exdulwicher

Westerham is really nice, there are loads of walk options in the woods around there. Toys Hill and Ide Hill both close by, Limpsfield Chart and Chartwell itself. Nearest station is Oxted or Hurst Green a couple of miles west - can then walk over, drop down into Westerham where there are loads of pubs and cafes. Or it's about an hour's drive.

That's wrong. TfL website: https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/lez-lez-services-37309 Extract from the page: The charges only need to be paid if you drive your vehicle within the zone. Parked vehicles are not subject to any charges. That's the whole issue behind reducing the hours that it is operational, that people will drive in at 6am, park up and then drive out again at 7pm. No charge payable. The info is on various London tourist websites as well eg https://www.toptiplondon.com/practical-tips/london-congestion-charge

If you drive in outside operational hours and your car is then parked for the duration, there is no charge. Same as the ULEZ - if you have a non-compliant car but it's parked on the street or in your driveway, no charge is payable. Charge only applies if the vehicle is moving within the hours of operation. Hope that helps.

It's a sparrowhawk. Peregrines have dark eyes, sparrowhawks have yellow eyes with a black pupil. Good pics though, great to see it so close up!

There was a page or so on this topic buried in amongst the 300 pages in the previous (now closed) LTN thread. Retailers want to offer the best customer service so will offer next or even same-day delivery. The quicker the delivery, the less efficient it usually is since there's less chance of a van being able to fill up and do multiple drops in an area. If you order something at 10am on same-day, the retailer simply won't have the volume of orders to fill a van so you end up with a van having a couple of items on it rushing from depot to door in the space of a 4-6hr window. Much less efficient than one that can load up fully and do 40 drops in the area. They often don't put the price on the delivery since that puts people off ordering. They'll either do it Amazon style where you pay a fixed fee per month for Prime which includes "free" next day delivery or simply hike the price of everything to cover it. Much like supermarkets run loss-leader items - artificially cheap bread, milk etc gets customers in the door and they'll invariably spend more once in there. "Free" delivery tempts the same sort of behaviour in certain retail areas; the customer buys a few extra items - they may as well because it's free delivery, they can try them on and then send them back (more van journeys!) for free if they don't like them. You also have situations where the customer is out and the parcel gets returned to depot for another delivery attempt the next day - another van journey. Retailers don't want to address it for fear of losing customers. After all if they don't offer free next day, someone else will. The Government doesn't want to address it because it's market forces. The consumer - well some people genuinely do care and avoid places like Amazon but there aren't enough people like that to offset the ones who do order that thing they *need* same day. And I get that that exists, there are times when it's justified like if your fridge/freezer breaks down and you get onto [retailer of choice] and have a new one brought in urgently before all your food goes to waste. But it's not like that explains all the vans charging around the place!

The schools have all this and they're legally obliged to come up with travel plans. There's a 2016 one here done to assess the coach service to the three Foundation Schools, it includes a map of the stops (page 5) from which you can get a good idea of the catchment area: https://consultations.southwark.gov.uk/environment-leisure/quietway-in-dulwich/supporting_documents/2016_Dulwich%20Coach%20Service%20Study_published.pdf

It's not TfL, it's DfT. Benchmarking is done every 10 years or so in order to account for cumulative errors that can occur as well as factors such as: new developments, changes in land use, changes to the road layout and so on. You can read about it here, I'm not going to re-type it all! https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/916034/2019-minor-road-benchmarking-frequency-asked-questions.pdf Wrong again. Vehicle miles travelled in Great Britain have had year-on-year growth in each year between 2010 and 2019. However, the sharp decrease in 2020 has resulted in traffic estimates that are lower than the 2010 levels. Therefore, to say traffic has fallen over the last decade would misconstrue, as the overall decrease is entirely due to the decline in traffic levels observed in the 2020 estimates. I've said before that Covid has messed up the modelling. You can see DfT's counts for Southwark here: https://roadtraffic.dft.gov.uk/local-authorities/103 There's also a data disclaimer on there: Traffic figures at the regional and national level are robust, and are reported as National Statistics. However, DfT?s traffic estimates for individual road links and small areas are less robust, as they are not always based on up-to-date counts made at these locations. Where other more up-to-date sources of traffic data are available (e.g. from local highways authorities), this may provide a more accurate estimate of traffic at these locations. Counts from DfT, TfL and Southwark themselves won't always align so it's important to check which ones are estimates, which are actual counts and the methodology behind them.

