wulfhound

Looks like drainage related. The work on the playing field side is focused on a manhole cover and/or drain grill.

In terms of routes, they took the London Cycle Network as a baseline & then extrapolated from that. They chose roads with relatively low (by the standards of the neighbourhood, at least) traffic speeds/volumes. Routes will have been agreed with, and signed off by, council officers; I don't know how high up the chain that stage of the process went (for example whether cabinet signed it off, how much involvement the Ward Cllrs had etc.) One thing I can say with reasonable confidence is that it's unlikely to be a "cycle path", and as such driveways are pretty much a non issue. Southwark have in the past, and continue to, express a strong preference for integrating bikes with traffic wherever possible. On a road like Turney they'd be far more likely to create a cycle route by reducing traffic speed/volume in the main carriageway to a point where they consider mixing to be "OK" for their target user group than building separate cycle tracks or even painted cycle lanes. Rosendale is wider and faster - they could probably fit in a decent track there if they chose to. @ITATM bias for or against, and independence from, what? Sustrans are employed by the council & TfL, and will inevitably be dancing to their tune. TfL are putting up the money, and the council has the final say on what gets built. The goals are (intentionally) vague, and the standards are a score out of 100 with no minimum "pass" threshold, so beyond that it's entirely down to politics. Some of the designs recently unveiled in boroughs which don't have any understanding of cycling are entirely useless.. literally just painting some bike symbols on busy roads. As if that worked out well the last three times they tried it.

Sustrans are working with both Council and TfL. This ought to be seen as a positive thing - the council has copped a ton of flak over recent consultations, so this time they've brought in an organisation for whom community engagement is their bread-and-butter. .. because they *don't know*! Rightly or wrongly, there's very little in the way of minimum standards for a Quietway, so the certain impact, other than a few more people cycling up the road & some fairly discreet purple street signs, is largely limited to either a) what the majority of residents are prepared to put up with, or b) what the council are prepared to stick their neck out & force through. The one real exception to that is junction rebuilds. It seems pretty much inevitable that there will be substantial work at the Dulwich Village junction next summer, possibly but not necessarily on the same scale as Townley Road / EDG. While I question the sanity of attempting to build a consistent, reliable transport network through a process of street-by-street consent from those most directly impacted, the high-ups have already decided that's how it's going to be done. The timeline you've posted seems to reflect that - pretty clearly informal at this stage, they're seeing what kind of interventions people might support and/or tolerate, and finding out what the hot button issues are ("don't even think about messing with on street parking", say). However, it's worth observing that "informal" and "formal" do not correspond to "unimportant" and "important". Qualitative input ("I don't like this, make it go away") seems to carry more weight during the informal process. That's how they're doing the whole programme though - delivery via consultation, with what actually gets delivered being determined more by the consultation process than any overriding goals/standards. Which is rather short-sighted in my view, as it doesn't allow those residents who will be sitting on the fence about it (car owning families, especially) to evaluate whether they'll get something they themselves can actually use at the end of it. My personal view is that if they'd set the bar higher in the first place, it'd be easier to convince people that any change and disruption is ultimately worth it.

Could you ask them to take a look at Crystal Palace Road on that front please? Visibility on some of those corners is really bad - particular hazard for small/low cars pulling out from side roads trying to spot cyclists coming down the hill & vice versa. Southwark Spine is only going to increase numbers there. Hear hear. You're absolutely right - although I tend to see that as an argument for more thorough interventions, rather than doing nothing.

Not sure London Wildlife Trust would be too keen - the only sensible "quiet" route south from there is Cox's Walk & Dulwich Woods, no cycling allowed IIRC. Might be one to drop Tessa Jowell a line about, though - she seems to be making the case for more walking & running as part of her election campaign - see http://essays.centreforlondon.org/issues/technology/london-a-walkable-city/ - and presumably knows that junction?

