exdulwicher

Not really. You and Penguin have gone down the route of nitpicking and pedantry over what exactly qualifies as "SUV", arguing that they're not as big as US trucks therefore they're not SUVs whereas the article (and the usage of the term SUV in the UK) is much broader and encompasses everything from a Nissan Qashqai / Vauxhall Mokka at one end right up to Porsche Cayenne / BMW X7 etc at the other end. Maybe a more accurate term is "car bloat" where vehicles get marginally bigger / higher / heavier each year. If you look at a first gen BMW X5 for example, it looks a right baby next to the current X5. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-25/bigger-heavier-suvs-worsen-traffic-congestion-in-us That's a US article but the argument holds true over here, in fact more so cos the UK generally has much narrower streets and less off-street parking than the US. It's noticeable now along residential streets how unbelievably narrow the actual usable lane is due to parked cars each side - cars which are way bigger now than they were 10-15 years ago.

I'm struggling to work it out too. It started as a nonsense conspiracy theory that the consultation had somehow been infiltrated by a top secret pro-cycling cabal who successfully swung it to.... oh wait a minute, it was already positive even if you completely discount the "out of area" and "not answered" responses. Then it became an equally nonsensical point that "I have never seen anyone using it" somehow equals "no-one ever uses it" in spite of my analogy of infrastructure that Rockets agreed WAS used in spite of the pictures at that moment showing no usage. Apparently " I can't see anyone using it at this moment" when applied to literally any other bit of infrastructure means "people do use it, they're just not there at the moment" but when applied to cycle lanes it actually means that they're never used. Go figure. I mentioned Strava not because of the exact numbers (which I pointed out are not representative for a number of reasons) but because it's an easy and free way for anyone to have a quick check. Also, in relation to numbers.... What is the "right" number Rockets? How many cyclists need to use the cycle lane for you to consider it worthwhile? If 1000 people use it every week is that OK but if only 10 use it then it needs to ripped out and... what, converted back to roadspace for cars? Converted to pedestrian space? Do you apply this logic to any other infrastructure? Do you sit outside the library and count the number of people using the wheelchair / pushchair ramp to determine if that is also "worthwhile"? What about parking spaces? If one of those is empty, do you demand that some motorist parks there immediately because a valuable bit of land has been allocated to them and therefore it should be used 24/7?

What exactly are you getting at here? I have no idea of the point you're trying to prove other than you seem to have moved on from the conspiracy theory that the cycle lane was "forced through" by some underhand cycle campaign manipulation and now you're trying to prove that it's not used? I'll repeat the questions I posed to Penguin earlier - what constitutes an acceptable level of use? What arbitrary number is the minimum for you and why? It's actually interesting that people say things like "ooh it's a lovely quiet road" or conversely "this road is so busy, it's very unpleasant" but as soon as it's a cycle lane, it's the opposite. Apparently it needs to be rammed with cyclists 24/7 in order to justify it's existence? As soon as it's quiet, it needs to be ripped out? And no, I'm not going to give you the figures from Strava because it's not representative. You will of course know all about this because you're very keen on representative accurate verified data, you've said so many times. As I explained, it's only counting active Strava users who ride the whole segment, it won't be picking up people who ride half of it and turn off, people not using Strava, people who are using it but have set their ride to Private etc, nor is it distinguishing between the cycle lane and the road. In fact the segment I looked at is one way so it's ignoring people going the other way too. It's like counting all the blue cars driving this way -----> along a road and trying to use that as a basis for overall traffic. I know exactly what'll happen if I say "X number of Strava users rode the whole segment this week", you'll twist it to say "only X number of cyclists ever use this lane!" And on that note, I'm off for the weekend. Why don't you pop up there and have a ride along it, see what you can see? Bonus for riding it is that as you descend Sydenham Hill, you can't be caught by the bus lane camera if you're on your bike...

Look at that, there's no-one using Turney Road either! Why aren't motorists using that expensive infrastructure that has been provided for them? It's a lovely day, surely they should be out in droves enjoying their roads?

As I pointed out, Strava only shows how many active Strava users went along the entire segment. If I ride along it (with Strava running) but turn off half way along, I won't complete the segment so I won't show on the stats. If someone rides along it without Strava, it won't show anywhere either. I used the example of Strava because it gave a very quick rebuttal to the utterly stupid "I never see anyone using it" comment. If you want daily stats, direction of travel etc, you'll need a system like Vivacity or induction loops to give a count of every passing cyclist at a specific point. The analogy I'm making is that we both know full well that hundreds of trains travel up and down the WCML every day. But at that moment in time, it looks empty. The point I am making is that just because it LOOKS empty doesn't mean there aren't trains on it. You aren't watching it 24/7 and I'm not really sure why you care anyway.

