exdulwicher

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...

So they can be publicly vilified in advance of being hung, drawn and quartered. Dulwich Square is going to have a gibbet and gallows installed next month. Southwark Council will be selling tickets to raise revenue. The miscreants' bikes will be auctioned off, also to raise council funds. The conspiracy continues.

Yes! Same as the police deal with the million or so unlicenced / uninsured / untaxed drivers. Same way the police catch dangerous vehicles, burglars, shoplifters... I'd absolutely be up for any increase in policing. If it means a few cyclists are caught, have their illegal e-bikes / e-scooters confiscated and crushed, go for it. As an added bonus, while they're out and about, they could maybe deal with some of the countless mobile phone / speeding / drink driving offences. Maybe they'd catch a shoplifter running out of M&S as well. More policing is 100% OK by me. If some scrote on a private e-scooter is rugby-tackled to the ground and has their scooter taken away, I'd be there cheering.

It;s interesting from a wider perspective though. Calling for cycle licencing / registration plates etc for example. That idea is insane. It's been shown, time and time again to be insane. No other country does it. I posted a link with various reasons why which I'll put here again: https://cyclingfallacies.com/en/33/cycling-should-require-a-licence-and-registration There are numerous other articles about it, it's been raised repeatedly by various politicians and Governments of both colours have repeatedly explained why it won't happen: https://www.cycleassociation.uk/news/?id=3742 So the "argument" (such as it is) is bonkers on many many levels. But, in spite of being faced with all manner of evidence as to why it's bonkers, it's been repeated numerous times. It's a classic argument against all these requests for more data, more info, more research, we want the raw data, we want more consultation... The cycle registration thing is pretty straightforward, there is no logical case for it whatsoever. There's no nuance in it, no "well, some of it might be a good idea..." It's flat out wrong. At this stage, the only way anyone advancing a case for cycle registration could be more wrong is to go off and start a thread claiming the Earth is flat. No amount of data and info will ever appease this sort of person. So actually, yes, the simple answer is to say "you are not interested in any form of good faith discussion, you're ignoring every piece of evidence placed in front of you". That's not a personal insult. It's a simple statement of fact.

See my link above. And cyclist are not "above the law". I mean, pedestrians aren't registered and licenced yet a pedestrian can still be stopped and questioned by police if they suspect that person of being guilty of a crime. I've seen the police up in town pull cyclists over for running red lights. They were able to do that in spite of the cyclist not having a number plate. I saw the police stop two burglars once too, in spite of them having done everything possible to hide their identity! Incredible stuff really.

Here you go: https://cyclingfallacies.com/en/33/cycling-should-require-a-licence-and-registration No-one (other than maybe North Korea I think...?) requires cyclists to be licensed / registered. It's a total waste of time and effort to even try it and yet it pops up with monotonous regularity, often when some clueless politician desperate for a moment in the limelight comes up with this genius plan and is then shot down in flames. It's a useful "dead cat" thing though, it can often be used to hide any manner of political indiscretions because it invariably results in a week of radio phone ins and opinion column inches.

Because an e-bike (and by this I mean the correct use of the term in law, the legal Electrically Assisted Pedal Cycle (EAPC) with a motor that only works when pedalling, that provides <250W average power and that cuts out at 15.5mph / 25kph) is regarded in law as identical to a bicycle. So that includes Lime bikes, the e-cargo bikes you see kids being carried on etc. What it does not include is stuff like electric motorcycles, bikes that have been modified with the addition of a motor and throttle, bikes that can be powered to more than 25kph etc which are - in law - not "e-bikes" at all, they're electric mopeds, electric motorcycles or adapted cycles. They already need licencing. You can ride an electric motorbike but it needs to be registered, licenced and the driver / rider (whatever you want to call them) needs a driving licence and insurance. If they don't have that, it's already illegal and the powers already exist to deal with that, it's just it's very rarely enforced. I wish it was enforced! Problem is that if it was, there'd be an awful lot of people complaining to Deliveroo that their food hadn't turned up... Part of the problem is that literally anything on 2 wheels with a motor is referred to as an e-bike, often wrongly. It's a bit like calling every vehicle on the road a bus.

I was going to suggest line dancing but Rockets might cross the line when turning left so that's out...

I've got visions of this... Which one is Rockets?

Page 6. The definition of Suburban / Urban / Central, each split into 3 sub-tiers of Habitable Rooms per Unit (a unit being a house, block of flats, apartments etc) per Hectare. As I mentioned previously, the original use was as a planning tool to aid in calculating the number of parking spaces that should be provided in new developments which is why housing density is a part of it. Have a read of Page 10 which explains some of the limitations of PTAL as well.

