within LTNs experienced a significant drop in traffic....". Well I never...if you close streets to traffic then you will never guess what happens to traffic levels within the streets closed to traffic....

She is the very definition of an LTN lobbyist....Peter Walker must have been too busy to pen the Joseph opinon rebuttal so they bought Izzy in....

I love where she points out that London's road have been the most congested in Europe for years. What she fails to mention is that, despite all the LTNs going in, congestion is getting worse not better - despite there being fewer cars on the roads! One wonders what might be causing that....

I think Joseph's Opinion piece is a far more realistic reflection of life with LTNs than Izzy's.

 

 

 

Heavens, you must have to excited to go to sleep last night.  Sadly you are rather dismissive of anyone saying positive things about LTNs.

Funnily enough Izzy's article repeats some of the lazy arguments others present on being 'forced' into driving -  nonexistent buses (what???) and public transport being too expensive.  We have the best public transport in the country and reasonably priced.  I'd of course we wacking fuel duty up to subsidise public transport further but Starmer doesn't want to upset motorists paying historically low fuel prices.

Just responding to the post above, are you going to champion every anti LTN campaign?  

[Rockets]

9 minutes ago, malumbu said:

Sadly you are rather dismissive of anyone saying positive things about LTNs.

I am when they are paid to do so.

10 minutes ago, malumbu said:

Just responding to the post above, are you going to champion every anti LTN campaign?  

Probably yes as most are fighting against the wilful and wanton destruction of the democratic process by the officers trying to impose them on communities, often at the behest of active travel and cycle lobby groups, without any proper analysis on if they actually do what they are intending to do. Grand statements about area-wide reductions in traffic numbers for all being replaced by heralding a few extra cyclists using closed roads is not what any of us were sold. 

[Earl Aelfheah]

38 minutes ago, Rockets said:

it's clear there may well have been a playbook these councils were following as they tried to manipulate the process

It is not clear. This is just more conspiracy nonsense

39 minutes ago, Rockets said:

What is interesting when you read the judge's summary is that he was critical of the way the consultation was held but that it did not meet the high-water mark to make it unlawful

That's because a consultation is not a vote. They just need to make reasonable efforts to engage and give appropriate consideration of the feedback, before making a decision. But they are still accountable for the decision, not those who have responded to the consultation. This is actually the most ridiculous thing about the whole case - were they able to demonstrate that they had considered the 53 page presentation (on which the judgement hinged), then they could still have made exactly the same decision and it would have been entirely lawful. It will be interesting to see what the judges directions are. Whether he instructs them to end the trail, or perhaps just reconsider the submissions, or something else. 

[Rockets]

But @Earl Aelfheah you have to admit - the similarities are clear aren't they? Patterns of behaviour like this don't happen by accident.

[Earl Aelfheah]

What patterns of behaviour? You have been obsessed with reversing the improvements to the village for several years now. You have never demonstrated any issue with how people were consulted over the changes and I don't believe there is any process that you would have been happy with, except one that kept a queue of cars where the square now is. This many years on, it's also irrelevant. We've had local elections since and councillors were returned to office. Most of the objections made in regard to the consultation by Southwark seem to be based on the idea that it should have been treated as if it were a referendum. That's kind of like criticising an elephant for being a poor cat. 

Edited May 16 by Earl Aelfheah

[Rockets]

11 minutes ago, Earl Aelfheah said:

That's because a consultation is not a vote.

He wasn't assessing that - he was assessing whether the consultation was lawful. And he found glaring flaws but it did not pass the high-water mark for him to judge against them.

12 minutes ago, Earl Aelfheah said:

This is actually the most ridiculous thing about the whole case - were they able to demonstrate that they had considered the 53 page presentation (on which the judgement hinged), then they could still have made exactly the same decision and it would have been entirely lawful.

That's the beauty of these things - it's often the smallest of details that trips people up. But, a bit like Gotti and tax evasion! 😉

9 minutes ago, Earl Aelfheah said:

You have never demonstrated any issue with how people were consulted over the changes and I don't believe there is any process that you would have been happy with, except one that kept a queue of cars where the square now is.

I kindly suggest you refresh your memory and take a stroll down the old LTN discussion to remind yourself just how many of us had issues with the way the Southwark consultations were being run - many of which were, not surprisingly, flagged as issues the West Dulwich group had in relation to how Lambeth were running their consultations - many of which the judge had issues with too!