The money being "poured" into cycle infrastructure is a tiny drop in the ocean compared to the colossal sums being spent on roads. A single junction upgrade on the M25 is costing twice as much as the entire annual active travel budget for the whole country. And this whole "I don't see anyone using it" rubbish. Are you there watching it 24/7? Got a video feed that you scroll through every day? Do you do this with any other infrastructure - stand there in front of the library and count how many people use the wheelchair ramp? Bloody hell, no-one is using the West Coast Main Line either! Best get rid of that.

Nice to see that we've moved on from the usual anti-LTN demands of "We want to see more data, we want the raw data, we want to know this period and that location, it needs to be transparent" to a simple "well I've never seen anyone using it therefore it's a waste of money". Even the most basic look on Strava, the fitness tracking app, shows tens of thousands of rides along there and that's just the people using Strava (which certainly won't be everyone) and the people who've done that full segment from one end to the other (again, won't be everyone, plenty of folk will turn off somewhere along it so won't show in the full segment details). Quick question. Two actually. 1) What, to you, is the number of cyclists who have to be using the infrastructure for you to deem it worthwhile? Would it be worth it for 1001 but not for 999? Also, how long are you giving people to realise there's a cycle lane there and to start using it, is there some kind of Penguin-approved cut-off time. Well it's been a week since it was put in, not seen anyone, time to rip it all out again! 2) Do you do this with any other type of infrastructure? I mean, if the council put a wheelchair / pushchair ramp up the side of a set of steps, would you say "I've never seen any wheelchair user on that, it gives the disabled access lobby a bad name". Would you suggest that it was a waste of money? Would you suggest that a certain minimum number of wheelchair users have to use it to justify it's existence? Cos I'm willing to bet you wouldn't, it'd come across as really quite a stupid thing to say...

You CANNOT have this both ways! On the one had, you've created an imaginary scenario whereby some pro-cycling organisation infiltrated a consultation (with a whopping 26 people, not exactly mass protest level...) to apparently "sway" a decision that had already been shown to be positive and this is outrageous. On the other hand you've just airily dismissed the data-led removal of over a thousand fake submissions to another consultation on the grounds that "people felt really strongly about it". The report talks through the process used to eliminate the dodgy submissions (which I would class as "mitigating manipulation" which you seem to be in favour of) - same IP addresses, same copy/pasted responses etc, it wasn't the council going "ooh, we don't like what Mrs Miggins has written, let's bin that one off..." You can't create a conspiracy over here <----- while ignoring the actual proven example of what you're claiming over there ------> A more appropriate thread might have been a general "isn't it a concern about possible manipulation both for and against...?" and some ideas about what could be done about that - better engagement, more communication about what a scheme is designed to achieve, Citizen's Assembly type arrangements maybe. Although nothing will ever please some people; I'm sure in some cases you could run consultation in a person's living room and they'd probably still find a way of claiming they were out getting a pot of tea at the point that vote was made and therefore it's all a con.

You've done what you always do. Cherry pick a statistic, a single point of data, the position of a single traffic count tube. Weave some wild-eyed conspiracy theory around it as "proof" of how something has been subverted or "got through". Lose any sight of the bigger picture and repeatedly double down on the nonsense. Your hypothesis is that a public consultation was "hijacked" or infiltrated or swayed by the involvement of some unnamed pro-cycling organisation. Yes? Let's assume for the moment that it was Southwark Cyclists, they're the independent borough branch of the London Cycling Campaign (LCC). There are over 800 members of LCC living within Southwark so if Southwark Cyclists emailed them all and said "here's a consultation, get in there quick and we'll rig it", to get a grand total of 26 "non-resident" supporters is pretty poor. In fact it actually blows your theory out of the water - if SC / LCC had emailed 800 people and said "respond favourably to this" there'd almost certainly have been a minimum of 100 responses, probably more. So the options are: 1) SC / LCC emailed all their 800+ members in Southwark (or their 12,000 members across London) and a total of 26 out of 800 (or 26 out of 12,000) of these hardcore campaigners, the All-Powerful Cycle Cabal that you keep going on about actually bothered to click a link, click a few answers and submit. Hmm. So much for the All-Powerful Cycle Lobby that has apparently infiltrated all layers of Government. 2) Your hypothesis is wrong. You know what it's likely to be? Sydenham Hill is right on the Lewisham / Southwark border. But the ridge, just over the top is Bromley. And a bit further along, you can drop off the ridge north into Lambeth or south into Croydon. Plenty of people along the ridge will walk, cycle, get the bus or drive across borough. Maybe work in Forest Hill, live on the ridge? Maybe live in Crystal Palace, in Forest Hill. You only have to be a few hundred metres along from it to count as "out of borough". There's a further part that blows your ridiculous conspiracy as well. The text at the bottom says: The majority of those who responded are residents of the Southwark side of Sydenham Hill with the next highest proportion being resident of surrounding areas. The majority of those who responded from Southwark and Lewisham support the proposals or support the proposals with changes. I'm going to highlight this part: the majority of those who responded from Southwark and Lewisham support the proposals or support the proposals with changes. To me, that implies that they did what I suggested in my previous post, namely that they've applied some sort of weighting to prioritise the from Southwark and Lewisham responses and downweight the rest. Either way, whether you take those out of borough responses or not, the scheme still had majority support, either as it stood or with changes. Doesn't look like the All-Powerful Cycle Lobby had a lot to do with that really does it? In fact, the total number of responses suggests that very few people really cared one way or the other. If you really want to find attempts to manipulate consultations, try looking at the anti-LTN lot, they're quite blatant about it all: https://brixtonblog.com/2022/01/concerted-attempts-to-manipulate-brixton-ltn-consultation/ https://lastnotlost.wordpress.com/2021/12/29/consultationfakes/