The specific wording used is "access to off-street parking" which just means "not on the public highway". So it includes driveways, lock-ups, resident car parks, underground parking garages - even things like supermarket car parks. Doesn't say you have to own them, just that you have access to them. So if you drive your EV to the supermarket and pop it on charge at one of points there, that is counted as having "access to off-street parking". It's a slightly disingenuous way of saying it although if you take all the above into account, the figure is roughly correct. It's useful in determining how many on-street chargers are needed albeit in fairly general trends.

Because they'd have been applying a Southwark-wide figure traffic figure from TfL monitoring to a single LTN scheme. Firstly, cam I assume that by "their monitoring report", you do actually mean the Main Report from the Streetspace page? https://www.southwark.gov.uk/transport-and-roads/improving-our-streets/live-projects/dulwich-review?chapter=4 If you're going to quote excerpts, it's useful to post the link. Page 19 and again on page 28 of that report give a % figure for SOUTHWARK. That's data from TfL so it's main-road monitoring covering everything from the northern reaches of Crystal Palace right up through DV, ED, Peckham all the way up to Walworth, E&C, Rotherhithe etc at the northern end of Southwark. It's an area wide map that, without breaking down anything about vehicle type / roads used / actual numbers / times of day etc has simply looked at combined traffic counts and said "In Sept 2019, there were X vehicles in total, in Sept 2021 there were Y vehicles in total; Y is 7% lower than X. It assigns the bulk of that to Covid which is logical and fair enough although there could be other underlying factors too since there's been a significant shift in working and travel patterns. You're then trying to look at the more detailed % figures given for the Dulwich scheme itself and seem to be arguing that - what - the scheme is a failure because traffic was already lower? Southwark data doesn't apply to Dulwich? Dulwich data doesn't apply to Southwark? The council are wrong with their figures? The "7% lower" figure is given as a helpful background note to put figures into context, not as something to apply direct to an individual LTN / Streetspace scheme. I genuinely don't know what point you're making other than you seem desperate to find something, anything to discredit the data while at the same time calling for more and more data. "we want data" [data is produced] "no, not that data, it doesn't match our opinion"

I've got an egg here Rockets, can you tell me how to cook it please... ;-)

Fully automated cars have been "10-15 years away" for about 35 years now. They're still "10-15 years away". Yes, you've got cars that have a high degree of automation built in and test cars have done full laps of race circuits but there's currently nothing close to full automation in an urban environment for consumer use. It's another way of kicking the can down the road, the idea that we don't need to do anything now because in x years time everything will be perfect, solved for us by the power of technology. Which I said back on Page 7...

There is currently a Traffic Regulation Order on it specifically preventing it. You can't just go "oh that doesn't apply for a few days", there is a legally binding process to go through.

No, I didn't say that at all. But doing it for a couple of days is a non-starter - especially when combined with all the other stuff you'd have to do and then un-do.

From a boring and practical point of view if I may... The council would have to rescind the Experimental Traffic Regulation Order that currently covers the LTNs and the soon to be Permanent Traffic Regulation Orders that will cover them and are currently in the statutory notification stage. Remove all the planters. Cover all the signs and cameras, including the signs painted on the roads. Cope with the fact that some satnavs will update fairly quickly, others may still fail to recognise the re-opened roads. Cope with a lot of lost / confused motorists - they'll be the ones who normally drive right on by along the S. Circ without ever coming through Dulwich and therefore have no real idea of where they're going. Potentially re-phase some of the traffic lights. Inform everyone of the changes. And then re-do all of that afterwards. To be honest, this would be an issue whether the water main repairs were in Lewisham, Dulwich, Clapham Common or Wandsworth. It would jam up the whole S. Circ. regardless. There is no "extra capacity" or resilience anywhere in the network and that applies on roads, rail and air. One incident - burst water main, fallen tree, RTA, fire in a building on the roadside, roadworks - will jam stuff up all around no matter how many roads there are. They'll just all get jammed.

