mr.chicken

No.

Mean daily km: Control: +0.6 Near LTN: +0.3 In LTN: -0.7 Traffic is up post pandemic (control), but up less near LTNs and down inside LTNs. In other words LTNs reduce traffic relative to the control not just inside but nearby too. Sounds like a success to me.

What defence, Rockets? You've been ragging on cyclists relentlessly for years, and your excuse is "yeah but he did it second". Which is, like, well, OK dude.

Perhaps then you could all stop spewing anti-cyclist hate (you know who you are) over every relevant thread. It's tiresome and polarising and designed to make every thread descend into a shouting match. It's also deeply irrational. So what IS your motivation?

No affiliation, but I ordered a battery for an out of support Lenovo from battery.co.uk. It arrived in a few days and they appear to have a UK address and everything. Battery has been running perfectly fine for a few months now. There are quite a few fake UK shop out there which have no UK presence and actually ship from China, so you have to be wary of a long wait!

Specifically that one? I don't know. It does line up with the general idea of design speed, which is a well established traffic engineering principle. People won't on the whole drive faster than they feel safe driving. Speed is controlled down by adding complexity: obstacles on the sides of the road, such as trees, constrictions, curves and indeed junctions without a guaranteed right of way. Speed is controlled up with the opposite, which is why motorways are straight and smooth, with a hard shoulder and only merging. I find those low signage places have a better kind of complexity compared to the ones where paint and signs are spammed with wild abandon. In the former, people kind of negotiate, in the latter many people are absolutely sure they're reading them right, except people don't agree and those feel somewhat worse. Also you end up spending more time looking at paint and signs and less looking at the road.

On a different note, it's not a question of just ragging on people as a group, that's unproductive. Cyclists aren't any or more of a felonious group than any others. There are always jerks of course: people who believe the road belongs to them and they can be in control of any vehicle (though they pose more of a danger if it's motorised). Anyway, I like @malumbu's plan for positivity. So how about some positive suggestions? I'll go: how about tackling speeding by changing the design speed of problematic roads to lower the natural speed most people drive at without needing excessive signage and fines?

Maybe I should change to complaining about lycra clad cyclists and their wads 😉 Flattery will get you everywhere 😉

Oh just been out and about. I shall add to the list parking on the pavement Using a phone while driving Indeed they are, and you have absolutely no cold hard numbers in the UK or at all. Without cold, hard numbers, all the claims that cyclists are a bunch of scofflaws are fanciful inventions pulled out of the air to lend false credibility to some claim. You clearly have an axe to grind about cyclists, your weird obsession with Lycra (and wads? was that you?) is a dead giveaway here given that the majority of people puttering around Dulwich over the week are just wearing normal clothes. As for lots and lots of yelling... well that has about as much credibility as, well... 😉

You mean as the government likes to call them. Here, let me post the same link again for you to not read: https://www.gov.uk/electric-bike-rules And to save you the trouble of clicking: here is the relevant quote from the page: It's there in black and white from His Majesty's Government: souped up e-bikes are motorbikes. Anyway you said I'd get to have the last word on that topic 😞

It is not "rubbish" that bikes are less dangerous than cars, it's basic physics. Cars have vastly more kinetic energy and so collisions are more likely to cause larger amounts of damage. When it actually comes down to cold, hard numbers, not warm, soft anecdotes, cyclists are actually more law abiding than cars: https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2019/05/10/cyclists-break-far-fewer-road-rules-than-motorists-finds-new-video-study/ But hey, we all like anecdotes! When it comes to cars, any one here could make one of those videos of drivers doing illegal things. these are very, very common: Not giving way to people waiting to, or actively crossing a road. speeding passing a bicycle with insufficient distance (min 1.5 meters) driving partially on the wrong side of the road (e.g. due to parked cars) and not giving way to oncoming traffic especially bicycles. driving too close to the vehicle in front The list is not exhaustive, those are just the routine, every day law breaking I see from cars every single time I go out. ETA: I want for a walk this morning and also saw: Not stopping at zebra crossing Illegal parking, blocking a crossing point and obscuring views.

