Liam Duffy

It's not just the area around stations that's prime land—the station itself should be seen that way too. Or at least that should be true in an area enough in demand for it to be worth building such massive tower blocks.

e.g. take this proposal for Stratford station which I hope goes forward. Improving links between the north / south of the area by building a bridge on top of the DLR / Jubilee platforms, which then also unlocks new space for development around the station.

diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2023/10/opti...

Could even put the station in a concrete box and build the development partially over it, with some new public realm better connecting either side of the rail lines. Putting such a huge number of new residents in the area, but not improving connectivity, surely won't go well?

There should be an assumption that they have approval and then you work backwards from there, currently it feels the other way around and like major projects don't have much of a leg up compared to what private developers have to deal with. Despite, you know, parliament being sovereign and all.

TBH the main shift that I think should happen is that if a project has got the approval of parliament and has been passed to this hypothetical department for delivery, the planning system should be set up to support them in doing that, not get in their way.

Not all. It's just that the Dutch have a similar infrastructure body and they seem to be so much more efficient. If you want a rolling programme of improvements, it makes sense to build up in-house knowledge / expertise.

Funding for rolling upgrades would be great, but surely the issues with long term planning / funding of UK projects is political, not administrative. With FPTP and "swing" the government which gets the ball rolling on a project will very rarely be in power once the benefits are realised.

I'd want something like this, but not specifically for roads perhaps. There should be a department of government for public works with its own powers and resources so we're less dependent on contractors for planning + delivery.

Emulating old games, I've enjoyed smoothing over the rougher edges of dated game design using save states, and being able to freely mess with the control setup. Tank controls are probably not something a user can fix though!

Surely it's one of those arrangement where he "works" for a few hours a month if that.

The advertising seems really predatory. Saw a poster at a DLR station (Island Gardens) which I assume is part of the same campaign. Says wages have been stagnant since 2008, okay, fine. But apparently it therefore follows that you should gamble what little savings you have on their platform.

The Eurostar should stop at Stratford International so they can put a personal waiting room for me there

As soon as something goes wrong, people always want the "legacy" (i.e. human-based) systems of trust and verification back. If they were genuinely happy with "code is law", then they wouldn't complain when a bug or a bad actor drains their bank accounts.

Can't help but think e-scooters would take up a lot less space in situations like this. Lambeth do allow scooters, but it's difficult for operators to offer them when so many boroughs don't. Dockless e-bikes far less tightly regulated of course, so naturally that's what we see far more of.

I've since needed to get a replacement bike from Tenways that follows a similar formula (internal battery, rear hub motor, single speed) to keep the weight / complexity of the bike down. It's great. But the lack of gears means you do need the motor on, otherwise standing starts are very difficult.

I had a Decathlon brand e-bike which also has a Mahle drive system. I wouldn't have said the assistance was "only moderate"—you could definitely just whack the assistance up and barely needing to pedal (at least until you hit a decent hill) to go full speed, if that's what you want.

Screenshot of map showing UK and part of northern Europe with locations of e-bike chargers shown.

If the data can be trusted (and tbh, my own experience bears this out), the availability in the Netherlands and Germany is outstanding. In the UK? Not so much.

There's a cluster in the Lake District but I'm not sure that's accurate. visitlakedistrict.com seems to have been scrubbed of any mention.

Found a way to easily query OpenStreetMaps for public e-bike chargers (without requiring installing an app / downloading maps).

Just move the map to the area you're interested in and run the query (it will take a long time / error out) if you've selected a large area):

overpass-turbo.eu/s/28Wu

CoL should really copy this Hackney scheme to allow exemptions for journeys paid through the taxicard scheme:

news.hackney.gov.uk/news/taxicar...

Concerns about disabled access isn't really justification to allow *all* taxis through the junction. I hope they're monitoring any impact on buses too.

Lucy Bronze was playing with A FRACTURED TIBIA!?

Honestly I do think there is a lot wrong with food delivery. The working conditions / pay / benefits mainly, but I also think they're making the experience for walk-in customers worse in a lot of cases, and "dark kitchens" obviously don't exactly contribute to a vibrant urban landscape.

I suppose dark kitchens + delivery apps maybe gives people options even if there isn't anywhere "open". But I suppose that goes back to the point of, perhaps we don't want to encourage people to become shut-ins who get everything delivered to them.

Yeah, much easier to make this style of housing work if they're already in desireable locations with many useful amenities.

No UK cities are 24 hour in the same way NY is, so perhaps that makes acheiving this more difficult. If you want a nice meal between say 10pm - 8am, you're making it yourself.

Most 1-bed units in western housing still have a kitchen with a full sized oven, 4 burners, a sink with a separate drying space. Just seems wasteful sometimes. Particularly now a lot of people will buy an air fryer and rarely / never turn on the oven.

I'd like options akin to those seen in SE Asia—compact kitchenettes taking up the space of just two "units". Typically a single burner, and then a sink with a drying rack above it, plus cupboards. Clearly intended for people who will eat out / order in a lot, but you can cook small meals at least.

They have to keep extending the "trials" until they pass a new transport bill (which is overdue for many reasons, and should've really been done by one of the previous tory governments but of course they were busy shouting about boats, tanking the economy, etc) which would make e-scooters legal.

Plus of course this matter has been thought about long and hard already. She doesn't seem to have engaged with the reams of existing reports on the subject, and didn't bother engaging with local cycling groups before tabling these swingeing amendments. Lost a lot of credibility in my eyes.

Very easy to be against things, not exactly clear what she actually wants here. It's fine to want experts to think long and hard about which solutions best balance the needs of various users, but is threatening to put cyclists in danger the best way to encourage that?

Are they stupid, where is the tacticle paving?

bsky.app/profile/liam...

Would be interesting to see an analysis of e-scooters as well. My guess is that compared to e-bikes, they are replacing more trips that would have otherwise been either walked or done via public transport. But even if they're making a smaller dent in car trips, that's still worthwhile.