wulfhound

Noticed this too, really not good. Hopefully just a signal timing error. Think it's a case of trying to please everyone, and in doing so pleasing no-one (apart from their contractors, who will be laughing all the way to the bank, assuming it wasn't Carillion). They should have done nothing & spent the money on something else, or listened to the cycle and pedestrian advocacy groups and made real transformational (albeit more controversial) improvements. Yes, this is a big problem on a bike as well - if you filter south along Calton Ave when the lights are red, when you get to the box junction then in theory you have priority to cross to the waiting area, but in practice, drivers heading on to Court Lane are unlikely to spot either an approaching cyclist (especially if they're on the far side of a line of queueing traffic) OR the give way line at the mouth of Court Lane.. and even less likely to spot both, bearing in mind you've got a split second to look in two or three directions at once after negotiating the first turn. The way the extra sticky-out pavement on the left hand side of the bend is designed doesn't help either, it hints that the natural flow of the road (& therefore priority) is in to Court Lane.. the right turn doesn't look like a right turn, so it's not surprising people don't realise it is one. If they're planning a temporary closure to Court Lane to repaint anyway, they should get on and do it now, before someone gets hurt.

Even with small children, easier with a car but still perfectly feasible without (especially nowadays with Uber etc.) - rather than pay up front for tax, insurance, depreciation, permits etc. and feel obliged to drive, we take cars when spending ?10 on a journey is genuinely preferable to spending the extra 20 minutes walking or getting the bus (or ?30 and half an hour, etc).. and while that sounds like a lot of money, it works out to be not very often (maybe once a month or so), so overall we're quids in. And I'm thankful we never get pestered to take the car instead of walking.. they'll ask to get the bus sometimes, but if they're tired enough not to mind the extra wait, fair enough. Journey Planner does make a big difference - being able to time leaving the house to when we know a bus will be at the stop in 5 minutes, that kind of thing. Having said that, I'm not sure everyone is adjusted to that world yet. Getting around on public transport when basically the entire system is visible at your fingertips is a massive, huge difference to the turn-up-and-hope lottery of 15 or 20 years ago.

Halfway serious question... If the people of Dhaka and Mogadishu are somehow not human enough to be deserving of our help, why spend our tax money on Darlington and Motherwell while there are people who'd go hungry in Peckham and West Norwood were it not for the food banks?

@ LoulaRose, could an electric bike help? Can at least be walked through the roadworks (or ridden through the park), and being electric you don't get sweaty & can ride in a suit or work clothes - a friend of mine does ten miles on one in a suit, arrives without a hair out of place. Good ones are ?900 ish though, so may not be worth it for a short term solution.

Fortunately, we live in London not King's Landing (or indeed Edinburgh, or Chicago). There are rarely more than a handful of days per year where more than gloves and a coat are needed to keep the elements at bay for someone in reasonable health. Out of interest, what do you think the main barrier is? Only because, personal experience, country roads can be worse than town: high speeds, blind bends, and when you do encounter an "A" road it's a 70mph dual carriageway with two miles between crossing points. Also the wide spaced road grid in the country, and bigger distances generally, means less chance of finding a direct, and therefore short enough to cycle, route between any points A and B. Cycling in rural Ireland is lovely, for example (apart from at pub closing time) but at the same time pretty useless for actually getting anything done as everything is so spread out.

Obviously doesn't work for everyone all the time, including me. Nobody claims otherwise. I'm not one for banning cars, but I do think we could see a very large reduction without major negative impact on anybody's quality of life. And yet of those within my immediate circle who could most easily cycle some fairly high % of routine trips (able bodied, 20-50somethings, haven't got pre-school children to transport, don't work physically demanding manual jobs or night shifts etc.), about 75% don't at all, ever. 75%, and I'm talking about a fairly well-educated, left-ish crowd. I should add that many of this 75% don't walk much either (and routinely drive trips which I'd walk rather than getting the bike out of the shed...) Firstly because of perceived danger (whether that perception is right or wrong is debatable), and secondly because once you've paid for a car, driving those short trips is quite convenient. Closing roads improves safety and makes driving short trips less convenient - it seems to have been quite effective in changing behaviour over time in Hackney and Walthamstow.

This is a misunderstanding. Most people will do whatever is easiest, because most people don't actually care that much one way or t'other. Want to change behaviour? Change what's easiest.

