New Crystal Palace

After many attempts to redevelop the site of the old Crystal Palace a new Crystal Palace has been proposed. It’s described as a £1/2bn project to recreate a cultural attraction.

New Crystal Palace

Chinese developers are proposing with London Mayor Boris Johnson supporting a replica of the original Crystal Palace. But hopefully with better fire alarms and sprinklers to avoid a repeat of 1936 when the original burnt down!

But such a huge structure with 94,000m2/990,000ft2 of space predicted to employ 2,000 people would have to draw huge numbers of visitors.

How will they get there?

What’s not been mentioned yet is that the original Crystal Palace was so successful it needed an extra railway line and Crystal Palace High Level Station: 265px-Crystal_Palace_High_Level_Station_1908

 

 

 

 

Recreating this railway line to ensure the success of the New Crystal Palace would likely need the rebuilding of Honor Oak, Lordship Lane and Upper Sydenham railway stations as well as a high level station in Crystal Palace to serve this rebuilt railway line. This would revolutionise public transport in south Southwark.

Do you think a these schemes should happen?

White Line Enforcement

White lines are meant to ensure people have access. Elsie Road has been a long standing issue with regards to white line enforcement. REsidents there felt the Police were being a bit random in their responses. So this is what I’ve found out…

If a vehicle is stuck on the driveway and is blocked in then the Police can have it removed. If a driveway is blocked and a person is stopped from driving onto their driveway, then they can’t.

The Police local patrol team (LPT) or if the local Safer Neighbourhood Team is in the area, the Police always aim to turn-out and try and resolve white line issues, but if the Police are otherwise engaged  calls will be passed to despatch for another LPT or the response team to attend. This is categorised as ‘E’ graded call (a lower priority response, as it does not require the immediate attendance of a police officer) this can entail a long wait as so many other things take priority. Very often the police will eventually attend and find that the problem has remedied itself and the vehicle has moved.

Last year some of the unhelpful calls for help included:

– one resident called the police to attend when his driveway was ‘blocked’ by six inches but could drive in or out.

– another called when he had a skip on his drive and argued that police should remove the car as the skip needed emptying, we got the car moved – but the skip was there (full) for another two weeks.

– another request because a resident could only turn left out of his driveway but could exit their drive.

– one resident parked his car across the white line of his driveway to make sure nobody else did

Apparently the vast majority of vehicles are moved before the police arrive, even when they are close by and get there within a few minutes. Of the remainder, many apparently have occupants within them and move upon request, some are nearby residents and we can trace the through the PNC and of the very few that remain we do aim to remove them or ticket them if we suspect they are nearby and will shortly return. Unfortunately, when we are on foot we do not always carry parking tickets – as we give out so few of them and there is a staggering amount of tickets, booklets and forms available to us – I fear my officer’s legs would snap if they carried them all (if they carried just one of each, they would require a small rucksack to carry them in).

 

 

 

Get Britain Cycling

The All Party Parliamentary Cycling Group have produced a report titled Get Britain Cycling.

I’m chuffed to say that thE Liberal Democrats have adopted all 18 of the recommendaitons.

The key components being:

–  government providing funding of £10 per person each year for cycling. That this amount rise to £20.

– cross -departmental cycling action plan be produced

– appoint a national cycling champion

– raise the target proporiton of all trips by bike from 2% in 2010 to 10% by 2025.

These actions owuld produce a heatlhier, happier and richer country.

Carmageddon

It has been reported that one of the coalition minister Tory Eric Pickles wishes to relax parking restrictions. He fear local authorities are “anti-car”.

We’ve had our own local issues around Lordship Lane and the bus lanes being zealously enforced but what would happen if Mr.Pickles had his way?

Through a weird quirk of fate an full scale experiment along the dogmatic lines Mr.Pickles proposes has taken place in Aberystwyth.

Due to a mix=up between the police and Aberystwyth local authority they’ve had no parking enforcement for exactly 12 month.

These extracts from 1 June Daily Mail describe the chaos Mr.Pickles wishes up the rest of the country…

“For the last 12 months, citizens have been free to park wherever they please, without fear of prosecution. And any faith in human nature, that people might act responsibly and observe the restrictions anyway, is quickly dispelled by a visit to the town. Forget Armageddon – this is Carmageddon. Everywhere you look there are cars parking where they shouldn’t be: on single yellows, on double yellows, next to bus stops, on pavements , and – most brazenly of all – in just about every disabled parking space available.”

