wulfhound

Would be a shame to dump the rat running on Underhill, that's another one which might reasonably be residents and access only. Barry Rd is plainly designed to cope with large amounts of traffic, however.

That van is a menace. Even cycling at reasonable and moderate speed down C Palace Road, it makes for a dangerous blind corner. Riding slowly still won't give you much time to brake (but it will at least hurt less if someone pulls out without looking). To be honest the whole road suffers rather from this. In one or two places e.g. Whateley Road they've built out the junction corners to enforce nice clear sightlines, but it could really do with that the whole way along.

James is right. No such thing as an accident. We choose to drive - for reasons of speed, convenience, comfort, or in the case of goods and trades, for profit. Yet if you look at the crash stats, the vast majority of the serious injury burden is borne by pedestrians, motorcyclists and cyclists - with much of the rest being either people driving illegally, or getting hit by someone else driving illegally. You have to be seriously, seriously unlucky to badly injure yourself driving legally, in a modern car with ABS and airbags, on Southwark roads. So it's about who benefits, and who's exposed to risk as a result. The serious injury rate for pedestrians hit by cars doing 20 instead of 30 is reduced by more than 50%, in return for at most a couple of minutes added on journey times. 15mph would add a lot more on to journey times, for not a lot more benefit to the serious injury rate. 10mph/15mph is arguably sensible for use in access-only home zones, but not on roads people use to get somewhere.

It doesn't - if traffic isn't flowing, it isn't flowing, speed is immaterial at that point. You can fit more cars per hour along a road at 20, shorter stopping distances = closer spacing. Collision stats are reported annually by the police & DfT. By the time the next borough election rolls around, there'll be at least two years worth of Total 20mph data, which should be a reasonable basis for voters to decide - though you'd need to look back over a few years, as it's been rolled out piecemeal since the mid 2000s. The average number seriously injured has been around 100 for the past few years, I'm not sure how far it'd have to fall over two years to be statistically significant, but there are widely agreed methods for working that out. But there is a catch, in that actual number of serious injuries is not necessarily the only thing to measure. If you have more people walking/jogging/cycling, risk exposure goes up, so the actual number of incidents may go up even if the safety of the roads has been improved. If you make the roads 30% safer but double the number of cyclists, the expected number of injuries will go up by 40%. Whether this is a good or bad thing is a matter of opinion, but it should probably be considered in terms of the wider public health benefits.

That signage looks to be out of date and wrong - Peckham Rye / Forest Hill Road is 20 now, I think. But you will still get those slightly bizarre 20-30-20 signs where a 20mph Southwark road crosses a 30mph Red Route (South Circular etc).

They barely get above 20 most of the time anyway, what with having to stop for lights, pedestrian crossings and bus stops. Conventional cars aren't exactly optimised for 4.5 miles of stop-start-stop-start anyway, regardless of whether the top speed you reach is 20 or 30. I'm generally of the opinion that the Renault Twizy is a rather silly machine, but it's designed to excel at that sort of thing.

Presumably still accessible on foot?

Depending on how busy your street is, you may be able to get the council to install one of these: http://www.cyclehoop.com/rentals/ (Fill in the "Suggest a Location" box). Friend of mine who lives in Bromley just got one on his road. Looks absolutely gorgeous with planters along the sides. Am decidedly jealous.

Head for the lake around Burgess Park just after sun down & you'll see dozens of bats feasting on all the bugs that come off the lake. Not sure which species.

Yes please! With halfway competent food they'd make a fortune off the Sunday walkers in the woods.

Not at all a fan of those myself - Bakfiets cargo bikes are enormously better for all sorts of reasons - but if you think it's the bike that's dangerous, you *may* be looking in the wrong place. I'm not playing semantics - it's quite uncommon in my experience for inanimate tarmac to leap off the ground and smack you about the head. Best contraption I've seen around here is a chap cycling up Camberwell Grove on a stretch tandem with THREE smallish children all in a long line pedaling away. And biggest idiot? Another fellow cycling along the A202, no handed, juggling. At least the balls were glow-in-the-dark for visibility though :o)

There's evidence that collisions involving women riders (25% of cyclists?) and HGVs (10% of traffic in Zone 1?) make up a massively disproportionate amount of fatal incidents. Young men are, perhaps surprisingly, under represented in the crash stats given they make up a large % of the cyclists on the road. Anything beyond that is conjecture.

Seemed to be some (most likely unrelated to the above?) works going on there the last couple of days, digging around the end of the island on the south side of EDG. Small patch of tarmac by the island dug up & a maintenance vehicle sat at the end of Townley. Possibly extra monitoring to make sure those works don't snarl things up.