R.norvegicus is the brown rat. Tbh the photo could be either. Dark in colour, but small ears. Found a dead one in my garage the other week. After a half hour rummaging around boxes to discern the source of the appalling, stomach-churning stench. Grim.

Not really, because you're closing the road to cars only. Make (electric) bikes, e-scooters, even walking an attractive alternative, and people will use them. I read the other day that the Government are actually considering subsidy grants for e-bikes, hopefully this will bring them within reach of more people. A lot of cars would be off the road if walking the kids to school & then cycling on to work were a viable option for mums especially.. half term today and the roads this morning were practically empty, more cyclists than cars all the way from Village junction to Elephant.

Been there, done that, got the shirt. OK, the shirt may have been a tad sweaty. Again, a few hundred pounds will buy the asthmatic, rheumatic or heavily-burdened more wattage in easy electronic assist than Chris Froome can manage on a bad day. And again, I do drive when the job requires it.. the point is that 19 times in 20, it doesn't. But most of them aren't carrying 4 or 5 people most of the time, are they? More often than not, I'll run in to someone I know on my a.m. commute. Today I stopped to help a total stranger who'd suffered a minor bike breakdown. Week before that I helped a couple of other cyclists push a broken down school-run car off the road, much to the appreciation of its driver and other stuck motorists. The p.m. commute is usually a bit less sociable (I work late), but a few weeks back I stopped to help a young woman suffering a severe panic attack. Only one in the last few weeks, and that was a couple of mildly lost out-of-towners who may not have been cognisant of the Rule That Thou Shalt Not Talk To People, but again I tend to run in to acquaintances more often than not.

Interesting. Turns out I got the wattage wrong for a typical hatchback too (90KW, not 60), so the power difference is 450x not 120x. Yes, people are using literally four hundred and fifty times more power to move themselves around town than they arguably need to - and even if you assume that, for urban driving, most of the time a car will be in the bottom third of its performance envelope, it's still 150x. I think you'll enjoy this book.. I certainly did! https://www.amazon.com/Energy-Glut-Politics-Fatness-Overheating/dp/1848135181

How about anti-inappropriate-use-of-car? I don't hate cars, I think (as with opiate painkillers, gas fired power stations and warships) they're a useful tool for a specific range of things. If you need to get a family of four and a bunch of camping gear to some remote part of Wales, for example, there's really no good alternative. I've lived in places where your quality of life without owning a motor vehicle could accurately be described as sod-all. SE5 isn't one of them. However, for moving people a few miles around a densely populated city, they're simply the wrong tool. Anti-social by design and by definition (convertibles with the roof down aside), vastly overweight and over-engineered and, as a direct result, creating disproportionate danger, energy waste and noise (all essentially facets of the same thing). You simply don't need a 60 kilowatt engine, 1.5 tonne chassis and motorway-grade impact protection to move one or two people and a few kilos of stuff a couple miles around a city. Your average cyclist can probably sustain 500 watts on a good day and 15mph average speed, which is as quick as driving in London; for people who can't or don't want to keep that up for an hour, or have a young child or a small amount of work gear to carry, electronic assist will do the same. It's as if we all one day decided to use petrol chainsaws for a bit of light gardening. There are times and places where heavy, noisy and dangerous power tools are the only practical way to get the job done - but it's better for everyone (in a densely populated city) if we use them as a last resort.

Wasn't Lyndhurst Way & Bellenden supposed to have been revamped with protected cycle lanes by now? Plans were published 2 or 3 years ago IIRC. Anyone know if that's still going ahead?

So should one option on the menu be to further restrict traffic movements around Bellenden, so that they don't have to suffer the increase? After all, people tend to do what's easiest: traffic is, over the longer term, thought to be pretty elastic in supply/demand terms (that is, it'll expand to fill the space available - less space = ultimately, less traffic).

You personally? I've literally no idea what you as an individual do or don't support. More a general sense that anything which might curtail free movement of cars & cheap, convenient parking is frowned upon by many here - despite widespread frustration with the amount of traffic, poor air quality etc.