End up being? Already are, if you've got reasonable legs or a power-assist. 20 minutes from Green Dale to London Bridge, and another ten to the far side of the City. The online map you refer to appears to be more of a fishing trip or pre-consultation than anything. Haven't heard anything either, and as a supporter of the Quietways in principle at least, I follow this stuff pretty closely. I suspect we're about to hear a lot more, but have no idea what they'll actually propose. Consultation programme starting soon, taking place over the summer & autumn; construction and delivery over the winter and in to next year. In theory AFAIK it's supposed to be ready middle of next year, but being more realistic if they have to do anything disruptive (alterations to Dulwich Village junction, say) they'd be stupid to try and do that any time before next summer holidays. I can think of a few reasons.. land ownership yes, also it may be difficult to provide "all abilities" cycling facilities from the Dulwich Village junction to the Picture Gallery. Not saying it can't or shouldn't be done, just that any loss of parking to create cycle tracks or change to the fabric of the street would inevitably be controversial. Also you've got the congestion past Dulwich College in the morning rush hour - cyclists can't get through, you often see them riding in to oncoming traffic. The Spine, had it not been truncated at Crystal Palace Road / Lordship Lane, would have faced the same problem. The toll road's nice, but it dumps you on Crystal Palace Parade at the top - nasty junction, nasty road. The top of it's quite busy too (access to Kingswood & traffic using it as a cut-through) and there have been quite a few accidents along there. Finally, perhaps they're looking at the area on the West Dulwich / West Norwood border (Rommany Rd, Clive Rd, Rosendale etc.) & can see there's a promising demographic there for cycling to work in London. Probably more potential there than Crystal Palace, it being pretty flat most of the way.

Good question. Again, money isn't really the issue - it's all about political will, but you're right that doing both well is going to be harder than doing one well. The Quietway is a quicker & more direct route to Central London for people coming from the south, but it's quite a bit hillier as you have to get over the top of Dog Kennel Hill via Greendale. The Spine is much flatter & serves those on the Peckham side of ED better. Also - Portland Street, which is the main route for LCN23 (the Quietway's forerunner) is likely to be carrying a lot of construction traffic during the Aylesbury rebuild. The Spine is supposed to use a new segregated cycle lane along Thurlow Street instead. So although there's some overlap, there's a case for both. I'd personally far rather they did one of them really well & the other not at all, than both of them in a half-baked fashion, but looking at the politics, the short term incentives are all around delivering "a cycle route" (with a side order of nice lucrative paving work for the contractors), not "a really good cycle route that anyone from 8-80 can use". The reason I say this is that I ride these routes every day, and for a reasonably fit adult on a bike they're basically fine as-is (total budget: ?0) - I wouldn't ride them if they weren't; yet for those less fit and trained - families, secondary school kids, older people - they're both equally hopeless. So the way I look at it, there's no point in spending public money on it if it's not something for everyone.. but again, it's political capital / bravery / long term thinking that's the key ingredient, not the money.

A no-left..? Surely not. I don't think the people who campaigned to keep the right turn (of which I wasn't one, but you can't deny they had some lungs on 'em) meant ".. so ban the left turn instead".

Money's not the issue - it's arguably cheaper to do it properly than to not do it at all, once you take all the potential savings in to account. The single most effective intervention - closing streets along the route to through traffic - is incredibly cheap. ?10K per street including construction and all the required legal paperwork. Overall, building a Quietway costs about the same as lengthening one Overground trains from four to five cars. The problem is politics, or local consent if you prefer. There's basically four things you can do on a Quietway: - Signage - "Public realm" work (build-outs, pavement widening, surfacing) - Junction rebuilds - Modal filtering (closing roads to through traffic) Signage is cheap as chips, politically uncontroversial, but doesn't accomplish anything apart from letting politicians and TfL people pose for nice photo shoots and claim to have done something. Public realm work is moderately expensive (lots of nice dosh for council contractors), mostly uncontroversial unless you lose your parking space to a kerb build-out, again gives the appearance of doing something but really does sod-all in terms of making the route accessible to a wider demographic of people on bikes. Junction rebuilds are massively expensive, can be somewhat controversial although only if they significantly change flows, can be very effective in improving the safety statistics for the *existing* cycling demographic (nearly all collisions happen at junctions), but don't do very much in terms of improving accessibility. Modal filtering is cheap, highly effective, does an enormous amount to improve accessibility, but there's no point in pretending it is anything other than controversial. The Quietways are a complete waste of everyones' time and money if it isn't done - and yet a lot of people will fight any road closure tooth and nail. I'm vehemently pro-Quietway & make no apologies for that, but I'd rather they built nothing at all than spent public money on a half-baked job & took credit for building something that isn't any more widely accessible than the old LCN routes. TfL, by neglecting to mandate much in the way of minimum standards, have created a situation whereby that's all too likely an outcome.