You know how consultations work, yes? By and large, anyone can respond. That can include, but is not limited to, residents and any users of that bit of road (or park, concert venue, gallery, school, whatever else it is you're consulting on...). Done correctly, there is sometimes a weighting profile where the views of someone who for example lives outside the borough but visits twice a week is given less priority than a resident on the road itself - although that can open up all manner of attempted rigging where respondents claim to be something they're not which often requires data analysis, cross reference with electoral registers etc; it's how the multiple fraudulent attempts by anti-LTN campaigners were found in both Southwark and Lambeth consultations although mysteriously you don't seem to have started a thread on that... So the various campaign groups (which again can include London Cycling Campaign, Southwark Cyclists, Make Cyclists Pay Road Tax.org, Roads For Cars Not Bikes.com) can distribute the consultation to their members and suggest they make their views known. One Dulwich routinely do this with anti-LTN stuff, London Cycling Campaign routinely do it with pro-cycling stuff, hell even the local schools will routinely send stuff out to former pupils urging them to get behind some campaign or other. Can I also remind you that back in 2022 you were broadly in favour of the scheme on Sydenham Hill, in fact you pointed out that reducing speed down there should be a priority: https://www.eastdulwichforum.co.uk/topic/311568-new-traffic-calming-and-cycle-lane-on-sydenham-hill/ Third post down. Edit: Also, welcome back. 😉

That's WHY infrastructure is being provided (albeit fairly limited and piecemeal). You don't wait until there are 1000 people a day swimming across the river before you build a bridge. You - not unreasonably - point out that no-one is able to easily cross the river, let's build a bridge. You don't ask why a housing estate is being built in a field because no-one lives in that field at the moment - it's understood that no-one is living there BECAUSE there are no houses. Build it and they will come. Saying "I can't see any cyclists, why are you building a cycle lane?" is a bit like pointing at a field and saying "I can't see any cars driving through it, why are you building a road?"

So actually, you have no idea of anything, just a list of assumptions and beliefs about how long you think this work should take? Seemingly based upon another belief that all contractors are inherently lazy ne'er-do-wells and a Mayor who apparently "despises" South London (in spite of actually being born in Tooting, being a councillor for Wandsworth and then an MP for Tooting) You might have shared your expertise in project management, road design, phasing of works, the numerous different organisations involved (and the associated numerous different bits of infrastructure under the roads), risk management...?

Other search engines are available. I assume you want things like gas, water, sewage, electricity, internet, safer roads...? Cos if you do, that's the price of them, occasional disruption when those things are repaired, replaced, upgraded etc. The idea that you'd be consulted on all of them is insane. And even when consultations happen, they're not Yes/No answers, no-one is going to say "do you want a sewer pipe or are you OK with all your waste running down the street like in the Dark Ages?", they're "we are going to do X, have you got any thoughts on it?"

I believe the dog(s) in question was/were found and destroyed. That said, I also think there were a couple of cases in fairly short order; one where another dog was killed, one where a dog was attacked but survived. I remember reading it on here and hearing about it locally in a sort of "friend of a friend" type way but I think the two reports got mixed up with details from (I believe) two cases confused and crossed as often happens in these situations. Definitely up around Sydenham Woods though.

So is SUV.