Rockets

Northern - so how does closing the section from of Turney from the DV junction to Burbage help that - because the traffic doesn't come from there does it? Therein lies the problem with the ludicrous suggestion to spend £1.8m closing part of the road that didn't need closing (when clearly the council had not done the required due diligence)....and now any sensible discussion about roads that people feel do need better infrastructure are pointless because we can't take council proposals seriously due to how flawed proposals like Turney have been and I suspect no-one in the council will have the appetite to put their name to future proposals given the embarrassing failure of the Turney closures. I can't help but think that Cllr Rose's departure is somehow linked to this debacle.

And interesting to see that the council is considering submitting plans to run up to 15 events a year at the Calton/Dulwich Village junction. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ee5b2552f1141316ee2efc9/t/647dc04661692b29f2d7ee3e/1685962823274/Calton+Avenue+S16+Consultation+Letter.pdf

Rollflick - Turney Road is already a quiet road with significant amounts of cycle infrastructure already in place - perhaps let me turn the question back to you and ask why you think it is not a good road to cycle down. I am more than happy to cycle my children down there now and let them cycle to the velodrome on their own - and in my mind Turney Road doesn't need additional investment (and to suggest spending £1.8m of tax-payers money on that councillor vanity project was a joke), there are other roads that are for more needy - it is also interesting to see that there seems to be two types of cyclists using the DV junction - those that turn left along Dulwich Village - usually full kit wallies heading off to Sydenham Hill and beyond - and children cycling to Dulwich Hamlet - only a few head along Turney. My position from the beginning has been that Turney didn't need closing but unfortunately the council got seduced by the pro-cycling lobby that convinced them that the only way to increase cycling is to close roads - which is an utter nonsense.

Does the council have any mechanism to collate resident's complaints about the discarded bikes - it does seem as if the council has opened the floodgates and is doing little to monitor the negative impacts of the schemes? Perhaps someone who lives in Cllr McAsh's ward can bring it up to him via email and get his response as I am sure this falls under his remit in his new council role and as he spends time in East Dulwich he can't have not noticed the challenges the bikes are creating and how bad the problem has become in the last few weeks.

It seems Southwark isn't the only council grappling with how to make money whilst keeping residents happy. The weeks of activities in Brockwell Park seems to be the model Southwark want to adopt but at what cost to local residents: https://www.brixtonbuzz.com/2023/06/lambeth-lib-dems-call-for-transparency-following-brockwell-live-festival-complaints/

Isn't that the Guardian's role!? 😉

Surely Lime need to be forced to place the bikes in the parking bays if they are placing them? Just randomly dumping them on streets doesn't mean anyone will actually use them - it seems to be a case of them trying to create a market by flooding the streets with them. Interesting that you hear so many bikes being used that have been jacked and are being used illegally - that clicking noise from the back wheel is the giveaway.

Rollflick - if you are correct about your assertion that this was rejected because Southwark bid more for this single project than for all the rest of schemes across the borough - then does that not ring alarm bells? Are our councillors out of touch with reality? Were they not then trying to splurge public money on placating the cycle voices? Or was this part of the bigger war being raged between our councillors and TFL following fallout from the allegations of bad treatment of TFL staff by council officials? It made no sense closing Turney Road to create a cycle route - and that is ultimately why it failed - because you don't have to close roads to create safe cycling routes but many in the pro-cycle lobby, and the councillors, have become so obsessed with that notion that it is their go-to position and they can think of nothing else. Turney Road is a quiet road, even at it's busiest and this is why so many people were shocked when the council suggested it needed closing and really exposes their lack of lateral thinking and hopefully signals an end of their blinkered, cycle-centric , view towards transport policy and policies.

My,..who did he upset in Southwark Labour to get that poison-chalice! All joking aside, and I might have this wrong, but wasn't he was a Green Party member before turning to Labour so probably aligned with his values?

....as much credibility as your claim that: When it actually comes down to cold, hard numbers, not warm, soft anecdotes, cyclists are actually more law abiding than cars. How you try an turn your incorrect and unsubstantiated claim back onto me by saying I have no data to retort and disprove your false claim is laughable and demonstrates you seem to be here for an argument rather than to engage in any sot of dialogue. You're becoming ever so Manatee/LTNBooHoo'esque in some of your posts.

