exdulwicher

Let me know when a cyclist destroys a marble fountain and we can discuss it.

It isn't, they use RTC. Road Traffic Collision. Accident would imply that no-one was at fault but in a road collision, especially one with injuries, there may be a future criminal prosecution (for, eg, careless driving, driving under the influence etc) so they deliberately do NOT use accident.

I reckon that if that was 46 recorded incidents of Lime bikes / Lime e-scooters hitting "things" (be that people walking or cycling, cars, solid objects) you'd be calling it a bloodbath of epic proportions and wanting them banned immediately.

Bear in mind, while you're all discussing whether it's 60 or 200 or whatever, that CrashMap only relates to personal injury accidents on public roads that are reported to the police, and subsequently recorded, using the STATS19 accident reporting form. Information on damage-only accidents, with no human casualties or accidents on private roads or in car parks are not included. So the poor fountain died for nothing cos it won't be recorded on there. Which means that the number of actual crashes will be significantly higher than shown on that map.

It's clearly the fault of the fountain cos it's not wearing a helmet or hi-vis and doesn't pay any road tax. Really, it got what it deserved. Equally likely of course is that a poor innocent driver was proceeding entirely legally when suddenly a swarm (herd? flock?) of e-scooterists, Lime bikers and e-cargo bikes hurtled out of nowhere forcing the poor fountain into taking evasive action and it leapt into the path of the car. Could happen to any driver.

Oh God, I can already visualise this in an estate agent window: "nestled in the heart of the Upper Dulwich quadrant is this modest 7 bedroom 5 bathroom apartment...." And then overhearing a conversation, maybe at a posh cafe, along the lines of "well, I live in Upper Dulwich you know...yes it's a charming little place, only the 7 bedrooms but we get by... Nanny of course has the attic room..."

I feel I'm being misquoted or at least selectively quoted. It is very easy to check for and compensate for inaccuracies by cross-referencing with other sources of data. No-one is using these in isolation, they are there to support other sources. If there are wild disagreements between what the sensor is saying and what congestion monitoring, manual traffic counts, video feeds, bus journey times etc are all saying then you can investigate further, maybe disregard the bad stuff, reposition the sensor, apply a correction factor etc. You would also have a look for local events that could have caused a change to the normal traffic pattern. And as I also mentioned, you do not need to count every vehicle on every road and the idea that even a single vehicle missed is some kind of "OMG, teh D4tA i5 BAD!!!" gotcha is simply not true. The fact is that even "bad data" can be very useful in highlighting issues and errors.

That's called sound methodology. It accepts and explains that not all data is good and - once again - there is a wider context. It's not specifically about tube counters, it's more to do with the overall data supplied by some (not all) councils not being up to the required standard for analysis so it gets discarded, ignored from the overall review. This is entirely normal in statistics, you invariably get some data that is corrupt, insufficient etc so, unless it can be properly validated and revised, it gets discarded. This should actually play into the hands of the anti-LTN folk cos there are fewer chances to prove LTNs are good. However the overall review of all the schemes using all the data that is available, was still overwhelmingly positive. Back to the tube counter stuff. They get extensively tested and validated by the councils, authorities etc that buy them. No-one is going to buy into a scheme that gives duff data but these counters are used all over the world. It's very easy to validate this stuff - you can run test scenarios, cross-reference with other independent sources of data and apply corrective factors if required, none of this is in any way unusual or radical. The tubes do more than just count vehicles. They measure speed (so it's easy to tell if it's free-flowing traffic or congestion), vehicle type and (depending on placement) they can also determine things like queue length and you can extrapolate from that delay times which is why it's actually quite handy to have them near junctions sometimes; it can measure how far back from the junction is routinely becoming congested. And as I said before, the info that the tube counters gives is cross-referenced with other data and compiled to give an overall picture. You're not after counting every vehicle on every road; you're after overall trends and patterns, increases and decreases over time and the reasons behind that - reasons which could include a new housing estate / school / supermarket etc causing an increase or a School Street / LTN causing a decrease. As a quick example, the most common "road load" number is called AADT - Annual Average Daily Traffic. It's basically a count of X vehicles use this road in a week then it must be X x 52 in a year or X/7 per day. That's useful for calculating expected wear and tear on the road, roadworks frequencies etc but it doesn't give the exact pattern of use because it's not (eg) 1200 vehicles per day spread neatly as 50 vehicles per hour 24/7. It's a very uneven load of <10 vehicles per hour at night rising to maybe 300 per hour for 90 mins in morning peak and then dropping off sharply during the day then rising again in the afternoon. However the AADT figure is widely used as an overall number. It's a good example of how you need a number of data points to give you the overall picture of road use. So in short, yes, the counters are fine.

