exdulwicher

From the first line in that article you linked to: A record-high of nearly 10 million fines were issued to London drivers last year in what experts claim to be a “money-making exercise”. What experts? Who are they? There's no indication there as to who these "experts" actually are, who they work for... Surely that fails the very first part of your transparency test? In other threads, you're arguing that much more should be done to fine cyclists for these same offences, but when it comes to drivers, you're outraged at this apparent cash cow. Tad hypocritical don't you think? 42,000 fines in 23/24, 48,000 fines in 24/25 - as you care so much about safety on the roads, surely you should be outraged that there's that number of people breaking the rules? Or more to the point, that number of people being caught, it'll be a tiny fraction of those that commit the same offences and aren't caught. It's not a pile-on, don't be so melodramatic. The thing is, there's actually some useful, constructive and positive debate to be had here but you insist on turning everything into a conspiracy. It's like trying to "debate" with a Flat Earther. Every time you debunk their nonsense, they go further down the line of "you're must be in on it, you're a paid NASA shill, you're ideologically obsessed with the globe model..." Same here, you've accused several people (including me I believe) of being paid council shills, we're ideologically obsessed with cycling, we're anti-car... And yet you never see that same aspect (from the other side of the coin) in yourself. Although actually on a revived thread a little while ago I did find this (see below) and I thought: Rockets and I agree on something! I was going to add that you must prefer it because it's right on the lovely Dulwich Square and then thought that your blood pressure might not take such accusations! 😉

Maybe look in the mirror Rockets. It's always you that starts these threads - a link to a headline, a tenuous link to Dulwich / Southwark and a "conclusion" that happens to match your exact opinions on the subject. I'm willing to bet that if we did a posts by author count on the Transport board, your name would account for at least 1/3rd of the input. THAT is relentless... This ^^ - Earl comes along and fact-checks you, you double down on it and drag out complexities and exhausting details - in this case stuff about exactly where your car wheel can cross a bus lane, but you've done it before with the exact positioning of a traffic counter on a road or the timing of roadworks for example. Southwark's Conspiracy Department must really have their hands full dealing with all this! No wonder they need all the money from poor hard-working drivers, it's to pay the wages of the "where shall we put a traffic counter today?" team and the "where should we paint a bus lane to cause maximum distress to Rockets?" crew and the "no, wait a week until we start those roadworks to inconvenience as many people as possible" department... 😉

The problem this year is that 5th November falls on a Wednesday. So some places will be bringing their "bonfire night" forward to Saturday 1st and some will be knocking it back to Saturday 8th and there'll probably be a few that just go with Wednesday 5th anyway. If you're doing a public display, having it on a weekend gets more crowds. Which basically means a solid week of fireworks.

Individual crashes - unlikely. Not a lot can stop someone who's determined to drive at 50mph while drunk at 3am. Collectively (when driving in normal traffic conditions) - yes. All it needs is one car doing 20mph and everyone else behind is forced to drive at 20. Medical episodes - statistically, medical issues are a factor in about 7% of crashes so it's pretty rare (certainly rare enough to usually not immediately leap to that as a "well the driver could have had a medical episode!" excuse that gets trotted out here as soon as a car ends up in a wall) but if the speed limit is 20, assuming the driver is doing 20-ish at the time they have this incredible coincidence heart attack, the out of control car is going to do less damage than one doing 30mph.

It's right there Rockets, you've said that slowing traffic has an economic impact. I'm assuming something something people sitting in their car for longer instead of being at their desk Doing Important Work...? The flipside is that there's an economic impact to collisions as well. A vehicle / pedestrian crash at 30mph is about 8x more severe (8x higher likelihood of death) than a crash at 20mph. https://www.brake.org.uk/get-involved/take-action/mybrake/knowledge-centre/speed/speed-and-injury At 20mph you're less likely to crash, if you do crash the consequences are much less severe. You've seen the pics on here of cars on their roofs, cars in central reservations (usually playing them down with the inevitable "we don't know what happened!!") - what about the economic impact of clearing up all that, the delays, the impact on the NHS, the cost to insurance (and ultimately the customer)? There's an economic impact to congestion as well. At 20mph, traffic flows more smoothly (it's right there in the CIHT report I linked to), journey times are more reliable. There's another (very in depth) report here about driving styles, pollution, journey times and so on also looking at the type of vehicle. https://futuretransport.info/urban-traffic-research/ Towards the bottom of that page, there is a link to a computer simulation model looking at vehicle sizes, normal stop/go urban traffic and speed limits and the conclusion was that if everyone drove golf cart vehicles at 15mph, everyone would get to the destination faster based on a combination of smaller vehicles being more space-efficient (you can fit more of them through a set of green lights) with lower speed limits reducing congestion and smoothing traffic flow. These kind of threads are always entertaining. 20mph in a car is far too slow, inefficient, "economic impact", it's too difficult to drive at 20mph, it's not appropriate on this road blah blah. 20mph on a bike is reckless and foolhardy and hooligan and lycra lout and "what if they hit someone?!" Standard motorcentric attitude...

