City planning

You have the power to regulate development much more than is happening at the moment. I am frequently shocked by the number of 'luxury flats' I see being built in neighbourhoods in London where there is both a social and affordable housing crisis.. yet these new developments are by far the most common?  If you care about your residents, young people and local communities, you will ensure a high level (50%) of good quality, genuinely affordable housing in all new housing developments. If you truly want to nurture your communities and support Londoners, you will make it possible for children and young people to buy a house in their local area when they grow up. You will not follow a trajectory which represents an agenda of ‘social cleansing’. I sincerely hope you take these comments on board, as London as a whole seriously risks losing the very character that makes it such an amazing place to live - I am noticing at a terrifying pace in Southwark and Lambeth at the moment. Do you want this to be the legacy that your administration leaves?

Rebalancing development plans to take account of tube/rail capacity.

In tandem, there needs to be a programme to clear the roads to allow buses to run efficiently. Oversized cars that create bottlenecks need to be taxed heavily for the impact on infrastructure capacity they have (and of course their pollution) 

Priorities should be:

1) Enhancing the quality of green space and promote enhanced biodiversity

2) A London wide cycling strategy with yearly deliverables

3) Building standards that set leading edge sustainability requirements

4) Truly affordable housing as the priority on all housing schemes

I think, 2050, is too long to wait for a park. These are just dreams that will never come true. All the tower blocks in London, are ruining the city. We are not getting enough sunlight because of them. I do not agree with demolishing all the buildings and destroying the city and its history. Why do we have to keep funding LLDC? There plenty of other companies that would possibly have better ideas.

Hello, the mayor has made several funds and design guides available to make neighbourhoods, streets and junctions better for pedestrians and cyclists, as well as the environment. Unfortunately, I see a lot of new schemes that don't fulfill these objectives. 

1. New pavements crossed by many private and access roads. Footways should be continuous there or at least be provided with zebra crossing. 
2. New street corners still not tight enough to slow down vehicles and offer comfortable crossings.
3. New raised tables at junctions in asphalt with no sharp ramps (max 30cm) that really slow down vehicles and .
4. Low amount of new zebra crossings accross  long resurfaced roads. No need for Belisha beacons everywhere (they existed in the Netherlands too, not anymore thanks to good design.
5. At junctions, invisible studs instead of clear zebras.
6. Widened pavements with no trees, no benches, no art.
7. Resurfaced carriageways in pitch black, that is the saddest colour and increases urban heat island effect. 
9. New advanced line stops for cyclists at junctions without the indispensable feeder to bring cyclists there.
10. Resurfaced wide roads with 4 lanes for cars but no cycle lanes, even advisory! Letting people cycling amoungst fast cars, vans and buses is putting their lives in danger. 
11. No design difference is made between through, distributor and access streets. It looks like vehicles have the priority everywhere, even in residential streets, with the exception of mews.
12. Asphalt is still much used while it is a petrol based material. Locally sourced stones and bricks are sustainable, permeable and easy to repair, reuse and recycle. 
13. Resurfaced one way streets without countraflow for cyclists.
14. 20mph streets without any type of traffic calming measures. 
15. High streets with crowded and uncomfortable pavements while they...

Something near to my heart is we must correct the boundaries, the GLA has to insist on places that are in the London trave zones all come under their control so they pay their council taxes to the GLA. There are places that have 020 London phone codes, inside the London loop and are in the travel zone but outside of London mainly in North London inside the M25. Most used to be LCC but were somehow left out in the last big shake-up due to no fault of their own.

This has a lot to do with spending and planing so everybody pays into the system, It is wrong to ignore what is an obvious overlook on behalf of the LGBCE any longer.

National parks are being eroded and destroyed in cost cutting by local councils so this as a planned investment is great but will have no difference, they took out bushes and trees in my local park to be replaced by bedding plants that just got pulled up by wildlife and the local rat hoodies because it was too expensive to up keep trees and bushes round the edge of a large park area! Next will like;t be fake grass because it's too expensive to cut.

stop the lunacy first then these plans might work

Investment in healthier green spaces is great so long as these 'healthy spaces' really do invite citizens to utilise them in varied ways including setting aside areas in parks for physical, healthy exercise such as tracks for jogging and exercise frames and aparatus for more athetic attention to body health and fitness. We do not have enough of these public outdoor innovations that other countries, particularly Russia and the USA, have accessible to their citizens to encourage citizens young and older to get away from a sedantary and lazy obese causing life. Please consider this seriously.    

