South Circular to be rerouted at Catford (2020/21)

Interesting - The details will be crucial of course. As a driver it has always been a mare and to be avoided.
As a cyclist - I don’t think I ever went round it and avoided it at all costs!

It’s all fairly pointless if they don’t address the issue of the crossing of the two railway lines. That’s the pinch point, not the one way system.
Unless the bridge and tunnel is widened cyclists will still find it difficult to travel along the south circular.

The east-west railway crossing points in Lewisham are appalling:
Southend Lane
Catford Bridge
Forest Hill
Sydenham
Hither Green
And I don’t think this scheme will touch this problem.

I completely agree with the point in principle, Catford in particular is a nightmare.

The problem is probably that replacing railway bridges is usually very complex and expensive - not only because of the building job itself but also managing the rail traffic and compensating the train companies while they can’t run trains. Commuters don’t like it having their line shut for several weeks for the sake of a major upgrade, let alone for fitting a cycle lane going underneath it!

On top of that, removing gyratories in town centres are in full fashion at the moment (and rightly so), replacing railway bridges are not (and haven’t been for 150 odd years).

If there is a will there is a way.

Modern offsite construction techniques combined with modular components and you can build a new bridge with minimal disruption. The Caversham Road Rail Bridge is a great example. I think the total time the connection was shut was 72 hours.

Though I doubt there is a will.

I absolutely agree about the bottleneck at the railway being a major issue, but that doesn’t preclude the removal of the gyratory in Catford itself in the meantime. That will improve through traffic for those crossing Catford from Lewisham towards Bromley and vice versa. It should also significantly improve the street environment for pedestrians with simpler and more direct road crossings.

Absolutely, it’s about people firstly and how it feels to arrive in and move around Catford. Which has got to be a massive benefit for the place.

Very interesting. That intersection is absolutely horrible and really holds back the area. The reason I’ve posted this news here is I’m sure a lot of us head that way from time to time or we are affected by slow traffic that is caused by it.

I don’t think this will help speed us the South Circ as it is always going to be a pinch point - I think it is more aimed at improving Catford…

Moving the South Circular road will transform Catford and make the town centre a better place to live, work and visit

Could be very interesting

Now if we could only move the South Circ from Forest Hill town centre. Perhaps via Devonshire Road and Honor Oak Road.

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controversial

It’s an interesting suggestion, but my plans to block all roads on the hill also includes an extra layer that shows the tunnel that could connect the Harvester to the Portacabin site.

It also shows my proposed new road that would follow the route of the south circular through Catford (through the railway arches, along the edge of the playing field and through Laurence House).

Just for completeness I propose another tunnel from Clapham to Putney, diverting the South Circular away from Wandsworth and back up Rohampton Lane (and providing faster access to/from the A3).

Such tunnels are highly unlikely as both would be longer than the Blackwall tunnel and would only bring more traffic to South London.

Mmmm. Tunnel.

Someone on the gin early today?

I may have dropped out of Politicos but I still got a spoon.

A tunnel connecting the Harvester to the Portacabin site would completely transform Forest Hill. I’m imagining what a quasi-pedestrianised village centre similar to the one in Herne Hill would look like. It would be great for local businesses, Horniman, Havelock walk and connecting the green chain walk sections, which are currently divided by the South Circular. I guess one can only dream at this point…

Or (and I know you’re just going to be shocked) we just all drive less and have less cars on the road and less life threatening pollution in the air. Oh and nicer places to live.

The Catford proposals aren’t about cars (no worse bit also no better), they are about people Catford isn’t going to be a better place to be and live until the focus changes from how it is now and frankly the stations need to be pleasant to use. Which they aren’t now.

It will be interesting to see what the actual proposals are. It’s not quite clear from the plans but I hope they don’t open Rushey Green for full two-way traffic. If they did that they would probably have to block the right turn from Rushey Green into Brownhill Road completely, as well as from Brownhill Road into Plassy Road, just to avoid having the tailbacks reaching back into those areas that they want to improve as public realm.

I still think that the A21 corridor from Lewisham to Bromley would make a perfect route for a tram. The amount of bus traffic along Lewisham High Street is abnormal. Probably not to happen within my lifetime though…

I also don’t think that it is possible to turn Catford into an attractive place without knocking down the Catford Centre and Milford Towers and start from scratch, but these public realm works can be a good stimulus for some momentum.

Strangely enough back in the day - the mid-80’s - there was a South Circular Assessment Study which included a tunnel under Horniman Park through to Stanstead Road, where it would have continued through to Catford using a cut and cover method. Lots of interesting ideas were put forward to try to deal with excessive traffic even in those days. Forest Hill would have become much more of a backwater and far more pleasant.

However, the disturbances to those who would have been affected and the blight of major roadworks around the entire area of south London on house values led to the scheme, on which a great deal of money was spent, being shelved.

Interesting stuff. I believe to remember that the idea was also touched on by Boris’ latest musings on a transport strategy before he left City Hall.