“As the residents of Aberystwyth are discovering, the iron is that when,  in theory you can park anywhere, you can’t in reality find anywhere to park.”

“With allocated loading bays being blocked by family saloon, frustrated delivery drivers are simply stopping their lorries in the middle of the street with queues of he-up motorists honking in frustration and demanding to know when they will be moving on.”

Cyclists Death

As a councillor for East Dulwich and former chair of Southwark Cyclists I was horrified to hear of the tragic death of SE22 resident Chiara Giacomini last Wednesday.

The crash with a Veolia HGV happened on Thurlow Park Road near its junction with Gallery Road.

Cycling is incredibly safe but when it goes wrong with a lorry especially a HGV, waste or tipper lorry, it too often proves fatal. Our roads must be made safer and policing of all vehicles must stop being a low priority in London and the Dulwich area. Such HGVs have been involved in 53% of London cyclist deaths in the last four years, but they only account for 4% of traffic.

It will take an inordinate amount of time before the coroners rules on the this death but we must learn lessons from it.

 

 

Lordship Lane Council Scam

I’m shocked at the revelation that Southwark Council is fleasing Dulwich residents and visitors.

Southwark only enforce bus lane restrictions by issuing tickets to drivers wrongly in bus lanes at restricted time at five location. One of those locations is Lordship Lane.

for the last complete year of stats 2011/12 Southwark Council issued 1,176 bus lanes tickets of which 978 were for Lordship Lane alone. This cost £60,142 to residents.

Why is Southwark Labour picking on Dulwich drivers?

Do you also think this is outrageous?

Well done Southwark News for revealing this.

 

Bus Crashes

Bus Garage Collisions London 8,600 buses travel an amazing  490 million kms a year across 700+ bus routes. Last year 2.35 billion bus customer journeys. So bus trsavel is safe but then the drivers are professionals.

The following is table of buses that crashed and needed repaits.

Major crash requires more than 40 hours of repairs, minor crash less than 40hours of repairs. Apparently the higher rates such as at Perivale, which is an engineering centre, and Stamford Brook, which is a London United refurbishment centre, indicate where the buses are taken for repair or renewal rather than the depots at which they are stationed for operation of routes.

Even allowing for this big variations between the crashes per million kms. Why the difference. Clearly some bus garages are doing something smarter than others. It means more crashes than we truly need on London roads.

Illegal Parking Permit

Today the High Court has decided ina a case broguht by Brent residents to block the raising of parking permit costs from £40 to £100 a year – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23406427

Justice Lang rules that Barnet Council acted unalwfully to use parking permits to generate more money for other purposes such as road maintenace. Barnet Council plans to appeal. But I get the sense that they’ll fail. If they win an appeal it owuld mean paring permits could be used for revenue raising puproses which would go beyond the 1984 act allowing parking permits to be charged for.

This potentially has a huge impact on Southwark which only 18months ago increase fees from £99.30 to £125.

It seems clear that parking permit charges can only cover the costs of providing them. Which with online applciations etc must be very much lower than the fees charged.

Paxton Green roundabout ideas

images  This weeks Local Transport Today  has an interesting article about Dutch style roundabouts called a turbo roundabouts.
They provide 1-1.5 time more capacity than traditional 2 lane roundabouts but with 50-70% less serious crashes than respectively traffic signalled & give-way junctions.

Struck me as a possible model for Paxton Green.

You can see a 70second video of the concept here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMYib3IR43I

Do you think it would help solve the problems at this intersection?

20mph Average Speed Cameras

2009 I obtained agreement on behalf of Southwark Council from TfL that for the cycle super highway along Southwark Bridge Road (most of its route in Southwark) that it would be 20mph.

Putting self enforcing measures along the road would be really expensive and disruptive.

Separately I’ve been nagging Southwark Labour cabinet members about trialling 20mph average speed cameras.

I’m chuffed to see both moving forward: http://moderngov.southwark.gov.uk/documents/s38028/Report%20-%20Allocation%20of%20discretionary%20funding.pdf

20mph average speed cameras will also have a small £10,000 study about them being applied to Southwark Bridge Road.

I submitted details to them about Siemens having a self funding scheme with 3-4 speeders paying to attend speed awareness courses and some of the fees paid for the £50,000 per cameras pairs and administration.

Hopefully the study concludes this route is suitable. Happy days for an opposition councillor to helps steer an administration policies.