Every single time you use a mobile phone, a satnav, a bank card, a supermarket loyalty card, an Oyster card etc "the system" knows where you are and quite often where you've come from, where you're going to and how you're getting there. Have a look at your location history on Google Maps sometime. Supermarkets and online retailers know what you like to buy and when. The Government know where you live, what you do and how much you earn. You're on CCTV (including private CCTV / doorbell cameras / dashcams etc) dozens of times a day whether you know it or not. Anytime you use an online streaming service, it build a picture of what you watch / listen to. Every time you use a car, your journey can be plotted by ANPR hits. The existing ULEZ and Congestion Charge works off exactly the same principle, the only thing it doesn't do is charge by distance / time of day / type of road, it just bills you a lump sum. Part of living in a large society is that we have to pay taxes - this is just a more efficient way of paying a tax. I mean, we could go back to mediaeval times and pop a toll booth at every gate to the city if you'd prefer? You mean we shouldn't protect democratically elected leaders from lunatics? I mean, I'm not a fan of Boris Johnson but he (quite rightly) gets a security detail that ultimately we, the taxpayer, foot the bill for. I assume you don't object to the vast security operation surrounding members of the Royal Family? If you got half the death threats and despicable racist abuse that SK gets, you'd want an armoured car too. And if you want to see what lunatics do, look at Sir David Amess MP and Jo Cox MP.

At the moment, it's little more than a "get the ball rolling" conversation. Road pricing / pay-per-drive is gong to have to come in at some point because as the shift to walking / cycling / public transport continues, combined with the rise in EV / hybrid vehicles, the existing Vehicle Excise Duty and Fuel Duty receipts will decrease markedly so the Government has to fill that hole somehow. TfL is in a bit of a tricky situation - the Conservative Government are trying their best to defund it in order to discredit the Labour Mayor and when they do chuck it another lump sum, they wrap it in caveats. The increased rate of Congestion Charge was a Tory caveat to a previous round of funding (even though they happily sat back and let Khan take the complaints about it). So if Khan can get this through before the end of his second term it could be a winner for continuing to reduce pollution, driving modal shift, bolstering TfL's finances and a bit of a one over on the Government for failing to start their own road pricing conversation. It could also be a lot fairer than a lump-sum ULEZ fee of ?12.50 which applies if you drive any non-compliant vehicle in the zone whether it's a 15-min drive to the supermarket or a 6hr trip of multiple deliveries. Have to see how it ties in with proposed tolls on (eg) Blackwall / Silvertown Tunnels as well.

Usually counting people getting on / off at the stops. Sometimes they employ people to sit on buses and do counts as well. Bus journey times are easy to get off GPS but ridership can be more tricky. You can analyse Oyster / contactless data to see how many actual individuals got onto the bus over the course of its full journey but as you don't tap out on buses, it's less easy to tell if someone got on and rode 1 mile or 5 miles. So occasionally they'll use manual counts to build an idea of how busy stops are and when.

Sorry Rockets but if you're going to go off into some sort of conspiracy theory rabbit hole there's nothing that anyone can say that will change your mind. Clearly, the fact that there are no cyclists visible on these cycle lanes is some sort of magic combination of them all wearing black and no lights while also being holed up in some kind of underground bunker in Tooley Street fabricating video evidence and holding councillors hostage. 🙄 Otherwise, if you're gong to make accusations of bias and fiddling figures etc, produce the evidence and take it to the council. Shouldn't be difficult; we've all read the comments on here about how woefully incompetent the council are so finding their wrongdoing should be straightforward, right? Or are they actually some kind of closet geniuses running an industrial-scale cover up operation just for laughs? Schrodinger's Council - simultaneously engaged in a massive data manipulation scheme *and* being too incompetent to run a bath.

It's all in the Streetspace reports. Overall review page: https://www.southwark.gov.uk/transport-and-roads/improving-our-streets/live-projects/dulwich-review Section on monitoring:https://www.southwark.gov.uk/transport-and-roads/improving-our-streets/live-projects/dulwich-review?chapter=4 There's a LOT in there - methodology, basic explanations of timings and data, locations of counters and so on but it's worth sitting down when you've got some free time to read it carefully and in context.