We all indeed do (.. aside from the 60% of Brunswick households who don't have a vehicle at all, and some living in the households which do). So just to be clear, we mostly agree that traffic is undesirable (even those who claim not to mind it aren't exactly queueing up to encourage more on their own road), and yet most people are unwilling to cut back on contributing to said problem, or to support measures encouraging or compelling others to cut back? It's like complaining about the amount of litter on the street yet being unwilling to inconvenience yourself slightly to put your own rubbish in a bin.

Including the 50% (South Camberwell), 60% (Brunswick) of households without a car or van? (per 2011 census data).

"It's not the state of the roads that worried the mothers... it's the risk of phone and pocket money theft." So we buy the kids a gadget so they can get in touch any time and stay safe. And then end up accompanying them everywhere anyway because the risk of some scumbag trying to steal said gadget. Second hand Nokia 3210 for mine, enough said. @McCabe it's four way stop because there's only one lane open N/S and E/W, while they work on the kerb widening / cycle lane / whatever it is at the NE corner with Turney Road. Long delays this morning as a result.

Interesting! I heard that the phrase "Over my dead body" was used in relation to the park - but that might have been somebody playing politics. Narrow is fine for back-street cycle routes (and cutting down trees is in direct opposition to all the green benefits cycling is supposed to bring.. just don't do it), the thing is that they need to be quiet and calm. Camberwell Grove, for example, has been great since the railway bridge was closed. Ditto the northern end of Friern Road.. it's narrow, on-street resident parking, but very little traffic thanks to the barrier at the end. What do fathers say on the subject of the school run? It's 2017 for goodness sake :o) - although given the state of the roads, I'm not at all surprised most kids aren't allowed to travel solo, at least until secondary school age.

@rendelharris I've been doing similar myself in the morning during the road works (and agree with other posters, they should have started early in the holidays, instead of right at the tail end), the park way is slightly further but the wait at the crossroads is so long I think it's actually quicker. I take Dovercourt up to Townley Road, avoiding Calton entirely. When the Southwark Spine cycle route was proposed to run through the park, there was quite some opposition from one of the local Conservative councillors. The council truncated the plans to finish at Barry Road / Lordship Lane as a result, and then it all went very quiet. But I think the general feeling is that encouraging lots more fast-commuter cyclists to use the park is not a great idea. The main problem with Quietways is that nobody is clear who or what they're for. The marketing material suggests leisure, but the actual designs suggest much the same people as the present-day cycle-to-work crowd. So it's not really clear if they should prefer parks, or try to avoid them. @rch I very much agree on the need for better public transport, but there's a tacit assumption that all the cars in the Village start or end their journeys there - I get the impression a lot of traffic is cutting through between points further afield. And it has been shown that reducing capacity for traffic does indeed reduce traffic itself - people change their behaviour depending on the options (we'd all probably drive in London a lot more if it weren't so wretchedly slow, and given the environmental consequences it's probably a good thing we don't). And much of the rest is school-related, which is better solved with walking/cycling than public transport: kids behave better when well exercised, and the very high peak/trough travel patterns are difficult for public bus services to cope with.

This time around the cycle groups asked for traffic restrictions on Turney Road, and pedestrian improvements / road capacity reduction on the Court Lane / Calton Avenue side. But (for better or worse, and I realise views on this differ) they were roundly ignored. "Roundabouts as good for cycling", let alone double roundabouts, is 1990s thinking. Works for the big-fast-and-ugly likes of Rendelharris and myself, but won't help anyone slower, less-confident and less agile.. not something I'd be comfortable using with my family, for example.

The police were looking at that moped on Friday afternoon - I'd assumed they were going to take it away; I didn't notice it this morning, is it definitely still there?

Edinburgh and Croydon have been experimenting with restricting parents' drop offs within some radius of schools. The idea being to make walking quicker than driving for those who live within a reasonably walkable distance. The other issue tends to be not with school distance (often quite small) but where the parents have to be after drop off. I know lots of people who drive eminently, easily walkable distances on the school run because the school is in the opposite direction to the station. E-bikes and secure cycle parking at stations have a role to play in addressing this.. they aren't the kind of people who are going to cycle all the way in to work, but if it gets them to the station as quick as the car & won't get stolen (E-bikes are expensive!), they might be convinced.

Personal view - the solution for Lyndhurst Grove is to intervene there as well - traffic calming and/or banned turns. Through traffic belongs on "A" and "B" roads, which are properly engineered for it. Residential streets are for.. well, clue's in the name.