It was on the cards for YEARS - originally proposed as part of a Healthy Streets plan (I think), that then got swallowed by Covid and redesigned as part of the Covid / active travel stuff. It was proposed because nothing else will ever make that junction work. The council had tinkered with it for years, they tried to to re-prioritise bits of it, I'm sure at one point there was a yellow box junction within it, there were corresponding measure like speed humps on Court Lane, banning the school coaches from using it, closing off the old cut through around the back via Gilkes Crescent (which was done WAY back, basically making Gilkes one long LTN, before "LTN" was a term) Nothing worked, it remained a congested and dangerous junction. There were also the plans for a network of Quietway cycle routes (this also going way back) and in fact it was branded as such, the laughable bit being that while Turney Road was OK and Calton up to Greendale was OK, the bit through the village was chaos, far from what TfL were proposing as "Quietways". Basically, the work done has mitigated all the issues in one go. Its not perfect but then no road scheme ever is. CPZ is a complementary measure to the other parts. Like treating an illness - you don't "just" have surgery, you have a range of treatments that work together. Surgery on it's own is not as effective as surgery plus chemotherapy for example. And, as has been studied and reported on numerous times, the best ways of reducing car use, congestion, road danger etc are Congestion Charging, limited traffic interventions (such as LTNs but can also included School Streets, cul-de-sacs etc) and parking controls. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/apr/16/12-most-effective-ways-cars-cities-europe And by the way, the consultation was not "should we do a CPZ? Yes/No", it was "we are doing a CPZ, what roads do you think it should cover and what times would you prefer?"

I love how you try to use PTAL. 🙄 It was originally a planning tool, actually to help developers work out car park spaces. It's a very basic system and while it's still useful for "at a glance" stuff, it's long been superseded by accessibility matrices and spatial heatmap tools. PTAL calculates walking distance from bus and train (inc tube, DLR etc) stops assuming: an average walking speed of 80m / min that people are willing to walk up to 8 min for a bus and 12 mins for a train so distances of 640m and 960m respectively. It does take into account service level (so a bus every 10 mins is better than one every 15 mins) but it doesn't take into account the destination. Therefore, as pointed out, an area like Dulwich made up of large open spaces like the Park, school playing fields etc will NEVER have a "good" PTAL score. So you could improve PTAL by building over all of that then running some roads (and bus stops) through it. Or... You know what does improve PTAL? Making it easier to walk (and cycle, although that's not explicitly calculated by PTAL). If you have to cross 3 busy roads, each with a wait of 3 minutes before the green man, that's a serious limitation on PTAL, people are less likely to walk. If you can create a direct walking route - maybe by, oh I dunno, removing the traffic from Dulwich Square say - you can eliminate the wait and effectively shorten the walking time. This works for cycling too (although as I say, it's not specifically included in the calculation) but if you can make it easy to cycle (minimising through traffic, more cycle routes, e-bike/e-scooter hire...) then it's easy to pick a bike up and ride a distance that would be annoyingly far to walk, like to HH or West Dulwich stations or to bus stops on the South Circular. Decent active travel infrastructure widens the catchment area for public transport by up to 10x therefore dramatically increasing PTAL And by the way, "poor" PTAL does not mean poor public transport. It's a comparison tool and PTAL of 5, 6a and 6b is basically "the centre of London". And even there, you have blocks of space like Kensington Gardens, Regent's Park etc with PTAL of 1a, 1b and 2.

It's entirely separate to the point of the thread which is CPZ but it came from the Southwark's Streets for People strategy: https://www.southwark.gov.uk/parking-streets-and-transport/improving-streets-and-spaces/streets-people/dulwich-projects/dulwich-village which is funded from a variety of sources. DfT, what used to be (under the previous Government) called the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC), TfL (via their Liveable Neighbourhoods Programme) and the Government's Safer Streets Fund which I think is on Tranche 5 now (since it was launched in 2020) https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/safer-streets-fund-round-five/safer-streets-fund. There's probably something from Active Travel England in there too. That;s entirely normal for any large-scale intervention like that, there's no way it could be funded from CPZ surplus. Edit: none of the above is any great secret or conspiracy by the way, it's literally all there on Southwark's website. I'm sure if you emailed the highways team they could probably supply you a breakdown of which funds came from where.

You could just read the Parking Reports, they're all online: https://www.southwark.gov.uk/parking-streets-and-transport/parking/parking-annual-monitoring-reports Re the funding - almost all transport interventions come from grants. It's a bit more confusing in London because TfL will often pay some of it so there'll be some money from central Government in the form of a pot of money for sustainable transport or highways repair or community projects which councils (from anywhere) can bid for. Government announce this sort of thing all the time - a pot of £1bn for this, that or the other, councils bid for a portion of it and are awarded some money if the bid is accepted. Councils can supplement that with their own money, money from developers (called a Section 106 which you can read about here: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/planning-obligations ) and, in London, maybe some cash from TfL as well.

Because it can't be used for that. Government regulations require CPZ schemes to be self-financing: they cannot be financed from council tax. The charge will need to cover the implementation of the scheme, administration and enforcement costs. Any cash surplus goes into a ‘parking fund’, which is primarily used to fund the concessionary fares which provides free travel for elderly and disabled people. The CPZ is not (directly) connected to LTNs or to Dulwich Square. However, parking restrictions can form part of a range of measures such as LTNs to generally discourage parking especially around hotspot areas like schools and stations which, by their very nature, tend to attract short periods of very high usage (like school drop-off / pick-up times). With schools, you can sometimes address this by use of School Streets (short term "closures" of the road in front of the school to prevent the stereotypical School Run Mum parking the SUV eight inches from the gate) however in an area such as Dulwich where you have many schools within a very short distance of each other, a CPZ makes more sense than trying to close off areas in front of Alleyn's, JAGS, Dulwich Hamlet etc.

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..."