Page 3, a post you made on Oct 23rd:

That ^^ from the previous page asking about links to studies on 20mph and effect on journey times... https://www.ciht.org.uk/news/20mph-speed-limits-mean-more-reliable-journeys/ CIHT is Chartered Institute of HIghways and Transportation. Click on the link above and read the report then there are other links taking you to who they are, what they do etc. Your critical point of failure in this argument is assuming that a 30mph limit means people drive at a steady and consistent 30. No-one, in the entire history of the universe, has ever driven along the South Circular at a consistent 30mph. You might get up to 30 (or even 40, although naturally no-one on here has ever exceeded the speed limit at all) but then you'll get to lights, traffic, junctions, a herd of irresponsible cyclists who think they own the road, a badly parked lorry, the front of a school at 3pm.. It is impossible to do a steady 30, you just arrive at the next pinch point or congestion fractionally sooner. As the report shows, if you smooth the flow out by doing lower speeds, more cars can fit onto the same amount of road, there's less gas / brake / gas / brake that causes so much variance in speed and less wear and tear on your car and the road. And less vibration going through the road means fewer burst water mains too. Your journey time *might* be fractionally slower at 20mph (although this is highly dependent on how far you're going and on what roads at what time of day) but the variance in journey time (the difference between the slowest journey and the fastest) is less so it's more consistent. And consistency / reliability of journey time is a bigger factor for most people than actual time taken.

It's usually a combination of "nearly Halloween", "nearly Bonfire Night", "weekend" and "dickheads". You can adjust the sliding scale on each of those factors most nights for the next 3-4 weeks.

And you then quote an extensive section of the report outlining 20mph zones and why it's a bit more difficult to analyse them but it's all still valid data... ??? And it's still got nothing to do with cyclists (or drivers) jumping red lights. Edit: I've also explained on another thread about the issues of "free-flow" and why it's really quite a nebulous concept in urban environments.

That's a bit rich coming from you Rockets! The forum is full of your selective use of stats, cherry picking of data, misreading / misunderstanding of articles, unfounded accusations against Southwark / Rachel Aldred / Peter Walker / the "active travel lobby" and numerous threads where you rail against cyclists and cycle lanes in general. And any time there's anything about a vehicle collision or incident, you'll look to minimise it, have a go at anyone criticising it and then it just becomes like this thread has, an increasingly tiresome tit-for-tat where you'll post some general nonsense, Earl will step in to correct it and you accuse him (her/it?) of doing exactly what you're doing. This thread has long since stopped being about cyclists jumping lights (one of at least 2 threads on the front page on that subject, see also https://www.eastdulwichforum.co.uk/topic/365768-why-do-cyclists-flaunt-the-rules-note-this-is-not-a-bashing-thread-and-should-not-be-turned-in-to-a-but-what-about-drivers-thread/ ) and just relapsed into the same old same old. Much like how the traffic drops noticeably during school holidays, it was very noticeable how the traffic on this section of the forum dropped significantly when you were on your little enforced "holiday"...

