Rotherhithe Tunnel closure

[doebag]

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/transpo ... 28788.html

Doesn't sound promising.

[Bryn666]

It's absolutely farcical that the two crossings of the Thames in this area consist of an ancient tunnel that is wholly unfit for modern traffic and a tourist trap bascule bridge with an 18t weight limit.

There really should have been a priority placed on building a decent tunnel with public transport priority whilst still allowing HGVs and other important traffic to cross the river somewhere around here decades ago.

It'll never happen now but this should be a warning sign that London needs something sorting out ASAP.

[KeithW]

Between the City of London and Poplar we have
Southwark Bridge
London Bridge
Tower Bridge
Rotherhithe Tunnel
The Blackwall Tunnels

One thing I consider very desirable is more railway connectivity. Travelling from Dartford to Purfleet means either travelling by road or a very long trip by rail.

[RichardA626]

Hopefully the Silvertown Tunnel won't take to long...

[Piatkow]

One thing I consider very desirable is more railway connectivity. Travelling from Dartford to Purfleet means either travelling by road or a very long trip by rail.

Or you could use the ferry from Gravesend.

I hadn't realised that ENCTS passes are valid.

[Scratchwood]

Between the City of London and Poplar we have
Southwark Bridge
London Bridge
Tower Bridge
Rotherhithe Tunnel
The Blackwall Tunnels

One thing I consider very desirable is more railway connectivity. Travelling from Dartford to Purfleet means either travelling by road or a very long trip by rail.

There are masses of rail crossings now in East London, and HS1 crosses east of Dartford. It's the road crossings that are inadequate. In the last 25 years we've gained the Jubilee Line (which crosses the Thames twice), two separate DLR crossings (to Greenwich/Lewisham and Woolwich), the Elizabeth Line and a much improved East London Line Overground service

If the Dartford crossings weren't so overloaded, you could run reliable bus services through them.

[Mapper89062]

Creating more road crossings east of London is difficult as there isn't really any good place for them to connect to. The A13 is fine and several areas south of it are low-quality industrial areas that could be demolished for a northern crossing approach, but the A2016 on the south bank is just a local distributor road for the Erith and Belvedere area that feeds into urban-fronted roads at each end and has poor onward connections to the M25 and A2.

I'm not sure pushing large amounts of HGV and strategic traffic down roads like this will work well:
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.49128 ... ?entry=ttu
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.47319 ... ?entry=ttu

[WHBM]

Between the City of London and Poplar we have
Southwark Bridge
London Bridge
Tower Bridge
Rotherhithe Tunnel
The Blackwall Tunnels

One thing I consider very desirable is more railway connectivity. Travelling from Dartford to Purfleet means either travelling by road or a very long trip by rail.

Southwark Bridge has been cut down to a single lane each way by hard-divided bicycle lanes, impeding capacity at the signals at each end.

London Bridge is now effectively buses only.

Hopefully the Silvertown Tunnel won't take to long...

By coincidence we came right over the works for this only last night, in The Cablecar, it being a visitors' holiday treat for them. Well, it was meant to be. You can imagine what it was like in the near-storm we were experiencing. Coming northbound the car doors were on the side the wind was blowing from, rattling, letting the blast through, and (slightly) parting !

There's a good view of the north side tunnel works from directly above; there's a very substantial cut-and-cover section from the river bank up to the north side roundabout. If you want some good photos of the project, take a trip these holidays - once the winds have died down.

[JammyDodge]

It's absolutely farcical that the two crossings of the Thames in this area consist of an ancient tunnel that is wholly unfit for modern traffic and a tourist trap bascule bridge with an 18t weight limit.

There really should have been a priority placed on building a decent tunnel with public transport priority whilst still allowing HGVs and other important traffic to cross the river somewhere around here decades ago.

It'll never happen now but this should be a warning sign that London needs something sorting out ASAP.

