exdulwicher

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.

I remember back in the "should speed limits apply to bikes" thread, you said, in reference to e-bikes and the difference between legal / illegal (and I quote): If they are on the road (they are) and can't be readily distinguished from electric assisted bicycles to the casual and 'lay' observer then both classes of vehicle should be treated similarly, under the same rules. And yet here you are getting all defensive about what is and isn't an SUV, a term that the car industry itself has kind of adopted and evolved to refer (loosely) to all SUV-crossover type vehicles. Everyone knows them as SUVs and you can probably get into all manner of semantics about "true off-roader" vs pick-up truck vs SUV vs "something that is trying to look like an SUV" but it's all pedantic distraction from the issue which the original article is referring to, "car-bloat". Cars have got (and continue to get) bigger and heavier and wider and whether it's an SUV or a "something that looks like an SUV but is really just a car chassis with a higher body doncha know", the fact remains that they're more dangerous to pedestrians and cyclists than the "regular sized" cars which were normal a decade before. More weight on the roads, more space on the roads and in parking places, more pollution.... https://lloydalter.substack.com/p/car-bloat-is-getting-ridiculous-and Maybe the article would be more accurate if it referred to "car bloat" or the term used a fair bit now, "autobesity" but the principle remains the same and trying to defend it with the "well they're not really SUVs you know" is missing the point completely.

From London Bridge you'd have to walk a short distance along Tooley Street to the junction of Tower Bridge Street and get on it there. The 78 comes from Liverpool Street over Tower Bridge then down to Peckham via the back of Bermondsey and the Old Kent Road. Kind of a roundabout route but worth knowing as a back up. The TfL Journey Planner is a useful site as that will often find alternatives if one mode of transport (or one particular stop / line etc) is out of action: https://tfl.gov.uk/plan-a-journey/ The trick is not to be too prescriptive with it. Use general areas rather than exact postcodes otherwise it'll be too focussed on getting you to an exact point - if you just specify "Dulwich" it will look at options to North, East and West Dulwich stations, bus routes that go through Dulwich in general rather than "this stop in particular". Hope that helps.

Given that there was a consultation on the route changes, that would make the "random decision" thing impossible by definition. Buses in London (in fact almost everywhere) are subsidised so it doesn't really make much difference if you're subsidising it to go this way or that way. I posted the reasons for the changes above but here it is again: Route changes can come about for any number of reasons. Add capacity, begin to serve a new housing development or business / employment area, stop serving a no-longer-used area (maybe somewhere undergoing redevelopment for example), maintain / increase / reduce service frequency... TfL has reams of data on bus usage, timings, patronage, positioning, network efficiency and so on.

I'd suggest you have two options. 1. Pop down there on Day 1, tell them that it can't possibly take them 3 months, stop lounging around, crack on and be done in a week you useless bunch of layabouts. It's just a bit of resurfacing and some painting after all. 2. Email the project manager - the contact details are all in the letter - and demand an explanation of exactly how it can possibly take them this length of time since it is (apparently) just a week's job. You may wish to outline your expertise in this area and examples of where similar schemes have been done in a week. Do let us know the outcome!

You could do it much quicker if a full and complete road closure was put in and they could work nightshifts. But no-one would ever go for that. Combination of keeping the whole lot at least partially open (so extensive traffic management set-up), phased works so that all the utilities can be worked on in the right sequence (cos it'll be like spaghetti underneath that road with water mains, gas, electricity, phone and internet and probably a few unexpected things too), there'll be a bit of leeway for weather-related disruption, there'll be costs for 24/7 on-site security (like stopping anyone running off with equipment, vandalising it etc). Depends on the sensor and camera network around there, it can be done. It is broken, it's been on the cards since mid-2000's for improvement works there but there are also questions of ownership (of the roads and the surrounding land, especially the Grove Tavern) and there have long been campaigns for safer crossing facilities there.

Back in about 2018, TfL had a consultation on a number of bus route changes, mostly to get rid of some longer routes (which are much more subject to delays than shorter ones) and also to prevent a mass of buses all terminating in and around Strand / Trafalgar Square / Oxford Circus. So the 40 got withdrawn between Aldgate and Elephant & Castle and was rerouted to Clerkenwell Green via Blackfriars Bridge and Ludgate Circus to replace route 45. At the same time, TfL introduced the Hopper Fare which meant that if you subsequently had to change buses as a result of the route alterations, you still only got charged the one flat rate, equivalent to taking just the one bus. If there are ever any issues at London Bridge, try getting the Northern Line to Elephant & Castle - that gives you options to get the 176 or 40 from there or any bus towards Camberwell then pick up the 185. Or you can do Thameslink to Herne Hill then 37 towards Dulwich. Oval is a bit more flaky / fewer options. You kind of feel that you've gone further south on the Tube so it should be quicker / easier but it rarely is. On the other hand I get why people would not want to be wandering around Elephant in the dark, it's not one of the nicer Tube stations...

