exdulwicher

It was 1968 and it still didn't set a speed limit for bicycles. Seriously Rockets, this has been done to death and I mentioned it in one of the first replies on here. Speed limits do not apply to bicycles. You can be done for the wonderfully named Careless and Wanton Cycling but not for speeding. And literally every time someone tries doing it (even in the headline you linked to in the opening post) whatever fines are issued are almost invariably rescinded after being argued about for a while. I do wonder though, what would you say if a driver was issued a PCN for driving at (say) 9mph? Would you be on here saying they were caught bang to rights, should pay the fine immediately and never set foot in the park again? Or would you come up with the usual stuff about "war on motorists", the council treating the hard-working motorist as an easy target / cash cow, couldn't they go and find some real criminals, what a ridiculously stringent speed limit... ? Also, you try riding a bike at a steady 5mph. Not easy is it, especially a laden e-cargo bike. You need a bit of speed to keep them stable.

Doesn't apply to bikes either but that doesn't seem to stop you wanting every last one of them fined!

Yep. Most joggers, a fair few kids, and pretty much every driver and cyclist! Parkrun would be fascinating. Ooh, just under 30 minutes for 5km, yep, that's 10kph, 6.2mph, you're in breach too, just pay the nice chap from Southwark over there. See you next week!

The 12mph speed is generally regarded as a sort of tipping point. Helmets for example are tested to withstand a fall at 12mph. Shared use foot / cycle paths generally have a guidance for designers of 12mph, the idea being that if you're faster than that you should be on the road. Also 12mph is 20kph so it's kind of a logical number. It's all a bit archaic and disorganised and of course byelaws from the GLC days did not predict e-bikes (and to be clear, I'm talking about the legal ones that cut off at 15.5mph, you have to pedal to make them work, blah blah. Not the illegal souped up e-motorbikes which are already illegal for multiple other reasons!)

We've been through this before. Speed limits don't apply to cyclists. 5mph on a bike is the sort of speed that has most people falling off. None of that is to say that people shouldn't behave sensibly but the whole speed limit thing is ridiculous. Also, how many drivers adhere to that. I think you'll find it's vanishingly few...

The fact that they are completely different areas with totally different population density, land use and traffic volumes etc has seemingly passed you by?

It's not cycle *lanes* as such. What has happened a fair bit going back to the introduction of cycle superhighways was the use of bus lanes to connect things up very easily and cheaply. Back then of course there weren't as many cyclists and generally it all worked fairly well but asking a small squashy cyclist who wants to travel at a relatively constant speed and a very large heavy bus that wants to go fast - stop - fast - stop - fast etc to share the same space is a stupid idea. Yes, it kind of works when there aren't many cyclists but you get to a crunch point where there are so many cyclists now (there's another thread about that!) that every time the bus stops, a flow of cyclists passes and keeps passing which makes it difficult for the bus to pull out again. Once it's out and going, it's trying to pass all the cyclists before then trying to pull in again, right in front of them. And so it repeats. It slows the bus down, it's very dangerous for cyclists, especially if they're caught in a blind spot and it's frustrating for the driver who is then tempted into taking more risks. There are various answers and options: 1) Bus stop bypasses. In spite of the wails of protest from some people, far and away the best (in fact almost the only) solution if you're going to ask bikes and buses to share the same space is to give the bikes a bypass at the back of the stop and the bus can then pull in and out without ever having to negotiate a constant flow of bikes. 2) 24/7 bus lane enforcement. This works for both bikes and buses because it means they're not constantly having to pull out into traffic and back in again to avoid a single parked car. Also bus priority junctions. There's a few of these up the Walworth Road and also at the bottom of DKH heading south; traffic lights with a lane for buses to nip in up the side and get in front while the cars are stopped. Saves the bus having to wait forever until a driver finally lets them out and also largely negates the bike overtaking issue - either the bikes wait behind the bus and follow it through or they move right which puts them in the main traffic lane stopped at the light. 3) Completely segregated cycle lanes. Stop the bikes and buses mixing in the first place. 4) And related to that, reallocation of road space to both buses and bikes. A lane for bikes here. A lane for buses there. Remove the cars. Not going to work everywhere of course but there are some roads where cars could be sent a longer way around. Tottenham Court Road is a good example.

It's standard for Rockets to just drop in a headline with no other text, no opinion (at this stage anyway!) and no wider discussion points. Also (from reading the article) it was one fine which was subsequently rescinded. They usually are - even when there are allegedly local byelaws to "enforce" some sort of action against speeding cyclists, no-one is aware of it and most don't have a speedo and most of the very occasional enforcement is so embarrassingly over the top that the council will eventually just sigh and let it go. The Royal Parks (notably Richmond) have occasional "crackdowns" on speeding cyclists which then ends up in an interminable back-and-forth as to whether or not speed limits apply to bikes (they don't) and whether or not Richmond Park has a byelaw to cover it (it does / it doesn't / it does again / it doesn't / oh no it really doesn't...). What do we reckon for this one? 8 pages? Can we run a sweepstake on how many times someone suggests number plates and road tax for cyclists? Or can we just pick one of the eighteen older threads where this sort of nonsense has been done to death by the same people and reference that?