Certainly would be useful as a bypass of Tower Bridge. If it was the early 60s or even the late 80s, you might have been able to build something like this

Would never happen, but could work.
The Bricklayers Arms Gyratory is a good place to start south of the river with ok links south, east and west, however its north of the Thames that finding suitable links is hard. I ended up deciding on a link to the A1023 as that gives you connection west. Finding a suitable place for another portal was hard, however I ended up settling on the old Bishopsgate station as a good location for a northern portal, as from there you can head north or east.
These tunnels would have a single GSJ consisting of south facing slips for access to the "Tobacco Tunnel", off of the main tunnel.
This would then free up Tower Bridge for buses/taxis/cycles only, which would be nice.
But as Bryn said, never going to happen

[thomas417]

Between the City of London and Poplar we have
Southwark Bridge
London Bridge
Tower Bridge
Rotherhithe Tunnel
The Blackwall Tunnels

One thing I consider very desirable is more railway connectivity. Travelling from Dartford to Purfleet means either travelling by road or a very long trip by rail.

Southwark Bridge has been cut down to a single lane each way by hard-divided bicycle lanes, impeding capacity at the signals at each end.

London Bridge is now effectively buses only.

Hopefully the Silvertown Tunnel won't take to long...

By coincidence we came right over the works for this only last night, in The Cablecar, it being a visitors' holiday treat for them. Well, it was meant to be. You can imagine what it was like in the near-storm we were experiencing. Coming northbound the car doors were on the side the wind was blowing from, rattling, letting the blast through, and (slightly) parting !

There's a good view of the north side tunnel works from directly above; there's a very substantial cut-and-cover section from the river bank up to the north side roundabout. If you want some good photos of the project, take a trip these holidays - once the winds have died down.

I don’t understand why London Bridge isn’t doing more heavy lifting.

If there’s a bridge that would benefit from being buses only it would be Tower Bridge. Yet that takes all the traffic and you’ve got a wide, empty London Bridge just sat up river from it.

[Chris5156]

Between the City of London and Poplar we have
Southwark Bridge
London Bridge
Tower Bridge
Rotherhithe Tunnel
The Blackwall Tunnels

One thing I consider very desirable is more railway connectivity. Travelling from Dartford to Purfleet means either travelling by road or a very long trip by rail.

Southwark Bridge has been cut down to a single lane each way by hard-divided bicycle lanes, impeding capacity at the signals at each end.

London Bridge is now effectively buses only.

Hopefully the Silvertown Tunnel won't take to long...

By coincidence we came right over the works for this only last night, in The Cablecar, it being a visitors' holiday treat for them. Well, it was meant to be. You can imagine what it was like in the near-storm we were experiencing. Coming northbound the car doors were on the side the wind was blowing from, rattling, letting the blast through, and (slightly) parting !

There's a good view of the north side tunnel works from directly above; there's a very substantial cut-and-cover section from the river bank up to the north side roundabout. If you want some good photos of the project, take a trip these holidays - once the winds have died down.

I don’t understand why London Bridge isn’t doing more heavy lifting.

If there’s a bridge that would benefit from being buses only it would be Tower Bridge. Yet that takes all the traffic and you’ve got a wide, empty London Bridge just sat up river from it.

It’s inside the Inner Ring Road and Congestion Charge cordon, and funnels traffic into the heart of the City. Tower Bridge, on the other hand, has been part of the Inner Ring Road since the 1950s and was essentially built to bypass London Bridge and the ancient streets it feeds in to. But I agree it’s now rather a shame that the bigger and wider of the two is the least used - in an ideal world it would be the other way round.

[trickstat]

Southwark Bridge has been cut down to a single lane each way by hard-divided bicycle lanes, impeding capacity at the signals at each end.

London Bridge is now effectively buses only.