Because the whole South Circular is managed by TfL, it's a Red Route. They're highly monitored but there's little point in half a dozen separate boroughs looking after a few miles within their area. It was "bad" even in the 70's and there have been loads of plans and ideas over the years to do all sorts from demolish a load of housing and widen the road to building new flyovers or tunnels but as soon as ideas like that get put forward, there's an immediate petition against it and the cost would be astronomical anyway, no Government could afford that these days. It's not a "planned" road like the North Circular, it's something that's ended up with vastly more traffic than it was ever intended to manage and virtually no way of doing anything about it.

Slightly pedantically, modelling doesn't prove things work. Modelling produces a forecast of how the transport system is likely to operate in a new situation, a source of insight to help understand / prepare for the new situation.* However, once the "new situation" is in place, you then need data to prove the outcomes. The modelling is usually pretty accurate and it helps a lot that LTNs are nothing new, they've been done for decades so the outcomes and the inputs required are all pretty well understood. *"new situation" includes: opening / modifying / closing a road or roads changing parking provisions opening / modifying / closing a public transport service opening / modifying / closing a site (like closing down an old school or opening a new shopping centre) and so on

PTAL is a London system, it's not used elsewhere (or at least, not in anything like that form). In London, it's used mainly as an aid to planning developments. Areas with low PTAL are required to have more parking - it sort of accepts that as P/T isn't as good therefore more people will use private cars which is a bit of a catch-22 in itself since it entrenches car use. However the "not as good" is in comparison to high PTAL areas. You're comparing "leafy Dulwich" with central London! Of course in central London you're no more than a few minutes from a Tube or bus, you've got large terminus stations... In Dulwich, there are far fewer roads and a lot of green space - playing fields, the park etc where if you're in the middle of that, of course there's zero density of P/T! Whilst PTAL is a simple calculation (easily performed by a spreadsheet) that offers an obvious indication of the density of public transport provision in an area, it suffers three key problems: It does not take into account where services actually go to ? for example, a bus that runs every ten minutes to the bottom of the road is considered better than a bus that runs every twelve minutes to the city centre. The use of arbitrary cut-offs to exclude more distant service access points underestimates the ability to access locations just outside those cut-off distances. For example, a point 960m from King's Cross could have a PTAL of 6, whilst a point 961m from the same station could have a PTAL of 1 or 2. It does not take into account how crowded the services are. If you stand outside Victoria Station on a weekday rush hour (ignoring Covid for the moment), you're in a PTAL 6 zone. Try getting down onto the Circle or District Line platforms though! I do wish the same old "PTAL scores are really low" argument would die. It's low compared to high density P/T in central London. You will literally never replicate that in Dulwich, not without tens of billions of ?? investment in trams, a Tube line or two and some bus-only routes (the latter of which means closing some roads to cars and/or removing parking). There are more detailed models available - accessibility modelling gives you colour-coded maps of travel time door-to-door. You may have seen similar on (eg) Santander Cycles docking stations where it gives you a radius of where you can reach in 5 mins walking / 5 mins cycling etc. It's a more detailed version of that and also factors in Active Travel. PTAL only really half-acknowledges that in terms of assumed walking time to a Service Access Point (ie a bus stop / train station etc).