Having accurate traffic count data (speed, volume and type) is something they need for a Cycle Quietway. Doesn't necessarily mean they'll do anything about it, but it means they've got an accurate picture of which bits of the route are better/worse than others. There's a points scoring system, but almost no minimum standard. Info on p31 of this document - appears to be a draft from last year, if anyone can find the final version & see if it's different, go for it: https://consultations.tfl.gov.uk/cycling/draft-london-cycling-design-standards/user_uploads/ch2-tools-and-techniques.pdf I also notice there's a load of monitoring gear popped up at the Calton / Court Lane / Village junction, which appears to be controlling the lights (at least late at night). It wasn't working terribly well at 11pm last night - very long red phase for Court Lane, to the point that eventually one motorist got fed up and drove through. Ironically, I think it was because he was being considerate to a bunch of cyclists in the right hand lane - he was too far back for the sensor to detect, and those units never seem to do a good job of detecting bikes.

Couple of links you may find relevant.. http://www.hernehill.org.uk/campaigns/ruskin-park-area-road-danger-reduction-campaign/concept-traffic-evaporation-reallocating-r https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_traffic Certainly the number of times I've thought, "b****r the South Circular, I'm taking the train instead" suggests the theory might have at least some mileage.

Makes sense & I agree about the consequences - for me, one day a week of sitting in a longer jam than before is a good trade off for enhanced peace & quiet the rest of the time, but can understand how others might see different.

richard tudor Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Let's all be honest, it all has to do with enhancing property values. Sort of. Removing traffic makes a place nicer to live in - and therefore people are prepared to pay more money to live there. This could, however, be taken as an argument against anything that makes a place nicer to live. So people new to an area seek to improve it, and that's somehow a bad thing? Has it occurred to you that these people, presumably home owners - might actually just want to improve their quality of life, rather than their bank balance? If a nice coffee shop opens up down the road, I'll support it because I like drinking nice coffee, not because it makes my house worth an extra ?10k. @bobby p - we'll have to agree to disagree. You're working from the built-in assumption that all those journeys are necessary, that people have "no alternative" to sitting in jams. I'm approaching it (as a ZipCar-driver, ex car owner, parent of young kids) from the point of view that maybe a quarter of those car journeys could reasonably be walked, a quarter cycled, and a quarter made by public transport - given sufficient motiviation to do so. Certainly that seems to be the experience in (equally Tube-less) Hackney, where car ownership & use is in free fall.

In the street grid in some of those areas, that's the end result. In a lot of new build, you have a clear distinction between distributor road (through traffic) & access road (no through traffic) - built like that from the get-go. Money's not in the least bit the issue - it's down to willingness to change. None of this stuff costs a lot - a road closure is low 5 figures for consultation and legals, 4 figures for implementation. If - and it's certainly a big if - people want it, it's cheap to do. There's an argument that it's actually cheaper in the long run than doing nothing - whether or not that holds water, spending ?25k to improve a street where the combined housing stock is worth over ?100M is a rounding error.