Shirts and trousers fit in larger pannier bags, Ortlieb are great. There are dedicated rucksacks/panniers designed for full suits, but they tend to be pricey (as in ?100+ for what's basically a medium sized rucksack). Big advantage of panniers over rucksacks is that you don't get a sweaty back!

Got to say I can't stand this guilty-by-association stuff, whether your ride's a Giant or an Addison Lee. We've all (I hope) moved on from it in relation to ethnicity, can we let it go over choice of ride? Especially as pretty much everyone has more than one. Well done OP for calling this particular muppet out though. Given the profile of those killed and injured recently, that's pretty distasteful. Young mums, middle aged art directors, senior architects. Not those you tend to see riding recklessly.

Signed.

It looks to be mostly just a tidyup of what's there already. Resounding 'meh'. They're taking away the guardrails to expand the available waiting area on the island, widening it a touch and putting in a few advance stop lines for cyclists using the carriageway. Still three crossing stages to get from the bus stop on Sydenham Hill to the Horniman, pretty rubbish if you ask me.

It's double yellows most of the way between the roundabout and the park. South of the park entrance there's often a fair few people parked, and loads more down by the College itself; it's pretty wide between the park and the S Circ, doesn't seem to cause any problems there.

Glad I'm not the only one - I'll ask Valerie Shawcross & Darren Johnson. They are in a more relevant position to do something about it than Tessa Jowell.

Was out for a run in the woods this morning - is it me or is the crossing at DC/LL by Cox's Walk extremely hazardous? It's marked for pedestrians to use with the usual tactile paving etc., but with no actual green man phase on the lights. The southern side of Dulwich Common in particular seems to have continual flow, there's no break in the traffic allowing people to cross. Has there been a previous push to get this sorted, is there history etc.? Bad enough on my own, would be a nightmare with kids or dogs.

@richard tudor They wouldn't, couldn't, and AFAIK don't want to. But in terms of the problems that the other parties' London Assembly politicians (& most, though by no means all, councillors) think can be somewhat alleviated with a big increase in the amount of people cycling citywide (obesity, air quality/climate, congestion & public transport overcrowding due to population growth etc.), UKIP lean toward different solutions - or in the case of climate, perhaps disagree with the others' definition of problem at all. They're certainly, at London Assembly level, the least pro-cycling of all the major parties by some distance. @Tessmo Think you've misunderstood - I'm not blaming local people for the problem - I'm saying that the school travel plans may themselves demand changes that are inconvenient for those who live on the roads concerned. Like rebuilding junctions or indeed closing certain roads to "through" traffic. Which means a longer round trip if you live on the "wrong" side of the closure from wherever you want to be.

@hopskip Very much agree the schools need to take a lot more responsibility in their travel plans - but if those travel plans require further intervention on the roads, some of it potentially more inconvenient than 20mph and a few banned turns, what then? Put it another way - how much inconvenience are you & others prepared to suffer to your own motor trips if the end result is to drastically reduce the school-caused jams? @Villager Love the creative thinking re ANPR. Carrot is always preferable to stick, but sometimes nobody makes a big enough carrot. Wonder what it'd take to get them to trial something along those lines a few days a week. @Duvaller Given the amount of TaxPayersAlliance-ish rhetoric flying about, I'm not sure the Labourites will be exactly shaking in their boots. But worth remembering that this ?200k, ?285k, whatever it is, has come from a Tory administration keen to promote cycling. It's one of the few things the two parties seem able to agree on (along with the Lib Dems and, of course, the Greens). Don't want to see more cycling in the area? There's always UKIP...

I'm confused - surely it's effectively a single lane now? If anything larger than a hatchback is turning right, a left turning vehicle can't fit alongside (on the road itself) without blocking the (painted) cycle lane. Usually you get a sort of zig zag arrangement, people position according to which way they're turning but you rarely get two vehicles side by side. At least at the times of day I'm there. Once you get to the middle of the junction itself, right turning traffic pulls over & lefts can filter past, but Townley proper is single lane and marked as such.

The borough election is three years away - plenty of time for the statistics to accumulate. The number of incidents is such that it'll be very, very clear within about two years whether it works. May be worth watching the STATS19 injury collision data for other Inner London boroughs which have gone Total 20 a year or two ahead of Southwark - published annually by the DfT - just have to be tad careful as those stats include the red routes.

It's secure in the sense of an old joke: "How fast d'you have to be to outrun a lion?" "Faster than the other guy." Thieves leave them alone because there's always going to be easier prey that doesn't require the kind of loud, heavy cutting gear you'd need to bust one open.