@legalalien: not as such, no. And actually this picks up on @Rockets point a couple of posts above as well. I mean, if you're one of the people crying out for "equitable solutions" and saying that nothing should be done until there have been consultations and 100% buy in then yes, anything that falls short of this utopian ideal is going to be described as "poorly planned". However that is a well-known distraction technique, it's called "policy perfectionism". Push for "perfect" solutions that are equitable to all, cause inconvenience to no-one, removes 50%+ of cars from the roads, drops pollution by 50%+ etc etc. Basically stuff that does not exist and and never could. It's being pushed (probably deliberately) as a binary option. Rip everything out immediately because what has been put in is not "perfect" vs well OK, we've made a start, it's not perfect (and no traffic scheme will ever be perfect and I don't think anyone has ever claimed that LTNs are perfect) but let it bed in, then see how we can build upon the benefits and mitigate the disbenefits. @heartblock - I agree. However it needs recognition that the current, very car-biased, transport system is in itself inequitable. Plenty of people cannot afford to run a car, have nowhere to park it or at the absolute worst, you end up with what is known as transport poverty where a person is forced to own a car to get to/from work because there are no convenient / reliable / safe / affordable other options and the cost of owning and running a car (especially if it isn't compliant with the new ULEZ or you have to drive into town during congestion charge hours) takes up a significant chunk of your wages. In essence, you're working to afford the car that you need to use for work which you need to do to pay for the car etc etc. The problem is that we're back at square one. Rockets and legalalien earlier saying we need different interventions, heartblock - I think you're saying more or less the same? Which brings us back to - what interventions? What perfect policy? Put a load of free buses onto the roads which then add to the traffic and get stuck in the existing traffic? Wait 10 years for everyone to be driving EV? Solves pollution at roadside but not the congestion or parking or road safety. Also not very equitable. Wait x years for an equitable road-pricing solution? Government aren't working on anything at the moment... Wait x years until we can whistle up a self-driving car to our door and no-one needs to own their own car? Wait for eternity until the Tube / trams / flying taxis come to Dulwich? Final note on this comment: Compared to literally anywhere else in the UK, London public transport (even Dulwich public transport) is AMAZING.

Think how much worse it would have been if there hadn't been some (relatively minor) efforts to curb vehicle use. Our current Government, in between having lockdown parties and handing out lucrative contracts to all their mates, did manage to realise that post-Covid, there would be a dramatic shift away from public transport due to concerns around crowded spaces although maybe they did not predict the ongoing shift to WFH where possible. The efforts to prevent that mass shift towards private vehicle use and promote active travel have had SOME effect albeit it's taking some time to filter through, there's still shifting goalposts around "return to the office" that's having an effect. The key thing is that most of the measures have gone in with a broad degree of collaboration between boroughs (certain notable exceptions like Wandsworth and RBKC notwithstanding) which has been far better than them going in piecemeal or without any other measures (like the previously quoted Loughborough Junction which, as a standalone scheme was never going to work without significant other interventions in that location). The answer - counter-intuitive though it might sound - is to go for more restrictions. Make walking and cycling safer and more attractive, make driving/parking more difficult and (if possible) make public transport more attractive although that might require a fair bit more advertising and reassurance yet. Currently we're in a bit of a limbo - the measures that have gone in have had a reasonable impact across the boroughs, the general picture looks about the same from all the LTNs across the various boroughs with a few isolated negatives (although generally trending -> positive). However some councils, possibly with an eye on May elections, are wavering under the onslaught of the noisy minority (and in spite of the "68% of respondents" and other such stuff, it IS a minority, it always is) and are trying to throw a few bones such as timed restrictions or unlimited access for taxis which basically just shifts people's habits to "oh well I'll drive earlier or later", it doesn't shift them away from driving. It's also quite confusing - there's the potential to simply follow the car in front through a bus gate without necessarily realising that the car in front is Blue Badge or a taxi and exempt and then end up being fined. That generally upsets people - even if the argument is simply "you're a driver, you should be able to read and understand road signs, not just blindly follow the car in front". If you want more buy in, it's actually better to have more restrictions. Doesn't help much that the Government's Transport Decarbonisation Plan makes no mention of reducing vehicle mileage, instead relying on the automobile industry to come up with cleaner / electric vehicles which, while it removes the pollution aspect from the roadside, it does nothing to alleviate congestion or road danger. In some respects, the Government, after introducing and funding the LTNs have largely left councils out to dry which is why some backtracked almost immediately which in turn has made it harder still to re-introduce any restrictions.

If you type the word "quote" in square brackets: [ quote ] (but without the spaces), copy/paste the text you want to reference (and maybe the name of the author as well) and then use [ / quote ] (again, no spaces) at the end of it, it'll give you the neat block of text which you can then respond to. Saves messages being auto-formatted with all the > > add ins. So: Edited because, ironically enough, I screwed up the quoting! 🤣