Southwark Council Transport Policy / Upcoming Consultation on the Movement Plan

[legalalien]

Am (with some trepidation) venturing into the Lounge as I think the admin might be unhappy that some of the posts on the LTN in ED thread might be too generic for that section of the forum.

Those who have been following the council?s transport policy might be interested in reading this report by Cllr Rose and officers in response to the Environment Scrutiny Commission?s recommendations in its Air Quality Report, prepared for a meeting next week.

https://moderngov.southwark.gov.uk/documents/s105848/Air%20Quality%20report%20briefing%20note.pdf.

Note this against the background of a review of the council?s Movement Plan (setting out its transport policy) currently being carried out with a view to aligning it with the council?s climate change strategy.

Some interesting points around

- the target for traffic reduction: the committee asked for a viability assessment of the target to reduce traffic by 90% by 2030. The response refers to a current target of 50% of pre- pandemic levels and says that ?As part of the review of the Movement Plan targets will be reviewed considering applicability (all traffic, local traffic), deliverability, and ability to monitor and ensure delivering of the ambition, coordination with other work areas.?

I?m not quite sure what this means in concrete terms. Also not quite sure where the 90% figure came from. The 2019 Movement Plan says ?our aim is to reduce trips made by car/motorbike to 13% by 2041?. Might be a new target suggested by the committee itself?

- looks like some more detailed consideration has been given to the viability of switching the entire council fleet to electric. Relatively simple for light vehicles, more difficult for heavy and specialist vehicles (for example, currently no such thing as an electric gully sucker).Also ?Whilst it is certainly feasible to acquire electric vehicles for many of the fleet replacement requirements, detailed consideration needs to be given to the required charging infrastructure, its location and the expected associated costs. The scale of the requirement and the task of installing charging infrastructure on such a large scale should not be under-estimated.?

- cycle hangar roll out has increased, but still a waitlist of 9000. ?There are no plans to increase the current hangar space charge to users (currently ?40 per annum) or reduce the current level of council subsidy (currently ?20 per annum). However, this may be required to be reviewed dependent on the costs to the council of future cycle hangar provision, maintenance and management.? ( this in response to a recommendation that cycle parking should be kept cheaper than car parking ?by space?). I?m not sure how many cycles fit into a cycle hangar and whether that?s currently the case?

- it would be difficult to implement variable parking charges based on size and weight of vehicles as it isn?t easy to get the info from DVLA (as it is for emissions based charging, currently in place. ? There are other potentially more effective means of managing kerb space in relation to varying permit pricing which will be given consideration in the short to medium term.? (Not sure what they are).

Always interesting to see what happens when high level aspiration targets bump up against practical considerations and (in the climate space particularly) the hard reality of limited financial resources.

For anyone interested the report on the upcoming review of the Movement Plan, prepared for cabinet last month, is here

https://moderngov.southwark.gov.uk/documents/s104619/Report%20Movement%20Plan%20update.pdf

[Nigello]

There will come a time that cycling will be so normalised that subsidies will no longer be acceptable to most people. I would hope that those who can afford a bike (and who are not spending money therefore on petrol, car maintenance, public transport) woudl be willing to pay a ?5/month fee for their locker. Seems reasonable to me but I am sure others woudl have different ideas.