This is what I'd like to know. I've not seen a single one which is (a) workable and (b) supported by decades of traffic engineering experience. And why not add on (c) perfect in that it causes no inconvenience at all to anyone under any circumstances. Well quite: there seems to be this thing that's come up here before: a bike once killed someone therefore bikes are as dangerous as cars. While it's true that you're just as dead either way if you're dead it seems to greatly ignore the relative probabilities of ending up that way in either case! I do think the gig economy is a menace in this regards. It's generally taken to be responsible for the quite large number of tipper truck accidents. If you pay people more to make more deliveries, you're giving people an incentive to push the limits. And that causes accidents.

You can also just flat out buy the kits. Google for "500W ebike" and let it complete "conversion kit" for you. The "legitimate" vendors sell them "for use on private land", the less legitimate ones don't even bother with that disclaimer.

Oh thanks for clarifying! I'll definitely calibrate down in future. Er, so for the avoidance of doubt, are your dubious and sometimes invented facts about traffic volumes also jokes? They didn't seem funny (in the humerus sense) but now I think I ought to check. Oh alright, Rockets, I'll bite an give in to your inverted burden of proof! Tell you what if anyone that doesn't have an outstanding apology for spreading misinformation about me still open, and an account older than, say, right now wants to DM me for the link I'll be happy to oblige! Nice of you to let me have the last word. I agree with you that it's important that correct information should be the most prominent. You don't appear to realise that souped ebikes are legally motorbikes here and are illegal without a license and registration, and illegal to ride on bike paths. https://www.gov.uk/electric-bike-rules If you have any evidence that the council is encouraging reckless lawlessness in this regard, please do share! It doesn't help that Amazon for example sell huge numbers of conversion kits for illegal e-bikes through a load of dodgy fly-by-night vendors, which they disclaim all knowledge of It's a good idea to reduce the design speed of a road if people are going too fast, however, the road needs to be wide enough to let emergency vehicles through (this was the result of the consultation).

Oh, thanks! The link doesn't support that claim. That's kind of trivially true anywhere that's sufficiently busy. Ultimately if space is getting short it needs to be dedicated towards the most efficient use of space, which means more or less cars < bikes < mass transit < pedestrians. But we're talking about the city centre here, more like Oxford Street levels of business, which still has people crammed on slow moving pavements while inexplicably small numbers of people in motor vehicles are given an outrageous amount of space. But what is your point? That's got nothing to do with bikes in general. It's a problem of essentially unlicensed motorbikes. As far as I can tell, the main reason why you think this is that I don't agree with you.

This is what you actually said first and what I initially replied to: Nothing about e-bikes. Which you posted in defence of your original point which had nothing to do with (illegal?) e-bikes. It's very hard to have anything approaching a sensible conversation when you keep moving the goalposts so fast.

Yes but that's not what you wrote. You supported something you wrote about bicycles in general with an article specifically about (illegal?) e-bikes. It's not "misrepresentation" for me to accurately read what you write and respond as such. It's fine to talk about either. It's not fine for you to accuse me of misrepresentation when I go by the words on the screen not what's in your head. And speaking of... glass houses... stones... etc Why on earth do you think I'm suggesting that? I think you're somewhat overstating the tension. One group want it pedestrian only. Another group want a bike path. Many people don't feel strongly between those two and a third group want it ripped up and reverted to a line of idling cars stuck in traffic, i.e. what it was before. People are always going to disagree about use of space. There are also reckless and speed oriented drivers. I'll take my chance with 80Kg at 20 miles an hour over 2000 Kg at 45 miles an hour.

Hey, something we agree on! Trams are great.

proliferation of E bikes. See the "E2 in there. This is not, as you claimed "bicycles are a nuisance", this is about what are effectively unlicensed motorcycles. Parleying that into "bicycles are a nuisance" is disingenuous to say the least. The other link does also not say what you seem to think it says. Souped up e-bikes are not functionally different from motorbikes, and are treated as such in law, but I think there's something of a lack of enforcement of existing laws on unregistered motor vehicles. You're always pushing things to wild extremes. You don't need "everything" in walking distance and no one's trying to undo it instantly. The best time to start undoing it was 50 years ago. The second best time is right now. If we do nothing now, we'll keep having transport that stinks forever. So? Again, what's your point?