Another vote for The Cheese Block on LL but for 20 adults, you'd better be willing to pay a fair chunk of money or hope that they'll be happy with very small amounts of cheese! Other than that, supermarket or search online for a large Christmas cheese hamper and take your pick. For example: https://www.finecheese.co.uk/collections/christmas-selections-hampers (only mentioning them as we had a gift hamper, much smaller than a big Christmas one, from them a while ago and it was very nice). I'm sure there are other excellent options.

Does that apply for other walks of life too? If you drove into a pothole and wrote off your car wheel, would you be happy if the council told you to slow down and take a bit more care? If you were walking along the pavement and tripped on a cracked and uneven paving slab, it'd be fine for the ambulance service to tell you to stop wasting their time and you should have just looked where you were going? If a wheelchair user fell down an unguarded open manhole cover, perhaps you'd be first on scene looking down at them and saying it's their own fault for not slowing down a bit? Or would you think that's it's not unreasonable that a public space should be maintained to a basic standard of safety? That's one of the most crassly stupid comments I've read on here and it's up against some really quite stiff competition!

Mice will eat *anything*! That shop had a couple of very low food hygiene ratings over the years (and it was closed for "refurbishment" for a while which was obviously the first attempt to deal with the pest problem) so I'm not surprised by that article. You'd hope that pest control would have dealt with the majority of them...

I've given you several reasons but as usual you're weaving around with insinuations rather than asking actual questions or stating your own views. Here's the document: https://content.tfl.gov.uk/travel-in-london-2024-active-travel-trends-acc.pdf TfL themselves highlight fluctuations and changes in travel behaviour noting for example (page 9) in 2023 the annual demand on Santander Cycles saw a drop of 26 per cent from the previous year. On closer inspection, it is seen that this drop occurred only for demand from casual users (that is, those who are not registered members), while hires by members continued to increase (by three per cent between 2022 and 2023). Key features behind some of the data (page 14) However, in recent years there has been a steady and substantial decrease in the proportion of cycling trips for shopping or personal business. This is in line with the decline in trip rates for shopping or personal business observed overall (regardless of mode of transport). What it's clearly showing is that shopping habits have changed (thanks Amazon!) and fewer people are making shopping trips overall (which also means fewer people cycling to the shops). There's all sorts of this wider context in every part of the data but you're fixating on an apparent short-term decline and arguing about percentages - I'm not even clear on what point you're actually trying to make. Most of it was cut! The National Audit Office said that investment of £7bn over the CWIS2 (Cycing & Walking Investment Strategy) period was required to meet two of the four CWIS2 2025 targets and come close to meeting the other two. Government initially committed to spend £3.8bn through CWIS2, of which only just over a third (£1.3bn) was ring-fenced for active travel. Spending just £3.8bn would effectively result in all four 2025 objectives being missed by a large margin. The UK Government were aware from 2022 that their own CWIS2 objectives would not come close to being met, even before it reduced the funding further still, to around £3 billion, in a Written Ministerial Statement on 9 March 2023. This included a dramatic reduction in the amount of dedicated funding (which is primarily capital funding for local authorities’ Local Cycling and Walking Infrastructure Plans). Ringfenced funding for the final two years of CWIS2 (i.e. 2023/4 and 2024/5) was cut by £233m, from £488m to £250m (of which only £100m is capital funding). This has massively exacerbated the sense of uncertainty within local authorities to deliver the Government’s cycling and walking ambitions. This is also affected by the previous decades of austerity which hollowed out council back-room functions (like Legal, Procurement, HR etc) to the bone which means that every scheme going through is delayed because there's limited capacity to check it all, hire the relevant people, go through the contracts and then deliver on it. By the time it's all gone through, costs have gone up by 20% so what's delivered then gets cut / redesigned / watered down midway through. It's a woefully inefficient way of doing things. In short - yes, if the funding required had actually been delivered (rather than being grandly announced and then successively cut back), if the designs and ambitions had been as transformational as required than there could easily have been a tenfold increase. But tinkering around the edges and taking 5 years to deliver a hundred square metres of public realm in Dulwich is not "transformational"... (don't get me wrong, it's good but it's nowhere close to the speed or scale required to deliver a tenfold increase).