Oh bless. II think I've found the post you're referring to in the Streetspace thread, 15th May 2023? Feel free to tell me if it's another one of mine that you've found though. Right - accuracy. Tube counters work to supplement other sources of data (including, but not limited to) mobile phone/satnav data, roadworks databases, information from other sensors (such as Vivacity, independent traffic counts, TfL cameras etc) and their advantage is that a number of them can be deployed pretty quickly and at any location. They're left in place for a period of time, come of them upload data to the cloud of their own accord, some of the older ones need collecting and downloading. Location: You can NEVER have a free-flowing road by the way. Any road, from the smallest cul-de-sac off LL to the M1 can be subject to "congestion", it might be 5 minutes cos Amazon and DPD can't agree on which of them needs to back up, it might be 30 minutes while the refuse collection truck potters along the street or it might be a day cos some idiot has rammed their SUV into the bollards along EDG again. The data: you look at the traffic counts and cross-reference. Example: Oh look, there's a 30-min period on Tuesday morning when only 6 cars went across it. What does it look like either side of that timeframe? What does it look like on other days? What was the counter up the road saying about traffic going the other way? What would we *expect* at this time on a Tuesday morning? But rather than look at that one 30-min timeframe, you're doing it over the whole of the period it was left in place, looking for TRENDS. It doesn't matter if one day there's 1000 vehicles and every other day there's only 850 - trends like that are pretty regular (Friday afternoons!), you can often pick out individual events (such as a football match or a school open day, which is another source of cross-reference) and, if you do that often enough over a period of months, you gain a very good understanding of traffic trends that smooths out the short notice congestion stuff like a particularly busy day or a single accident or a 2 week period of roadworks. Crucially, they are as accurate as they need to be for supplementing other sources of data and for being rapidly deployed on pretty much any road in the borough, unlike more permanent sensors such as the Vivacity ones which need wiring into the lamp column, calibrating and verifying. Quick analogy is that a pilot doesn't just rely on one instrument to show their speed; they'll have GPS, air speed indicator (uncalibrated), True Airspeed (which is the uncalibrated figure corrected for altitude and temperature), Ground speed (which is True adjusted for wind speed and direction), mach number indicator... It's the same here. What's also the same is that no matter how much data there is and how much the council publish, the anti-folk will always claim it's not enough, it's not in the right place, or the right time, it's not representative, it's not accurate, it's fake... Except if the data shows an increase in traffic at which point it'll be 100% valid and all traffic schemes should instantly be removed cos it's a dead-cert that they've failed.

This argument that "the council are overreaching their legal powers" has taken on the same sort of myth as some of that Magna Carta "freeman of the land" nonsense that was doing the rounds during Covid... The council have a statutory duty to manage the roads in the borough that don't come under the jurisdiction of National Highways or TfL (and even there, they all have to work together). That includes maintenance, lighting, pavements, traffic orders (for things like roadworks, street parties, markets etc) and also the basics that people rarely think about - parking be a big one in that. Paid for vs free, unlimited vs time limited and so on. If a road has unlimited free parking and it's filling up to the detriment of residents, tradespeople etc then putting in some form of restriction is a logical way of dealing with some of the issues - not all of them all of the time but many of these measures work together. Councils have been doing CPZ for decades - the main point of one is actually to avoid loads of signage and street clutter from painting out individual bays and putting parking meters etc in, it's not some radical new idea. It's not an overreach of legal powers, it's doing their statutory duty.

https://tfl.gov.uk/bus/status/ There's a search bar to put in the bus service number and it shows you the full route with any diversions. The permit for the Thames Water works has been extended from the original date of 12th September to a new date of 26th September so, although it's open at the moment, I guess further closures can't be ruled out.