In terms of house values, whilst they may drop during construction they would get a major push upwards after completion of the works no doubt.

There are many examples where this has been done as well with great success, for instance around Wanstead station. In Munich, on a slightly larger scale, they’ve been working on putting their almost entire ring road underground for decades now, with a transformative result for the people living alongside. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mittlerer_Ring_in_Munich#/media/File:München_-_Trappentreutunnel.JPG

The problem would be, as with any road scheme in London, that any attempt to make traffic faster in one place would attract substantially more traffic, which in turn would create many new issues in other places.

I’ve become increasingly sceptical about road capacity projects since reading that the M25 capacity improvements attracted so much traffic that journeys are slower than before the works!

https://www.transportxtra.com/publications/local-transport-today/news/53100/extra-traffic-prompts-longer-journey-times-on-widened-m25

The other, often glossed over consideration for any tunnelling or undergrounding of the South Circular is the need for interchanges with the surface road network, or at least the tunnel portals. These would involve significant land take and property loss, and in the long run would be as bad a blight (or worse) for anyone left living nearby.

Agreed, although I’m equally sceptical about this article (or at least the part that is freely available).
Apologies for going off-topic here, but smart motorways are only smart until the point where a vehicle breaks down which not only makes it less safe but also causes havoc to traffic - a classic example of a false economy imho. The article also doesn’t appear to discuss whether other roads have been relieved as a result either which could be a worthwhile benefit.

The point about tunnel portals is equally valid however there is a choice of blight of a confined area for the benefit of “unblight” of a much larger area - a price many would consider worth paying. Still don’t think it would be the right solution for the South Circular but then I can’t see any alternative that would turn Forest Hill into a truly attractive town centre.

Anyway, the elephant in the room is the cost to build and maintain so I can’t see a project of this scale happen in my lifetime in an area that is, at least in the view of many decision and policy makers, still perceived to be largely inhabited by the “riff-raff”.

Roads are widened and built to meet demand. If they didn’t do that, we’d all be complaining that all these new roads are being built and no-one is using them. Imagine the outcry if the government spent billions on a new motorway and nobody used it.

Ergo, saying a new road development has “attracted” traffic is a bit of a falsehood.

After the plan to tunnel under Forest Hill it was replaced by a plan to tunnel under Dulwich and then come through Forest Hill as a dual carriage way. For a few years everybody in Forest Hill had signs saying ‘No to the Trunk Road’.

The plan was to smash their way through Forest Hill demolishing houses all over the place to straighten the South circular. It is not clear what the town centre would have been like afterwards, but I don’t think central government were particularly concerned at the time. I might have some documents at home from the time - that have been handed down to me, but it could take a few months to locate such files in my house.

That’s not quite right. A road capacity improvement project will attract trips which previously were not made (or at least not made by car). Transport planners call this ‘induced traffic’. This frequently turns out to be far higher than forecast during the development of a scheme, and that’s the crux of the article I posted. Far sooner than anticipated (and within a couple of years of completing the improvements), the M25 is so full that it’s slower than before.

And that’s where it becomes circular: build capacity, induce traffic, identity the need to build more capacity, and so on.

We’re clearly going to be stuck with the South Circular (and the rest of the road network around here) in its current format for the foreseeable future. We therefore need to make the most of the capacity available. That means prioritising more efficient modes of transport (measured as people moved per unit of road space), so that’s buses, trains, pedestrians, bikes. We can also reduce the need to travel by car through better planning e.g. having shops and services within walking distance rather than at ‘out if town’ locations. Reducing unnecessary car trips will also make road space available for those who really need it, i.e. the emergency services, deliveries, vans/lorries for work, and people who may need cars for mobility reasons.

“induced traffic” and “meeting demand” aren’t mutually exclusive. Clearly the demand to travel was there, but now it is easier to do by road.

As for the holy trinity of walking, cycling and public transport, there aren’t many journeys that incorporate the M25 that could be done on any of those modes. It’s also worth noting that average speeds may be down because the traffic flow is controlled by variable speed limits which are rarely switched off.

It is a bit of both. Roads are busy due to high demand and the “solution” is to build more roads to lessen congestion and cope with the demand. Less busy roads become more attractive and demand rises again leading to more congestion. So yes new roads and wider/improved roads are built to cope with new traffic but it also does attract new traffic - it is fairly old and established principle in traffic planning and something covered in year one on a lot of Urban Geog degrees…
Modern road planning should therefore always be accompanied by other measures to try to promote public transport and alternate means of getting around but the build first and see what happens approach is still fairly prevalent…

We also tend to forget that cars are also more affordable today. When I arrived in the UK in 1986 there was usually one car per household and a lot of people didnt have cars. It now seems the whole family has a car. As cars have become more affordable people are buying them in ever increasing numbers leading to more congestion.

Interesting. So they are nicking a bit of green space from Jubilee Ground for the south circ.
I wonder how long it will take to get that through planning? When we did similar for a new building it took two years to get permission to build. The junction with the A21 is going to be crucial to this being successful as they are both hugely busy roads…