Development next to the canal should not shade out the water. Current building along the waterway is very short-sighted as this is robbing the community of what could be an amazing linear park for people and a blue-green corridor for wildlife from the Lea Valley into the heart of London. However, wildlife needs plants and plants need sunshine - also lots of wildlife needs sunshine too. So please follow and enforce the many planning guidelines that already recognises the importance of biodiversity for wellbeing and resilience.

In terms of the consultation process, I would have expected to receive rather more information than the headlines provided - clicking purple boxes to look at the results in more detail simply sends me round in circles to find the limited facts that I have already uncovered.  Furthermore, I would prefer to see raw data rather than results that have been "weighted  . . . . . by age, gender and ethnicity to make it more reflective of the London population"  One might say that this means weighted to produce results that the Mayor's office wants.

THE CONSULTATION PROCESS IS ALSO DIFFICULT BECAUSE OF A 2000 CHARACTER LIMIT AND A DIVISION OF RESPONSES INTO SECTIONS.

SO WHAT FOLLOWS IS PART ONE OF TWO - THE SECOND PART COMES UNDER HOUSING!

In general, I have little objection to the main aims and ambitions of the Mayor, bar a total opposition to the incessant need to grow London, to squeeze house building into any bit of spare land that might be found and, worse still, to build high rise.

In my view, London is already overcrowded - just look at Oxford Circus Tube station during rather lengthy rush hours, and look at the increasing pressure on the NHS and other public services including the Police.

Far from encouraging growth, we should be encouraging consolidation and looking to improve the quality and availability of essential public services.  Quality of life and a healthy environment should be the priorities.

END OF PART ONE - PART TWO UNDER HOUSING

Please plant more trees along TfL routes

More restraints on high rise building. 

Shared ownership priority should run across London not be confined to the live/work borough as young people often change jobs and rental homes.

My preference (as a cyclist myself) is for cycle paths to simply be marked with paint, as that usually suffices to keep the space clear for cycles and makes it easier to overtake.  Where separate cycle paths are deemed necessary, however (e.g. because of safety concerns), my plea would be for these to be better designed/aligned with the normal flow of traffic.  It is often the case that these paths cut cross across the normal traffic route at some point, which has the dual effect of both slowing the traffic for all concerned (as these crossings tend to be controlled by additional traffic lights) and arguably making it more dangerous around these areas, as it is sometimes difficult to work out which route to follow, and where cyclists have priority.  If the paths were better designed, then I think that would be much less likely for some cyclists to elect to abandon the paths and rejoin the roads with the rest of the traffic.

On a different note, I think we should implement any and all measures to reduce London's carbon footprint (e.g. renewable energy, planting more trees, insulation for housing).

Leisure Centres and Sport Centres:

I live en Rotherhithe, and we have a beautiful and too expensive to build today deep water 33 meter long 4 meter deep swimming pool and Southwark Council wants to replace it with 25 meters of prefabricated rubbish of ony 2m deep!
You have presided over the destruction of Barnett Copthall deep water pool with an active diving club!!
Now very likely you will authorise to give British Land PLC a 35 million contract when it would only cost 8 million to refurbish Seven Islands and 160 thousand to install a movable bulkhead to give primary school galas a 25 meter "short course" inside the 33 meter pool.

Even the Council said it would never build nor authorise to build a leisure centre where it now plans to build it because it is a terrible place on top of a railway tunnel. Causing us great expense among other things. Seven Islands with its better pool santds on DONATED GROUND! No problems on OUR site! The only advantage of the "Canada Water Leisure Centre" is that it gives British Land an unwanted contract of 35 million pounds which WE will be paying for, WE will also be paying for concrete demolition (loads of green house gases etc) to destroy our better and more expensive pool and then we have to pay for British Land's 25 meters of prefabricated rubbish.
To do this the Council has cancelled 2 resident participations because we were voting to keep Seven Islands so they took it off the list and only left 3 sites every one forcing us to give the contract to British Land Southwark Councils 20% Partners!!

How many more deep water pools are you going to destroy? 

There are hardly any left!

Regards Livepeanuts

With regards to city planning due to new housing builds being built in the poorer areas of the town (as the council can get away with this as they can dismiss the voices of the existing poorer residents) the overcrowding issue is extremely important.  Multi-occupancy houses generate a lot of rubbish which ends up overflowing onto the street. which leads to others fly-tipping on the existing rubbish. The streets of Croydon are littered with rubbish due to the afore mentioned reasons and the council do nothing about it.  The posher parts of Croydon are litter free but the poorer parts are a fly-tippers paradise - so where is the social justice? Bring back the scheme 'Keep Britain Tidy'.  Also when city planning ensure that pedestrians walk ways are prioritized as everyday we have to navigate the litter and dice with death when crossing roads due the enormous amount of impatient cars.