James Scantlebury

Well that’s lots of people followed on Bluesky. @ me if I missed you, it was a rushed effort! Anyway, for now twitter - see you later.

@GarethDennis @TheMurkyDepths These are (allegedly) for City / Canary Wharf financial transactions - there’s no sites left in Tower Hamlets. There’s another one by Canning Town. Hard for us to push back as its industrial land - but we did get substantial public benefit, such as waste heat for heating homes

@TheMurkyDepths WHAT

Data centre under construction in Silvertown.

@s8mb Can go both ways too - Singapore offer discounts if you “touch out” in the CBD before the peak period. The limitation is the Oyster system (now 20+ years old) and it’s being replaced - contract has been awarded iirc

My unpopular opinion is that TfL should raise peak tube fares more. In the mornings, stations and trains are uncomfortably overcrowded and it's often difficult to get a seat. Higher fares would help with that and raise more money to invest in newer rolling stock.

@JRUrbaneNetwork Does CRH use extra trains for this level of service, or is every available train pressed into service (i.e. no heavy maintenance during this period)?

During the peak day of Chunyun some key high speed trunk lines in China were running all night. Some lines like Guangzhou-Wuhan trains ran all night with trains dispatched as close as every 4 minutes each direction. Shanghai had a high speed train leaving every 2-3 mins all night

@beyonddc Utah, “French Alps” and (highly likely to be) Switzerland as the next winter hosts… you’re basically right!

My every-two-years Olympics take is that humanity needs this joy and it is worth the cost, but the Olympics should shift from host cities to host countries.

@s8mb Riding at the front of the DLR … you might have to fight the big kids / adults for the front seat 😂

My son absolutely loves trains. Can’t get enough of them - his ideal afternoon is watching videos of them on TV while playing with brio trains and a Duplo train station. What are the best things to do in London with him? We’ve been to the transport museum and I’ve taken him to watch them at Denmark Hill station (where the drivers often toot their horns at him, which he loves). What else might he enjoy?

@boys_nicholas Because London doesn’t have the levels of dedicated revenue sources that other major world cities have - “versement transport” in Paris, for example

Why cannot London pay for this?

@AntBreach Also, having lived in tiny flats… NPSS are a good idea (as are the London Plan outdoor space requirements). Otherwise we’ll get a miserable race to the bottom as happened when standards like Parker Morris was abolished …

England's 37m2 minimum space standard is unusually high compared to other countries. We recommend the space standard be set at either 25m2 (as in Japan) or 18m2 (as in the Netherlands), both of which are above France (14m2).

Our latest report looks at five 'anti-supply measures' that are a major bottleneck on urban housebuilding and the 1.5m new home target - a quick thread below on what they are, why they're a problem, and how to fix them:

@AntBreach That’s not what our evidence shows RE: overheating… Simpler building forms (i.e. less corners) also make it much easier to achieve net zero building standards - as we and London boroughs are pushing for (and we show it’s achievable cost wise!)

This might be OK if it kept people safe. Unfortunately, passive-only measures will struggle to keep well-insulated flats cool on the hottest and most dangerous days of the year. Only air conditioning can do this, but it is only allowed in the regs under exceptional circumstances.

@humantransit Excellent thread on this by garius on the butterfly platform… bsky.app/profile/garius…

Every transit manager I know is frustrated about fare enforcement. But there are no solutions that don't (a) cost more than they gain in revenue or (b) degrade the service for everyone. The inefficiency that you see is the least bad solution.

@RM_Transit Congrats!!

So, big announcement from me (and I'm serious enough about it to actually be saying it publicly) I am writing a book about urban rail.

@2cheee OH I thought you were literally reading the same section at once. I withdraw my previous comment 😂

@turini2 James! Have you never shared a newspaper with another person before?? You read a section while they read a different section and then you trade.

Sharing a newspaper with a stranger in a coffee shop feels so intimate lol. Am I insane?

@2cheee What?! Waiting until the other person was done until you turn the page?

@turini2 Hahaha. I have read so many interesting things over the shoulders of strangers. But this time we were swapping sections of a shared newspaper.

@weather_forkast not called yet, but looks like it

@RoyalDocksRob @TheMurkyDepths In the long term, plans for DLR up the Roding corridor towards Barking and Ilford…

@TheMurkyDepths How about this though? Clearly stopping at Thamesmead is not ambitious enough. Going back over to Barking Riverside and potentially on to Dagenham Dock and Beam Park would link up 3, possibly 5, areas currently near as the crow flies, but isolated from each other.

A development of this size needs more than the London Overground's relatively short trains every 15 mins. DLR was due to head through here with three stops on new extension connecting to c2c rail before Johnson scrapped it. Thamesmead DLR plan makes it harder to bring back.

@freddie_poser And here’s the completions - again, this data will be updated later this summer. Hoping that Newham will get 100% of our London Plan target…. data.london.gov.uk/dataset/reside…

@freddie_poser I’m not sure where Molior get their data from. Here’s the GLA residential starts dashboard - check back in August when we’ve all collected the data! data.london.gov.uk/dataset/reside…

ZERO new housing starts in 23 London boroughs... I have no words.

@AlexCrane33 it is, boroughs only collect this data yearly

@Sam_Dumitriu Surely, surely, this is just incomplete data

This is bleak. Not a single new home was started in two-thirds of London's 33 boroughs. We need an urgent rewrite of the London Plan.

@Sam_Dumitriu @yimbyalliance It's wrong lol - I recommend using the actual GLA data which reports the same thing (note the lack of 24/25 data because we haven't collected it yet) data.london.gov.uk/dataset/reside…

@turini2 @yimbyalliance This is the source knightfrank.com/research/artic…

NEW: “Not a single spade hit the ground in 23 of London’s 33 boroughs in the first three months of the year. That’s right - developers didn’t start a single home in all but ten boroughs.”