Someone (be it the legitimate owner, or a car thief) has parked a Merc on a wall (having crossed a pavement and demolished half the wall to put it there) and the concern is over one spelling mistake in the original tweet. Wow. I'm sure of course that the 20mph speed limit was being rigorously adhered to (what with the car having number plates and all that) good job the airspeed limit is much higher. 😉 Suppose we should be lucky it wasn't a Lime bike, imagine the absolute chaos and carnage that could have caused! I'm sure that could have been the subject of at least another 2 threads.

If the cycle lobby were even a tenth as powerful as you suggest, there'd be a comprehensive network of cycle facilities across the UK that would put the Netherlands to shame. As it is, it took twelve YEARS of back and forth consultation, argument and redesign, a global pandemic and several rounds of council elections to get 100m of Dulwich Village filtered. Hardly the output of some All-Powerful Cyclist Cabal... That's still not collective responsibility though. Every organisation of that nature does similar including One Dulwich (although they do it with considerably less oversight and publicity of exactly who is funding them or indeed who is even behind them). I can walk through Dulwich Park without being a member / belonging to Friends of Dulwich Park: https://dulwichparkfriends.org.uk/ I can ride my bike through Dulwich Village without being a member / belonging to LCC, Southwark Cyclists, Sustrans etc. You can join any organisation you want in order to express your support, that does not mean that you are responsible for any other member within it or that - apart from that one particular aspect - that you share any other common trait. In fact I could be completely unaware of the existence of LCC, doesn't stop me riding my bike.

Funny how no-one ever uses this argument on driving standards... There it is again, this idea that cyclists are somehow a coherent community and share collective responsibility. Suggesting that one person’s behaviour reflects on all other people with whom they share some attribute is just wrong. People who cycle are connected only by the fact that they sometimes use the same mode of transport. See how ridiculous it sounds if I say "the driving community really needs to get its act together and address mobile phone use and speeding" ? There is no "driving community" - there's a collection of many many individual people, none of whom are responsible for the behaviour of any other, using a similar mode of transport. Same with walking, or using a wheelchair... Likewise, it would be ridiculous to claim that everyone using public transport is a fare-dodger, simply because some people use public transport without paying. It is also a fallacy to believe that prejudiced views would disappear if the subjects of prejudice were to behave in a certain ‘approved’ way. In other respects I agree with you. I would love to see more roads policing. You're not going to find me complaining if a cyclist gets pulled over and fined for jumping a red light, same as I'd be very happy for people parking on the pavement / double yellows to be ticketed. Bring it on.

It's like trying to argue whether the murderer used a 6" knife or an 8" knife or a footlong knife. Largely irrelevant to the outcome. Illegally modified bicycle, illegal electric moped. All illegal, all can be confiscated. We return to the fact that, other than a few occasional crackdowns, they are largely not dealt with which is nothing to do with the fine detail of the bike in question and everything to do with the lack of enforcement. The existing laws spell out very clearly what is a legal Electrically Assisted Pedal Cycle (EAPC) and what is an illegally modified bicycle or an electric moped / motorcycle being used without registration, insurance etc on public roads.

Ah bless, I love your selective quoting. Illegal bikes / illegal mopeds / illegal motorbikes. Irrelevant, they're illegal.

They're bicycles - illegally modified via installation of a motor, battery and throttle.Therefore they already fall foul of existing laws and can be seized and destroyed. For example: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5yvxl037m9o https://news.sky.com/video/police-seize-illegal-e-bikes-and-e-scooters-on-streets-of-london-13271669 https://ebiketips.road.cc/content/advice/features/vast-majority-of-seized-e-bikes-are-being-used-by-delivery-riders-but-what The latter link is quite interesting. Society has essentially created this issue - app-based food delivery firms have taken over the high street takeaway industry. If your takeaway business is not on Deliveroo / Just Eat etc, it's going nowhere (same as hotels being "forced" to be on booking.com). The apps pay the rider by delivery while also promising the consumer that their food will be with them in <30 minutes. From the moment you press the "order" button on the app, the takeaway has 15-20 minutes to receive that order, prepare it, pack it, give it to the rider and the rider then has 10-15 minutes to deliver it. It is basically essential that the rider breaks any and all road laws, rides like a dickhead and has some form of transport that permits this. Mopeds are expensive, you need to do CBT etc plus they have number plates. Modified bikes = WIN! They get shared around too, legitimate riders sub-let their accounts to people who really don't have the right to work or can't get employment (often migrants). The police know all this and it's not exactly difficult to find these people, they're outside every bloody takeaway on LL! The problem is that doing anything about it results in people not getting their food order (and therefore getting irate) and a whole world of complexity involving HMRC, DWP, and whatever layers of Government need to deal with immigrants who don't technically have the right to work. You arrest a dozen delivery riders and confiscate the bikes, there's then a week of paperwork to deal with the people you've detained, half of whom won't even be on record and in the meantime the gap has been filled by another dozen riders on borrowed bikes. On the other hand, Mrs Miggins on EDG got her order of dumplings and fried rice in 5 minutes so she's happy, even if she'll moan about "bloody delivery cyclists" the next day. The problem is allowed to exist in plain sight because these people are scraping a living on a few pence per drop, providing a service and - other than being a bit of a nuisance - are otherwise not out there begging / stealing / turning to crime. If you want to solve it, the answer is not speed limits or registration plates or fining the riders, it's dealing with the app companies that have created this issue in the first place (and to a lesser extent, dealing with the lazy public who can't even be arsed walking to the takeaway 5 minutes down the road).