That would be just as disingenuous as no consultation, you're providing answers that simply aren't an option. Link here to an article in SE22 magazine from Cllr McCash which mentions the CPZ being in the manifesto. https://twitter.com/CleanAirDulwich/status/1698991374614368326?t=bNTkkVq8bntxjgDwOFQzhQ&s=19 There's further reasons why it's needed - reallocation of roadspace for various other purposes (EV charging bays, cycle hangers, parklets etc) general nudging away from cars most of which tie in with the overall Mayor's London transport strategy and Southwark's declared climate emergency and their own streetspace strategies. So having "no CPZ" as a possible answer isn't an option, there's going to be a CPZ. A lot of public consultation, in it's current form, is a waste of time; it's an insult to the population (most of whom are being asked questions that they're not equipped to answer because they're not experts) and it's an insult to the experts who have dedicated their time and careers to the matter in question (this applies to most consultations, not just transport or roads). But consultations are done, the results come out and then something else happens because the "answers" that were given are nonsense. That corrodes the trust between the authorities and the population. So to prevent, or at least minimise that, you don't ask open ended questions and you don't provide impossible options. It's like asking your kids what they want for tea; sooner or later you're going to get an answer of "brontosaurus on toast" or "a bucket of ice cream" and the kid is going to be disappointed when that turns out not to be an option. So you don't ask the open ended "what do you want for tea?", you ask a much more focused "do you want fish & chips or pizza?" Both of those are reasonable options, a choice has been given but it doesn't permit stupid answers. It's still a valid consultation. Just because you don't like it doesn't make it any less valid.

They do. Local roads are maintained by the council so anyone who pays council tax contributes to that. I mean you have those free-loading kids who don't pay any taxes plus the folk on benefits but basically all council taxpayers, whether they own a car or not, whether they use a bike or not, all pay for the roads. And before you start about "yeah but drivers pay road tax..." there are plenty of cars subject to £0 VED. https://www.carwow.co.uk/guides/running/which-cars-are-exempt-from-road-tax#gref

That's not quite true - there's plenty of baseline data from various sources, the issues are around trying to sort out correlation and causality from factors such as Covid (far and away the main one) but also things like schools, general demographics, car ownership, changes in how data is gathered/interpreted and where/how that baseline is actually taken cos it's a moving target. New AI-powered sensors and video feeds are giving councils huge amounts of extra data that they never had before so there's definitely a learning curve in how all that gets interpreted and factored into the bigger picture - you can sort of model it backwards a bit once you've got some trendlines and cross-reference it with previous data from automated traffic counts, manual counts, mobile phone data to double check previous baselines - stuff I've seen has generally been within a few %, it's rare to get anything truly out of whack. It's important to get a sense of other goings on as well and factor those into occasional days or weeks of abnormal counts. Roadworks is the big one - LL is going to show a dramatic drop in traffic this week! - but stuff like accidents , building works and so on can also feed in. The TfL report that basically said "bus times are a bit slower and we fixed it by altering the traffic light timings at Herne Hill". That one? The kind of thing that TfL do dozens of times a week. Although to be fair, HH is a nightmare junction, massively constrained by the railway bridge and the sheer number of drivers jumping the lights and then getting caught in the middle of the junction.

I'm talking about that specific case of the Newcastle one. It doesn't mean that all LTNs are bad or badly designed, we're referring to that specific one linked to in the news articles previously.