Just to clarify for you Danish cyclists have been found to be more law-abiding....you're quoting cold hard number from Denmark..... Bottom-line is I don't to be hit by a car, lorry or bike. Just because being hit by a bike might not kill you as easy as it is for a car to do so doesn't mean we should turn a blind eye to cyclists rule breaking and putting other road users (and themselves) at risk. It's a big problem right now. I don't know about anyone else but I see far more cyclists breaking rules than I do drivers now and that is where I think Barby's videos really show the extent of the problem. Just go and spend 10 minutes at the DV junction on a Sunday morning to see for yourselves....the new Highway Code says cyclists need to give way to pedestrians yet the number of times I have seen lycra-clad Tour de France wannabes shouting at kids and adults to get out of the way at that junction is amazing.

Eynella is like a Lime bike graveyard this morning.....

It wasn't - they went out of their way to make sure it wasn't as they were terrified they were going to lose their seats over it - not a single flyer that dropped through our door even made reference to it. Also do you remember when they did things like extend the consultation deadline and then sent hit squads to doors of Labour supporters around Dulwich to try to drum up support and remember when I overheard a councillor meeting in a cafe on Lordship Lane ahead of the elections and Cllr McAsh et al were hearing about a database they had access to to target "weak" Labour voters (they said they could break the database down by sex, ethnicity, annual income etc) who they could then "encourage" to get out and vote such was their concern. Nice to know that if you got the knock the party considered you weak! 😉

Here's what I said back in March to counter the "a bike once killed someone" nonsense we hear in defence of bad cycling. Every few days Barby posts a rogue's gallery of bad parking and driving but also bad cycling and it shows the scale of the problem. And anytime any cyclists are involved in an accident the narrative is always how bad the car driver must be...but when you look at some of the cycling shown in his videos is it any surprise there are collisions and I do wonder how many of them are actual driver fault accidents? Some of the usual suspects can be seen on the Dulwich roads acting like the rules of the road don't apply to them - what is it about cargo bikes that makes people think they are invincible? Those who say they never see this type of thing are obviously trying to convince themselves that this is not an issue - go grab a coffee in Au Ciel or grab a plate of cheese and a glass of wine at the cheesemongers and just sit and watch for a few minutes and ask yourself if cyclists at the DV junction are: 1) being mindful of pedestrians or 2) obeying the rules of the road. They're not but people are expected to turn a blind eye because...well they're cyclists.....and somehow the rules don't apply to them. And I like to consider myself a considerate cyclist and the majority are now giving us a bad name - it's no wonder people dislike us so much!

Of course they are great for those who enjoy using them but an inconvenience and eye-sore when they are left strewn all over the streets. And be careful when you say they are non-polluting as those battery packs don't charge themselves...and they can only be a net benefit if the modes they are replacing are more polluting; if they are replacing walking then they are worse for health and the environment! As a cyclist I always think using anything electric is cheating - if no effort is required then what's the point! 😉

Ha ha someone is feeling the pressure - using election results rather than the consultation responses is so typical - but as Cllr Rose (who also gets a grilling in the Mail) told us the consultation for the first-round of LTNs wasn't a referendum - this time it appears it might have been. Obviously Cllr Newens doesn't like the accusation that she has overseen the first ever Labour U-turn on an LTN! 😉 Shame the Tories and Lib Dems didn't think take a leaf out of Labour's books and engage in a bit of tactical voting and one set of councillors withdraw! I feel a bit dirty doing this but here's the link to the Mail article which did make me chuckle.... https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12107823/Labour-run-Southwark-council-scraps-plan-SIXTH-low-traffic-neighbourhood.html Funny how Cllr Newens goes on to say: "In reality, the 2022 election results give southwarklabour a strong mandate to improve active travel infrastructure + reduce traffic in our borough"....a little bit rich and someone ought to remind her how she, and her other councillors and party, went out of their way not to mention anything about active travel during the run-up to the election, choosing to pretend it wasn't a local issue at all....her U-turn on that is almost as impressive as the U-turn on the Turney Road closures.....but as I have said time and time again admitting you're wrong is often the hardest thing for many hard left-wing thinkers!

I think this is the real motivation for the closure and "children's health" was the narrative the council created under pressure from cycle lobby groups to create a route to and from the Herne Hill velodrome. This is what has been wrong with so much of this planning from the outset - it has been way too focussed on appeasing the cycle community - this is why the DV junction has been such an abomination from the beginning - the changes weren't designed with all user-groups having equal weighting - the priority was always cyclists and everyone else was an after-thought and had to be shoe-horned into the designs - it's why that junction can be so dangerous for pedestrians now - the council is aware of the issue but doesn't have the backbone to do anything about it.

