Rockets

Ex- it will also be essential to see local data. National data demonstrates macro trends not local ones. It would be a foolhardy path for the council to follow if they try and model national changes to determine local impact. They had strips down for periods over both the lockdown and the much more relaxed lockdown so we know they have the data and we know that what many of us could see when we were walking around Dulwich on the displacement roads the council can see too in the data. More broadly, those national figures are interesting and validate how people are changing their habits but I would challenge that these changes will not continue once lockdown lifts. Yes everyone is walking and cycling more - why, because their world extends about 1 mile in each direction at the moment no further. Parents were working from home whilst their children went to school so more people could take their children to school on their bikes and get back home in time for their first work commitment of the day. It's why Dulwich Park/Peckham Rye/Brockwell Park are absolutely rammed as they are only option for most people in the locality to get some exercise and fresh air. Covid has been a massive catalyst for modal shifts in transportation but soon, hopefully, things will begin to return to some semblance of normality and those modal shifts will swing back when people's world's begin extending. That's why we saw the traffic chaos on the displacement roads when the first lockdown was eased.

@DulwichCentral - I think you will find that the majority of statements about awful traffic were before this latest lockdown. Of course the roads are much quieter now (although I hasten to add much busier than during the first lockdown) but the LTN displacement roads were beyond awful before we went into this lockdown. One wonders how the council will aggregate this into their monitoring and analysis because when life returns to normal things will return to being hellish on Lordship Lane, EDG etc etc. I am really interested to see how they present/manipulate this. The worm seems to be beginning to turn on LTNs.

@Malumbu Your increasingly spiteful de-positioning of anyone who has a view differing to your own on this subject speaks volumes: it suggests you don't have a valuable contribution or rational argument for the points being raised so have descended to name calling and accusatory finger pointing at people you don't know anything about. A bit childish don't you think?

Well done Dulwich Alliance - get an early blow in before the council has a chance to manipulate the figures - no doubt they will counter that the people on the closed roads are saying how great it is!!!! ;-)

Also I would hope that the council are reviewing the number of FOI requests they get and determining how they can communicate better - the two are inexorably linked. The catalyst for a lot of these FOIs is their utter lack of transparency and professional communication on this whole programme - they are acting like they have something to hide so people go looking for what they are hiding (and finding it if those emergency services communications are anything to go by).

...response to Covid-19....the High Court may bring this house of cards tumbling down....

But weren't the council and councillors telling us the delays to emergency services weren't happening and the emergency services supported the measures..? It's also very clear from those minutes that there was no, or woefully inadequate consultation, with wemegency services over these closures. Time and time again councillors told us the opposite, that emergency services had been consulted. It's clear these measures put people's lives at risk and the emergency services were telly the council so for a long time and the council seems to.in the main, ignored it and that cannot be tolerated. I know they replaced the planters with removable bollards in at Melbourne Grove but the DV junction is still immovable planters. This council is trying to hide things. They have created a monster for themselves..an informed public who are tired of being lied to and are now emboldened to dig deeper and push for proper answers and expose their lies.The council cannot bury things under the cover of constituent apathy anymore. It makes you wonder what else has been happening over the years...

This might explain why many of the cheerleading councillors are doing nothing on their social feeds. Many of them, who were frequent retweeters of content from the pro-closure lobbyists, seem to have stopped. Perhaps they know they are in trouble and are backpedaling quickly to try and distance themselves from them. Cheerleading and grandstanding is easy, being accountable less so.

DulwichCentral Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > march46 Wrote: > -------------------------------------------------- > ----- > > I see Dulwich Alliance are no longer listing > the > > Dulwich Picture Gallery as one of their > > supporters. Were they not aware they'd be > included > > I wonder? > > Yes I noticed this. Very odd. Does make one wonder > how genuine the whole thing is. Not sure how you question how genuine the Dulwich Alliance is on the basis of that...or is it you are just grasping at anything to deposition any organised opposition? Meanwhile it appears the council may have stopped responding to FOI requests...far, far more concerning if true.