Agreed - it's already noted in the LTN 1/20 guidance (LTN in this case means Local Transport Note, not Low Traffic Neighbourhood!). Basically it's the guidance setting out how infrastructure for walking, wheeling and cycling should be designed and built, and it covers shared space and segregated space but it notes that the old days where a council could paint a line down the middle of a pavement for a bit then put a blue "Cyclists Dismount" sign at the end of it is nowhere close to acceptable any more. This obviously applies double for any form of adapted bike, trike, cargo bike etc which are far bigger and far less manoeuvrable than "traditional" bikes which is largely what has been accommodated so far. Thankfully there are an increasing number of parking bays, cycle hangers etc designed for e-bikes, cargo bikes, adapted bikes etc now. Give over Rockets. Funny how pedantry is really your strong point when it suits you but now you're just going "they're all e-bikes!" They're not, at all. Even the law says they're not so your statement is simply wrong. "e-bike" (in the colloquial term) refers to EAPC - Electrically Assisted Pedal Cycle. These are the legal bikes sold by reputable manufacturers and it also includes Lime, Dott etc. No throttle, the motor can only assist when pedalling, the motor cuts out at 25kph blah blah. It's all enshrined in law. You can even read about it here cos I know how much you'll want references and data points and "where did you get this info from?" https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/electrically-assisted-pedal-cycles-eapcs/electrically-assisted-pedal-cycles-eapcs-in-great-britain-information-sheet However "e-bike" is also used colloquially (and incorrectly) to refer to any sort of electrically-powered 2-wheel bike-shaped thing, usually by people who don't know or care about the differences and sometimes by media seeking some clickbait. If it has a throttle, it's regarded in law as a moped or motorbike. That can actually be legal if it's registered, insured, taxed, has a number plate and so on. But you can buy them from any number of websites including Amazon, sold under the guise of "they're legal if they're only used on private land" disclaimer which as we all know is a total get-out clause. Whatever "crackdown" has to happen needs to be from a mix of angles. Confiscate the illegal bikes, absolutely. But then the Uber Eat / Deliveroo lot simply beg, borrow, buy or steal another one and they're back on the road in 24hrs - mostly because the whole system of gig economy basically demands that they use the cheapest fastest mode of transport possible. You also need to go after the online sellers saturating the market with illegal bikes, the back-street "workshops" that work on them or modify them (most reputable bike shops won't touch them) and the people selling crap quality batteries. All those battery fires are from illegally modified bikes, often being used with aftermarket batteries and incompatible chargers. Actual EAPCs from reputable manufacturers aren't a problem. And in law, EAPC is regarded as "a bike". Same as any other normal road-legal bike. Allowed to use the same trails, paths, infrastructure as any other normal road-legal bike.

Not easily. Firstly, they're called Civil Enforcement Officers and, in England, they simply don't have the legal powers to be stopping people. There is an option, which I've mentioned before, where a council can create a Public Spaces Protection Order - this is a measure used to control anti-social behaviour so you have to state the issue being addressed (eg drinking in a public place) and the area that it is applied to, so it can't just be "everywhere", you'd have to state (eg) "Lordship Lane between Goose Green and North Cross Road" and that can be enforced by police & PCSO's and delegated council officials (who must carry ID). They're a bit of a blunt instrument and they can't just be put in any old how; there has to be a reason and a consultation on if it's the right approach in the right place. The more serious traffic offences (RLJ, mobile phone use, speeding etc) are prosecuted by the police (or by cameras) and (usually) a fine issued unless it really is serious (like causing injury or death) in which case it'll go to court. This also picks up on a point made a few weeks back: This is just not true. Fines, as issued by the police or automatically by camera for the offences I mentioned, go to central government. They're not ringfenced, they don't affect future police funding (or lack thereof). The only exception is when a driver gets offered something like a speed awareness course where the fine is used to pay for the venue, the trainers and the training material. The council can only enforce existing traffic regulations in their area so stuff like parking (which was specifically given to councils to free up police time for more serious crimes), and infringement of local restrictions like driving in a bus lane or through an LTN. The funds from that do go to the council but are ringfenced for Highways use, usually road safety stuff. As usual, pretty much all the legislation for dealing with this is already in place. Police can (and do) stop cyclists for RLJ and there's been a noticeable crackdown on use of illegal e-bikes and e-scooters, especially up around City of London. But ultimately, there has to be a sense of proportion around it. Same as you can't catch every speeding driver, you focus on the areas where that speeding is definitely dangerous like outside a school at 3.30pm.

Not removed as such - there are raised tables (like flattened speed bumps) installed which help both to slow down drivers and to provide a level crossing surface for wheelchair users / buggies etc. Better than dropped kerbs, it essentially raises the road to kerb level so it's a lot easier for pedestrians to negotiate while also providing a clearer visual aspect to drivers. And kerbs have never stopped drivers going onto the pavement. If you want to actually stop that you need bollards or guardrails.

That's just disingenuous use of statistics. Fairly obviously, if you have no rental e-bikes, no-one can fall off one. If you then introduce rental e-bikes, people can and will have accidents on them, either falling off themselves via stupidity, drunkeness, road defects etc or from a collision with a vehicle. Kind of like how there were no road deaths or injuries from cars in 1850 cos cars didn't exist but people managed to make up for that by falling off horses or being run down by horse drawn carriages. Talking of statistics, the BBC article doesn't have any stats at all, it's just anecdata and what-iffery. Wonder how many people were in A&E that day after being hit by a car...?

That's rather my point - you cater for EVERYONE, minority or not. Taken to it's logical conclusion, you may as well say that since most people can walk fine, we don't need step-free access. However I bet you'd never say that cos you'd rightly be outed as a compete muppet... And fortunately, "jazzer hasn't seen anyone using it" is not a verified metric in transport stats.