Can anyone determine what is going on here because that report from late last year says (or has this been superseded by something else) - Lime is considered dockless e-bike provider is it not?: We seem to have a trial of e-scooters but e-bikes being trialed by council agreement operator by operator but then a statement that there are no agreements with any dockless providers. Is this a diversionary tactic from the council and the providers - kit-fly a trial on e-scooters whilst rolling out e-bikes with no proper mechanism? All very confusing... 2. The proposal to trial e-bikes in the borough until 31st May 2024 through entering a memorandum of understanding with each operator of e-bikes be approved by the Cabinet Member for Leisure, Parks, Streets and Clean Air. E-bikes 11. There are currently no arrangements or agreements with any dockless ebike operator to place bikes, multiple units of bikes or create hire ‘stations’ in Southwark. 12. Other boroughs have signed up to trial schemes with e-bike operators and as such, we agreed that individual units may be off-hired and re-hired in the borough effectively making Southwark a ‘ride through’ borough. 13. There is very high demand for e-bike hire across the borough with usage rates many times higher than e-scooter usage.

To be fair, the Turney Road closure made no sense at all and was incredibly flimsily created and just looked like local grandstanding councillors pandering to the usual local lobbyist voices. Thankfully, not even the council could justify following through with it - but one wonders how much money was wasted on it. Let's be fair the biggest issue for children in that area now is from bikes as they eat, drink and play outside Au Ciel on their way home from school. It would have been far better for the council to focus on that than an absolute farcical folly project that was the closure of Turney - one wonders if that was a step too far for the Village councillors and now they are going to be forced to take a more pragmatic approach to future grand ideas. We know this council hates admitting they are wrong but this one must have caused some debate within the council for them to admit defeat and hopefully tempers their enthusiasm for more ill-thought out ideas.

Ex- that'll explain why I can't find anything about them on the Southwark site! ;-). Are e-bikes a done deal then - I notice on the Westminster site that they refer anyone who has any issues with badly parked bikes/bad usage etc to the operators themselves? Does Southwark have any mechanism to monitor the problems residents may be having with the bikes?

Well, lots of Lime bikes have suddenly appeared on our streets scattered around in far greater numbers than we have ever seen before. They appeared around the same time as the new Calton cycle hire bay appeared (which was chocker full of bikes when it opened with no room for any more), And following that there were a lot of bikes dumped along the length of Dovercourt, Court Lane, Woodwarde and Beauval - you could understand if there was a cluster of bikes near Dulwich Park, for example, but the way the bikes were left along the length of the roads looked very odd and not at all random. If you look at the Lime hire map there are a lot more bikes in the area as a whole than there has been so it does look as if Lime are increasing the numbers but maybe they have more bikes than the official parking spaces can take so are being forced to put them elsewhere. Or maybe there has suddenly been a huge overnight increase in the number of people using them but that would be more gradual rather than overnight. More likely though is Lime is trying to force their solution as part of the trial - flood the market so they become the go-to option due to availability. Now the council has added more bays then I see no reason for the Lime bikes to be parked anywhere other than in the bays. Inconsiderate pavement parking is a problem - but one that is not uncommon in any city that has hire bikes. BTW does anyone have a link to the council's e-bike here trial page - I can't see to find one?

Is there a mechanism to respond to the trial? Are constituents being given an opportunity to feed into it?

Malumbu, I do spend a lot of time around that junction so perhaps you'll just have to take my word for it that many cyclists there are very intimidating. So maybe instead of being critical of people who actually live in the area pop down to Dulwich Village junction this morning and take a look for yourself - they'll be a load of lycra full kit wallies flying down Calton without a care in the world for any of the pedestrians using the junction.

Given the hierarchy of road users pedestrians should be given priority at that junction and cyclists should be made to dismount. The speed at which some come down Calton and negotiate the S before the traffic lights is shocking. Shared cycle and pedestrian space rarely works in practice and way too much priority has been given to cyclists by the council at that junction and it is poorly designed.

My goodness Mr C - surely you’re smart enough to realise that was a joke…….? For the benefit of doubt in that regard, let me also state that had you managed to prove you had posted on this forum something other than one set of subject matter then I would not have expected you to tie me to the back of the cargo bike (that you have kindly clarified you don’t own) and drag me around Dulwich as my apology to you…..just in case you didn’t get the joke….