I think many of the fears about the way the council handled the implementation of these programmes are being realised: the council's blinkered approach is going to set proper debate to find solutions to the pollution crisis back by years. If a High Court judge can pull apart the mayor's and TFL's implementation they would have a field day with what has gone on locally. I do hope those who have defended the measures to the hilt, without any consideration for their impact on the wider community, think it was all worth it and that at the end of the day those cheerleaders within the council take full responsibility for their actions.

What happens next is really interesting and cast your mind back to Southwark's first push for these measures which was based solely around "social distancing" but it clear one of the key findings in that case applies locally too: As it was, the measures proposed in the Plan and the Guidance, and implemented in the A10 order, far exceeded what was reasonably required to meet the temporary challenges created by the pandemic. It seems the mayor, TFL and councils have created huge issues for themselves by being way too keen to use Covid as a trojan horse to role out programmes without proper consultation or engagement. It was like catnip to them and they couldn't help themselves. I very much hope this is the beginning of the end for these flawed schemes and then we can analyse how much time, money, resources and effort was wasted by the council when they should have focussing on other more important, community-wide, challenges. They all got sold down the river by the pro-closure lobby and completely misjudged the wider public sentiment and, as we all know, a politician does that at their peril.....

We got a huge batch of letters delivered today - it looks like it was all of our post for the last two weeks. Luckily nothing urgent but does anyone have any idea when they are going to get on top of this - it's getting beyond a joke? It seems there are a lot of no-shows for vaccines (a family friend went to have a pacemaker adjustment and was given the jab "as he was there and a lot of people hadn't turned up so they had spare") and I do worry that a lot of people just aren't getting their letters in time. I think we can all live with the occasional delays to post but the service now seems to be totally unreliable. Has anyone heard anything from our local councillors on the matter?

Ex- really! You can tell you have worked in council consultations previously! Your warping of stats is worthy of an honorary Southwark Council OHS Consultation medal for services to misrepresentation! That petition showed, quite clearly, that there was a group of people who were against the way the council had gone about their deployment - it may be 1% of the overall Southwark population but there's not another e-petition that the council has run on its website that has had more people sign. Given some bright spark on the pro-closure lobby then decided to set their own e-petition up in support of the closures and managed to gather about 60 signatures probably aptly shows the balance of local weight of feeling towards these closures. Yes the council paid lip service to the e-petition but that was always going to be the case - they have never wanted to have any sort of proper debate on the LTNs. They have been hoping the problem goes away and people lose interest but, perhaps most worrying for them, a new group has been set-up, 650 people have managed to negotiate their new confusing log-in system and signed another petition against it, 1800 people are signed-up for OneDulwich and hundreds of sets of eyes are waiting in eager anticipation to cross-examine the council's monitoring methodology, data and reports that they are promising sometime in the future. All at the same time as they head towards council elections in under 18 months. The longer the current lockdown goes on the worse it is for the council as, at some point life will begin to return to normality and the queuing traffic will return and the council will be back in the cross-hairs - and that will probably be under a year before the local council elections - and politicians start getting very angsty - especially as many will be looking to those elections as a bell-weather for Labour under Keir. Let's be honest, they've got themselves into a right mess and it was all of their own making and they keep digging the hole deeper and deeper.

Wasn't there one on Dawson's Hill too?

I suspect many are not aware of the new rules and process to get them collected as many of the streets of East Dulwich resemble medieval Christmas tree burial grounds.

Iona - try not to worry about it - there are a lot of idiots around at the moment who are too quick to lash out - I wholly suspect it is due to lockdown stress. Also, I wonder whether the pedestrian was looking at the main lights rather than the bike lights (this does not at all justify their reaction). A lot of people don't realise that bikes have their own set of lights and priorities at many junctions and that it can be red for everyone else but green for cyclists. It's quite simple, if everyone follows the instructions presented to them by the lights it works perfectly. I very much suspect that the pedestrian ignored their red light as they thought the main red lights would give them time to cross. So they are very much the idiot rather than you and don't let them put you off getting out and enjoying some fresh air and exercise!