So? You're assuming that I'm coming from a position wanting to win a war on cars and drivers. But haha! There are drivers in Amsterdam! CHECKMATE! Trouble is, while you're playing a game of chess, I'm playing a game of SimCity. Thing is you're comparing the whole of Amsterdam to just the very heavily urbanised area of Southwark, and even in that, they still have fewer cars. You're also not actually looking at the metrics which make the city liveable, like the pollution levels, journey times, that sort of thing. It's hard to do Apples to Apples comparisons, because every city is different. And yet, we can tell quite easily that London is congested and polluted. Cars aren't going away entirely, there are always going to be journeys which are most practical by car. At the moment, many journeys which could be practical by other means aren't so people go by car. That has the combined effect of making all journeys (by car and otherwise) less practical because cars are not efficient. Quite a lot of car journeys are short. I don't bike at the moment (don't believe everything @Rockets says like his weird and untrue claim about me owning a cargo bike), because the roads are too dangerous and polluted (though I've now tried a number of routes e.g. to Streatham, Brixton, and I'm probably going to get a bike because with all the connected LTNs those look OK now. I don't have a car, and it's pretty annoying sitting on a bus stuck in traffic, especially as bus usage is still down from pre-covid levels with car usage up, which is making bus journey times worse, so people are sticking to their cars forming a nasty feedback loop. Are you talking about pedestrianised areas? Those are not a new idea and to my knowledge have always excluded bicycles in most implementations. From what I gather, the Dutch have a lower threshold for pedestrianising areas than we do on the whole. If you look at how the traffic system is designed, it's not as simple as "cars are a problem" or "bikes are dangerous". The core idea is to reduce conflict between different transport modalities and make most efficient use of the space. This is why separated bike lanes are often provided on roads busy with cars, and why mass transit gets priority over everything else at traffic lights. Sometimes the best solution is separation and where different modalities are strongly encouraged to take different routes.

Being a Green party candidate doesn't mean being correct about everything to do with pollution an traffic engineering. It's not like the Green Party has always called it correctly. Besides if there's insufficient monitoring, then how does this person know? But anyway, the LTN was never going to be the last action in transforming transport in London (Amsterdam started in the 1970s and they are arguably still going). The LTN has reduced total car journeys and once the borough wide CPZ is in place, that will further reduce car use and make other forms of transport more practical.

The idea that CPZs harm local shops sounds intuitive, after all if people can't drive in they won't go to the shops so the reasoning goes, but is it actually correct? On Lordship Lane, the pavement gets really clogged by many people, yet a couple of meters of width is allocated to cars which are often single occupancy and stay there for a fair amount of time. There are far more pedestrians than could arrive by car and it turns out that people vastly overestimate the amount of business from cars versus non car users. Here's an interesting article from before the LTNs were a thing and from a US HQ'd company, so hard to argue they have enough skin in the game to be biased: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-11-26/4-reasons-retailers-don-t-need-free-parking-to-thrive

It may be worth nothing that car ownership in Amsterdam, somewhere notoriously friendly too many forms of non car transport, is 37%, a little lower than Southwark, but not by that much.

I'd just like us to pause and appreciate the irony of your comment. You've deflected a discussion on CPZs to be about the legitimacy of people you don't like holding opinions. But I'm deflecting from the deflection! Oh my pearls! [Clutch]. Clearly we should rip up the LTN and let drivers go to town (figuratively, because the traffic is too bad for it to be literal). So, why not commit to an apology rockets? If your are as right as you and your fellows think you are, then it will never come to pass. You worried it might? While I am the chicken, it appears you just might be one too!

I made no particular claim as to the breadth merely that I have made other posts (but good job you've now also hit point 5 on my list). Anyways, that's, what, 4 things you've invented about me on this thread? Oh come now rockets, we both know you will never get bored of inventing alternative facts about me! You do have a rich internal life and I'm flattered I'm involved in so much of it.