They're criminals - the fact they're using bikes is largely irrelevant. I assume that if someone ran up to you, pushed you over and stole your phone then ran away, you wouldn't be seeking licencing and registration for shoes cos that was the criminal's getaway method...? And licencing hasn't exactly been a deterrent for criminals using cars - plenty of ways to hide a car's identity. Hell, it got to the point of people driving through Dulwich Square with strategically placed "leaves" on their number plates. There's been a number of photos shared online of drivers half covering their number plate to avoid a fine from an ANPR camera at a bus gate. Strangely, that didn't invoke 12 pages of ire about the lawlessness and criminality of drivers.... Weird.

No-one is saying injuries / deaths are not bad. They are, of course they are. The issue is where you look to minimise injuries and deaths. On average, 5 people A DAY are killed on the UK roads: https://www.brake.org.uk/get-involved/take-action/mybrake/knowledge-centre/uk-road-safety If that sort of death toll was happening on the railways or in aviation or even at work, entire industries would be shut down. You know the cyclist case (and the names involved) because it is so rare that it inevitably makes headline news, it's a sort of "man bites dog" moment for the press. Would you get on the London Underground if you knew that 5 passengers a day would be killed?! One, maybe two, deaths a year caused by cyclists. Five PER DAY caused by drivers. So you can understand how Governments / police / road safety organisations are not really looking at cyclists when they try to fix this issue...

You mean the local community that specifically voted for the two Labour councillors behind the LTN and rejected the two Tory candidates standing on a "we will rip out all the LTNs" manifesto? The "groups" across London are the same shouty minority - it's amazing how the same individuals crop up in pics and online, a tiny group of obsessives who've been banging the same drum for 5 years, in spite of having lost numerous legal challenges and at every local election. Credit to them though for managing to place a near constant string of stories in the Times and Telegraph. Suppose it gives them something to do when they're not frantically trying to rig the results of every consultation going... https://moderngov.lambeth.gov.uk/documents/s161579/ODDR Proposed West Dulwich CPZ - Results of Statutory Consultation.pdf See page 11 of this. If you can't be bothered to click and scroll through, the basics are here (my highlighting): CONSULTATION AND CO-PRODUCTION West Dulwich CPZ - results of Statutory Consultation 5.1 By the closing date of Friday 20 September 2024, a total of 10,972 representations had been received via the online engagement portal in response to the CPZ consultation. 5.2 Given that a statutory consultation such as this is open to anyone interested in those advertised proposals, Lambeth’s online engagement portal accepts multiple representations from individuals and organisations and also different individuals living within the same property address. 5.3 On closer inspection officers discovered that, during the week prior to the close of the statutory consultation, two separate individuals had submitted multiple identical responses connected to addresses from a particular street within the proposed CPZ boundary. A detailed review suggested that these multiple responses may have constituted a deliberate act to skew the results of the statutory consultation, and as a consequence, this data has been ‘cleaned’ to remove the ‘duplicate’ responses, leaving just one unique representation from each of these two respondents. The same thing was found in most of the LTN consultations, Lambeth got rid of about a third of the responses which had all originated over the course of 2 solid days from the same 2 or 3 IP addresses. Fascinating how people who bang on endlessly about democracy are so keen to try and subvert it....

I would hope that wherever there is an issue with lawbreaking, be that shoplifting, robbery, vandalism, the police would raise their game and have a crackdown. Obviously there comes an issue of resourcing, cost-effectiveness etc and it's notable that whenever the police start pulling over motorists for the same offences like red light jumping, speeding etc, there's a whole raft of comments like "why don't you go and catch some real criminals" and "oh so you go after the easy targets like a motorist inadvertently doing 5mph over the speed limit but can't be bothered to turn up to a burglary"... Which again is an interesting insight into how some road crime gets a free pass...