By coincidence we came right over the works for this only last night, in The Cablecar, it being a visitors' holiday treat for them. Well, it was meant to be. You can imagine what it was like in the near-storm we were experiencing. Coming northbound the car doors were on the side the wind was blowing from, rattling, letting the blast through, and (slightly) parting !

There's a good view of the north side tunnel works from directly above; there's a very substantial cut-and-cover section from the river bank up to the north side roundabout. If you want some good photos of the project, take a trip these holidays - once the winds have died down.

I don’t understand why London Bridge isn’t doing more heavy lifting.

If there’s a bridge that would benefit from being buses only it would be Tower Bridge. Yet that takes all the traffic and you’ve got a wide, empty London Bridge just sat up river from it.

It’s inside the Inner Ring Road and Congestion Charge cordon, and funnels traffic into the heart of the City. Tower Bridge, on the other hand, has been part of the Inner Ring Road since the 1950s and was essentially built to bypass London Bridge and the ancient streets it feeds in to. But I agree it’s now rather a shame that the bigger and wider of the two is the least used - in an ideal world it would be the other way round.

I think road layout changes brought in after the IRA set off a bomb in the City in about 1990 made through routes north via London Bridge much less convenient.

[6637]

Creating more road crossings east of London is difficult as there isn't really any good place for them to connect to. The A13 is fine and several areas south of it are low-quality industrial areas that could be demolished for a northern crossing approach, but the A2016 on the south bank is just a local distributor road for the Erith and Belvedere area that feeds into urban-fronted roads at each end and has poor onward connections to the M25 and A2.

I'm not sure pushing large amounts of HGV and strategic traffic down roads like this will work well:
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.49128 ... ?entry=ttu
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.47319 ... ?entry=ttu

The route which would require the least demolition would probably be something like this as an A406 extension to the A2- it would require a handful of houses to be demolished but not an inordinately large number. Still probably too big of a project to be viable nowadays though.

[Bryn666]

Creating more road crossings east of London is difficult as there isn't really any good place for them to connect to. The A13 is fine and several areas south of it are low-quality industrial areas that could be demolished for a northern crossing approach, but the A2016 on the south bank is just a local distributor road for the Erith and Belvedere area that feeds into urban-fronted roads at each end and has poor onward connections to the M25 and A2.

I'm not sure pushing large amounts of HGV and strategic traffic down roads like this will work well:
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.49128 ... ?entry=ttu
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.47319 ... ?entry=ttu

The route which would require the least demolition would probably be something like this as an A406 extension to the A2- it would require a handful of houses to be demolished but not an inordinately large number. Still probably too big of a project to be viable nowadays though.

a406.png

That route is too far out to be of any use for the immediate centre of London which is where the main problem is.

It wasn't demolishing houses that sunk that project either, it was slicing through Oxleas Wood.

[Scratchwood]

Creating more road crossings east of London is difficult as there isn't really any good place for them to connect to. The A13 is fine and several areas south of it are low-quality industrial areas that could be demolished for a northern crossing approach, but the A2016 on the south bank is just a local distributor road for the Erith and Belvedere area that feeds into urban-fronted roads at each end and has poor onward connections to the M25 and A2.

I'm not sure pushing large amounts of HGV and strategic traffic down roads like this will work well:
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.49128 ... ?entry=ttu
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.47319 ... ?entry=ttu

The route which would require the least demolition would probably be something like this as an A406 extension to the A2- it would require a handful of houses to be demolished but not an inordinately large number. Still probably too big of a project to be viable nowadays though.

a406.png

That route is too far out to be of any use for the immediate centre of London which is where the main problem is.

It wasn't demolishing houses that sunk that project either, it was slicing through Oxleas Wood.

I disagree that it's too far out, as it would remove a lot of the traffic that uses the Blackwall tunnel, creating capacity there to relieve inner London crossings.

But yes, it's the damage to the woodland which was and is unacceptable. The only possible way of building this would be via a very long and expensive tunnel to Falconwood, with the smallest possible junction there to link to the A2.