Growth was in decline... 🤔 Growth rates will fluctuate day to day, week to week, month to month etc which is why you look at overall trends. Note that against all this there have been changes in population, changes in transport options (like the Elizabeth Line for example, also changes to congestion and ULEZ zones / charges), there's been a pandemic and associated changes in working patterns. There's a whole mix of factors in the background but *overall*, the trend is up. Imagine if you drive 12,000 miles in a year. That's an average of 1000 miles a month, yes? You could draw a dead straight graph of that growth. Except it won't look like that will it? That month you were away and the car sat on your drive. 0 miles, no growth in mileage. That month you did a big road trip, 3000 miles. HUGE growth! But the next month you WFH a lot and didn't drive to work much so it was only 500 miles. And so on. But the average over a one year period is still 1000 miles a month. Same here. The increase is the 43% stated. It honestly doesn't matter much what happened month to month, year to year so long as you look at the figures in Year X and the figures in Year Y and calculate accordingly. You can absolutely get more in depth with things like "ULEZ zone extended on this date" and "Elizabeth Line opened on that date" and "new cycle lane installed here" and "new housing development built there" and that'll obviously play into it but what it being talked about here is a headline figure. X % increase over Y years. It is as simple as that.

It's the standard "keep yourself relevant" method. It doesn't matter what is announced or what happens in terms of cycling, it'll never be enough, or never be justifiable, or never be "worth it". If 20 people use a cycle lane, that's not enough, it should be constantly busy 24/7 and this needs to happen within 10 minutes of the cycle lane being finished, otherwise it's a scandalous waste of taxpayer money. If the cycle lane is busy then everyone on it is a danger to themselves and everyone around and drivers can't drive and pedestrians can't cross and won't someone think of the children / elderly / disabled / wildlife?! Also of course, it must be very difficult for many people on this forum to actually understand how this increase has happened because remember that most of them simply cannot see cyclists at all! They are literally invisible. I'm not surprised that some people on here claim to have never seen anyone using a cycle lane. The cycle lanes are really busy but they're actually in an alternate dimension, imperceptible to drivers. That explains why so many of them park in cycle lanes, they just assume they're empty.

Various explanations. One is that over the years you have consistently cherry picked stats and figures to suit whatever your opinion is at the time, shouting about the ones that you like, downplaying the ones you don't so that will have skewed your perspective. I honestly don't know how much of that is wilfully misleading on your part or you simply don't understand how stats work - sadly facts don't really care what you do or don't believe in, they remain facts no matter what. Another is that mainstream media (of all political persuasions) are not good with stats because most people (readers and the people writing the newspapers) don't understand them so they'll dumb them down. Now to an extent, that's the job of media, to take a complex topic and unravel the basics so that the layperson can get the gist of it but it does lead to confusing stats such as "50% increase in cycling" (for example) but with no indication in the headline of over what time period, from what baseline, is it numbers of people cycling (and if so is there any understanding of how often those people are riding) or is it done on mileage / time...? Very basic examples: If I ride 10 miles in a day and then the next day I ride 15 miles, that could be interpreted as a 50% increase in cycling! If an average of 100 people ride their bike 3x a week or more for a year and then the next year, an average of 150 people do the same for a year, that's also a 50% increase in cycling. However, that won't pick up local and period-specific trends. During the school holidays for example, only 20 people are riding for 3 months of the year cos everyone is on holiday - whereas you'd probably look at that and shout "DECLINE IN CYCLING!!!", anyone doing some statistical analysis on it would look at the overall trend and agree that yes, there are peaks and troughs (as with all stats) but the overall average trend is a 50% increase. As an aside, you can see this with vehicle traffic; the School Run Effect in Dulwich is very pronounced because of the sheer number of schools. Another reason is, as I mentioned above, locality. Where exactly are these stats being measured - is it City of London, Greater London, London within the N & S Circulars, all London boroughs combined...? This also needs balancing out because averages hide a lot of info. If you have a safe and efficient cycling corridor (like Greendale, Calton, Dulwich, HH) it's very well used compared to a corridor like Denmark Hill, EDG, Village Way, HH. So someone standing at Goose Green will see a very different picture of number of people cycling vs someone standing in Dulwich Square which is why personal views and "I've seen / I've not seen..." is such a terrible measure of understanding. (same way that if you said there were an average of 30 buses an hour in Dulwich - there might well be 30 buses but someone on Woodwarde Road will see zero and someone on LL will see 20 and someone on EDG will see 10. Every single one of them would question the "30 buses per hour" narrative.) And a final reason is methodology although that one is easy to balance via various statistical calculations. Data now is more dense and detailed than ever before via traffic count sensors, mobile phone data, fitness tracking apps, connected vehicles etc so there's a constant process of adjustment and factoring in new info while still maintaining the old info. *it should be obvious but all the figures, counts and percentages I've quoted above are examples, designed to show the picture of how stats work. I don't know how many buses there are, I've chosen easy to understand figures.