Rofflick - would those be the consultations that were skewed to the council's agenda? The CPZ consultation that told the council the majority of East Dulwich residents were against them so the council skewed the results to allow them to go forth with their plans? Or the OHS consultation for Dulwich Village that were based on a willful manipulation of data (47% increase in traffic)? Perhaps in that light you can see why people feel the need to try and galvanise support from a large number of residents to get the council to pay attention to the voices they have overlooked and deliberately ignored for so long. The council is reaping what they have sowed. They chose to ignore the views of the majority to focus on the minority. And now they are doing everything they can to desperately hold on to their position. Every day we get closer to the local council elections in 2022 and every day councillors start thinking about re-election - that will likely be the main catalyst for ensuring the majority are listened to (whichever way that might be).

I suspect someone will submit a FOI to find out how many people have been fined. Someone did that in Lewisham and found that after a few weeks of operation 47000 fines had been issued.

Glad to see there is another group galvanising voices against the closures. The council hopes that the longer the closures are in so people lose interest in fighting them, it's part of their "small vocal minority" narrative. I think they are finding it is anything but a small vocal minority and that people are in it for the long-haul and won't go away or give up. It does not surprise me one bit that they have not been engaging...it's a bit like the plethora of local pro-closure lobby twitter feeds who now block comments from their posts! Dialogue will not be tolerated! ;-)

Looks like they are finally getting through the backlog. Had a load of post today from pre-Christmas - a load of Christmas cards, a weekly magazine the issue of which was Dec 19th and a letter from Father Christmas the late arrival of which caused some distress for one of our children as their siblings got one and they didn't - the only silver-lining was that their behaviour did improve markedly in the days before Christmas as they tried desperately to not be on the naughty list! We have had more recent post over the Christmas and New Year period - did they just put a load of post in a room and forget about it for a few weeks?

Cllr McAsh, Are you trying to tell us that a pedestrian crossing at the junction of LL and EDG is a different scale of magnitude in cost to the cumulative total all of the items of street furniture, cameras on Townley, Burbage, Turney etc, new road signage warning of no through route all over the area, new right-lane filter traffic lights for DV onto EDG, planters (and their subsequent removal and replacement with removable bollards in the Melbourne Grove area) and all the other sundries associated with the LTNs in Dulwich? Just how much does a pedestrian crossing cost - perhaps you're over-paying for your avocados and need to stop shopping in Waitrose? ;-)

The great thing about opinion pieces (and to be fair Ex- you could apply all of your points to most of the pro-LTN tripe churned out by the likes of Peter Walker in The Guardian, except they do nothing to establish themselves as neutral in the discussion nor do they flag them as opinions) is that for many they strike a chord and this one, I suspect, resonates with many who are having to live with the impacts of LTNs. DulwichCentral - unfortunately the council isn't sharing any data or evidence, and has no intention of doing so for some time - we all know they are sitting on data that would answer many of the questions we have but we keep being told these measures need time to bed in which is political speak for "damn they're right but let's hope we can drag this out so long that they either lose interest or we can manipulate the data to our advantage". Given you dismissal of the article on lack of evidence I presume you treat local councillors tweeting #modalshift images with the same contempt as they are not built around "evidence"?

That is a great piece and I think reflects the views of many who believe the LTNs are too blunt an instrument to adequately deal with the complex nuances of the causes of the problem. The pro-closure lobby regularly fails to acknowledge that such nuances and subtleties exist in the discussion and Malumbu, I am afraid, your "drive where you want when you want" missive highlights this perfectly. Malumbu I would be interested in your take on the article.

I am not sure the council/TFL can play that card anymore given the delays caused by increased congestion from the LTNs....;-)

Malumbu - yes I am on the lobby to tackle climate change as well but I want to do it in a way that doesn't make the problem worse and I want to try to deal with it with solutions that are fair to everyone and, perhaps more importantly, that know what problem they are trying to deal with from the outset. Your statement of "reducing car use" illustrates this very aptly. I do, I hasten to add, admire your ability to create an oxymoron paragraph. On the one hand you lust to reduce car use by curbing freedoms yet moan that reduced car use means people are speeding - will you ever be happy? And for the record I hate speeding drivers too! ;-)