More traffic count data is here, Dominick: http://www.southwark.gov.uk/downloads/download/3056/transport_data A few years out of date, but it's likely not changed that much since. 15000/week sounds plausible in the context of 2000/day measured in 2009-2010. The logical conclusion is - all of them except essential main roads. They've done this in other neighbourhoods (Van Gogh Walk, De Beauvoir Town, some parts of Peckham, Trinity Square in Borough) and most newer housing estates are pretty much built that way. It doesn't make any sense to design high-density residential streets to also function as traffic systems, which is why such things are not built. The challenge is how best to retro-fit that on to a street grid which pre-dates mass motoring by half a century or more.

5 journeys per car per day? That sounds way excessive. The majority of people don't drive to work, a lot of residents' cars - perhaps the majority? - are sat idle 4-5 days out of 7 & mostly get used for shopping and weekend trips.

+1 DadOf4 - tough even as a reasonably fit adult, impossible with kids or dogs in tow. I've written to AM Val Shawcross about it, but never heard anything back. Anyone else got ideas who might be worth approaching - Darren Johnson from the Greens maybe?

The high volume of traffic on main roads (which anyone can see is a problem) should not be an excuse to turn residential roads in to a traffic system - which is effectively what has happened by stealth over the past 20 years. I can't blame the Melbourne residents for being fed up and wanting to do something about it. Lordship and EDG are where the traffic belongs - if those roads can't cope with it, other interventions are needed to create viable alternatives to a greater proportion of current car trips. But.. the knock on effects of this and the proposed Calton closure on Townley need to be considered very carefully in relation to the Cycle Quietway. If the long term plan is for Townley to carry most/all of the cross-traffic (effectively being upgraded to a main road) & Calton is to be closed, that needs quite a different set of interventions to make the Quietway work than if both Melbourne and Calton remain open to traffic. Final point.. if Melbourne Grove does get barriers, given the loss of parking spaces it might be worth asking to get some extra ZipCars put in! Life's much easier if you can walk past the barrier & choose a car from either side.

Totally agree ellabrunswick! The whole neighbourhood between Southampton Way & Peckham Hill Street has had that treatment, seems to work well for everyone. Looks to have been done quite recently too (i.e. a retrofit in to an existing neighbourhood, not built like that from scratch).

Mostly agree apart from the last sentence. Improve cycling to the point where the majority of kids can ride to school and activities (the distances involved are usually reasonable - the problem is almos entirely down to road conditions) and the school run - aka bane of driver, cyclist and pedestrian alike - might largely disappear. Most of the parents who drive their kids to school do so because they feel like they have to. Also worth getting up to speed (ha) with the latest advances in electric bikes also. Ten years ago there wasn't a practical way for someone in less than ideal health to cycle a typical ED to Zone 1 journey (five or six miles and a fairly big hill). These days they're less than ?1000, and will carry a week's shopping for two people. Calton Ave residents want a gate..? That genuinely surprises me - all that arguing over the right turn at Townley, and now they want to shut Calton off entirely? Not that I'm against the idea - if the Cycle Quietway thing is going to happen, it feels like a necessary step - just surprised given the background.

Saw three young women with Boris Bikes at the top of Camberwell Grove a few days back. Seems they'd had no problem with the hill. Have also seen a couple of lads with them at the top of the big hills in Norwood - one on Knight's, one on Gipsy - but I'm not sure they came by them entirely legitimately. Something of a pattern lately. Reckon they'd be fine down Dog Kennel - it's not all that much steeper than some of the central London bridges, just longer. I've ridden a bakfiets down Green Dale many a time.. just have to be sensible, as with any bike. But to get from ED to Central London within the first 30 minutes of hire (& therefore not have to pay extra), you'd need to be pretty darn fit.

Signed. Feels like they're squeezing in the maximum number of large houses in to maximise profit with no regard for either genuine housing need (for which they'd build flats) or the local environment (in which case, fewer & smaller houses more in keeping with the area, with surface parking).

We do, but tube extensions are usually 10-20 years in the making.. don't hold your breath. Camberwell and Walworth Road stations both seem like they'd well worth reinstating. Whether that's even possible given the changes in safety requirements (platform widths, accessibility) and service patterns since they were shut, I've no idea.

That's gorgeous just_browsing!

Amen to that bobbsy!