exdulwicher

This argument that "the council are overreaching their legal powers" has taken on the same sort of myth as some of that Magna Carta "freeman of the land" nonsense that was doing the rounds during Covid... The council have a statutory duty to manage the roads in the borough that don't come under the jurisdiction of National Highways or TfL (and even there, they all have to work together). That includes maintenance, lighting, pavements, traffic orders (for things like roadworks, street parties, markets etc) and also the basics that people rarely think about - parking be a big one in that. Paid for vs free, unlimited vs time limited and so on. If a road has unlimited free parking and it's filling up to the detriment of residents, tradespeople etc then putting in some form of restriction is a logical way of dealing with some of the issues - not all of them all of the time but many of these measures work together. Councils have been doing CPZ for decades - the main point of one is actually to avoid loads of signage and street clutter from painting out individual bays and putting parking meters etc in, it's not some radical new idea. It's not an overreach of legal powers, it's doing their statutory duty.

https://tfl.gov.uk/bus/status/ There's a search bar to put in the bus service number and it shows you the full route with any diversions. The permit for the Thames Water works has been extended from the original date of 12th September to a new date of 26th September so, although it's open at the moment, I guess further closures can't be ruled out.

That would be just as disingenuous as no consultation, you're providing answers that simply aren't an option. Link here to an article in SE22 magazine from Cllr McCash which mentions the CPZ being in the manifesto. https://twitter.com/CleanAirDulwich/status/1698991374614368326?t=bNTkkVq8bntxjgDwOFQzhQ&s=19 There's further reasons why it's needed - reallocation of roadspace for various other purposes (EV charging bays, cycle hangers, parklets etc) general nudging away from cars most of which tie in with the overall Mayor's London transport strategy and Southwark's declared climate emergency and their own streetspace strategies. So having "no CPZ" as a possible answer isn't an option, there's going to be a CPZ. A lot of public consultation, in it's current form, is a waste of time; it's an insult to the population (most of whom are being asked questions that they're not equipped to answer because they're not experts) and it's an insult to the experts who have dedicated their time and careers to the matter in question (this applies to most consultations, not just transport or roads). But consultations are done, the results come out and then something else happens because the "answers" that were given are nonsense. That corrodes the trust between the authorities and the population. So to prevent, or at least minimise that, you don't ask open ended questions and you don't provide impossible options. It's like asking your kids what they want for tea; sooner or later you're going to get an answer of "brontosaurus on toast" or "a bucket of ice cream" and the kid is going to be disappointed when that turns out not to be an option. So you don't ask the open ended "what do you want for tea?", you ask a much more focused "do you want fish & chips or pizza?" Both of those are reasonable options, a choice has been given but it doesn't permit stupid answers. It's still a valid consultation. Just because you don't like it doesn't make it any less valid.

They do. Local roads are maintained by the council so anyone who pays council tax contributes to that. I mean you have those free-loading kids who don't pay any taxes plus the folk on benefits but basically all council taxpayers, whether they own a car or not, whether they use a bike or not, all pay for the roads. And before you start about "yeah but drivers pay road tax..." there are plenty of cars subject to £0 VED. https://www.carwow.co.uk/guides/running/which-cars-are-exempt-from-road-tax#gref

That's not quite true - there's plenty of baseline data from various sources, the issues are around trying to sort out correlation and causality from factors such as Covid (far and away the main one) but also things like schools, general demographics, car ownership, changes in how data is gathered/interpreted and where/how that baseline is actually taken cos it's a moving target. New AI-powered sensors and video feeds are giving councils huge amounts of extra data that they never had before so there's definitely a learning curve in how all that gets interpreted and factored into the bigger picture - you can sort of model it backwards a bit once you've got some trendlines and cross-reference it with previous data from automated traffic counts, manual counts, mobile phone data to double check previous baselines - stuff I've seen has generally been within a few %, it's rare to get anything truly out of whack. It's important to get a sense of other goings on as well and factor those into occasional days or weeks of abnormal counts. Roadworks is the big one - LL is going to show a dramatic drop in traffic this week! - but stuff like accidents , building works and so on can also feed in. The TfL report that basically said "bus times are a bit slower and we fixed it by altering the traffic light timings at Herne Hill". That one? The kind of thing that TfL do dozens of times a week. Although to be fair, HH is a nightmare junction, massively constrained by the railway bridge and the sheer number of drivers jumping the lights and then getting caught in the middle of the junction.

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.