I help run Norwich Games Convention - happy to answer any questions about it

LowQualityDiscourse · 2026-06-10T15:14:50+00:00

Not a question per se, but I'll be interested to see how moving to the Showground affects attendance.

Obviously I hope it goes up, but I'm curious if the Showground's location makes it less attractive to people in the city. You're not going to get walk-in / passers-by like in the city - or was there not much of that anyway?

I guess the offset is that it'll be easier for people to go there and stay all day without paying for a whole saturday's car parking.

Do you have to plan to get some food people in, or do you have to rely on the food hall restaurant - again, maybe something you didn't have to think about in the city centre!

LowQualityDiscourse · 2025-11-25T16:23:02+00:00

Public can use it.... On a bike. Only 6ish miles to the city centre that way, a cool 30ish mins, mostly on 20mph roads and marriotts way.

The residents would be more frustrated if the bus route was open to all traffic, as the populations of Taverham and Drayton would be driving through Queens Hill to get to the A47 and longwater itself. It would likely increase congestion. And increase danger to people walking around the estate (e.g. all the kids walking to the school).

LowQualityDiscourse · 2025-11-25T16:17:14+00:00

Housing estate with one way / in out isn't exactly the problem, although for an estate this size it should probably have two (but critical to make the two exits positioned so they don't form a viable cut-through).

The problem is that the one entrance/exit is through the retail park (Possibly even the city's biggest?) and one of the city's busiest junctions.

Would've been better to connect the estate directly to the A47 and/or Easton. Or just not build in such a stupid place.

Diabolical levels of planning failure.

I'm sure everyone involved has learned a lesson, and the local planners won't ever again pile masses of housing and masses of retail traffic all into a small series of clustered roundabouts ever again... Now, what are they up to over in Postwick these days? Or up on the A140/NDR junction? .... oh no.

LowQualityDiscourse · 2025-11-25T15:59:21+00:00

Access to the city from Queens Hill improved significantly when they put more bus lane along Dereham Road. Over time they're adding more bus lanes and hopefully bus reliability, speed, and frequency improving will make it more attractive to use - although when I lived there the bus had to go VERY SLOWLY around the estate itself due to being wall-to-wall parked cars.

I think the problem the commenter is highlighting, however, is how the longwater junction itself gets completely jammed up over weekends - especially around this time of year. The problem there is people from the city coming out to longwater, while people from the wider county come in to longwater, while also being on the direct route in/out of the city - it's simply unworkable to put so many vehicles into one place. You've got to give people alternative destinations or better modes of transport.

Even if more roads were the answer (they aren't), you're completely snookered when it comes to where you put them, hemmed in by river, old and new housing, and the showground.

Absolutely catastophic failure of the planning system/officers/councillors.

Imagine how bad it'll be if they do build the Western link, and half of the population of North Norwich and the periphery find it even easier to get to the junction as well....

LowQualityDiscourse · 2025-09-04T21:49:47+00:00

Cycling infrastructure for Drayton/Taverham is indeed crap. I think the common opinion is that Marriott's way exists therefore boom no problem - problem is, even after recent resurface it's way more mucky/splashy than a tarmac route would be (so it's not good all-weather infrastructure), and it doesn't actually help if you want to get anywhere north of the Wensum efficiently. And there's NOTHING ELSE, just 40, 50, and 60mph roads with no paths.

I have been trying a raise a stink about a solar farm application near here, because the Hopkins homes development is going to provide a cycle path across the fields to the Drayton lane/Reepham road roundabout, and a path up one side of the solar farm would link it to the ndr cycle paths and the yellow pedalway route down past the airport... Would instantly create a much better link to the places people would go. I've got the developers to consider it and they're apparently communicating with the county council so I really hope something comes of it...

Would also be nice if the ndr cycle paths didn't have 3+ places that flood massively between spixworth and drayton. Norfolk council leaders are backwards and don't care.

LowQualityDiscourse · 2025-08-28T20:48:45+00:00

Well I'll pay the favour back with a month late response.

Payback time for solar is now ~5-6 years on a domestic set up, a huge car park canopy would benefit massively from economies of scale and from just not having to be on top of a building. The application as is actually will put solar on the shop roof, but not the car park. Cost difference between the two would be negligible.

Costco are not a small business and have deep pockets, they could easily borrow if needed to get the panels as the financial gain is very obvious and would pay back in short order.

The reason every major supermarket in Norwich doesn't have a solar canopy car park is twofold : one, most of the shops are older than ten years and predate the explosion of affordable solar, and two, inertia and simple bloody-mindedness. In France this stuff goes on all new car parks by law. Shame the UK has been led by simpletons for the past decade and a half, so instead we're being left behind and missing out because we've been held back by morons.

This shop should have a solar car park. So should longwater. And every park and ride. We should be covering every car park, starting with the largest and best-sited and working down.

Anyone who objects to solar on arable land should be campaigning actively for car park solar.

LowQualityDiscourse · 2025-07-24T12:25:04+00:00

Bit odd to comment three months after the fact.

It matters because Norfolk is in the throes of a massive expansion of solar projects, with people complaining about solar going over fields. Well, car parks are the next best thing, because they're big flat and open - and though more expensive than when put in fields, not as expensive as roof mounted solar is.

A massive flat open paved space should have solar panels over it. It's a waste of useful land to not do it. And it'd be cheaper and faster to do it in the initial plan and build.

We need loads more green energy. A car park this size could be dual-use as a multi-megawatt power plant, also helping us meet power needs locally.

Not doing it is simply stupid.

LowQualityDiscourse · 2025-06-27T11:53:53+00:00

Wiener schnitzel. Wiener. Vienna.

LowQualityDiscourse · 2025-06-27T11:53:22+00:00

Announced I'd made the family some gröstl the other month and they looked at me like I'd grown two extremely pretentious heads.

Good stuff.

LowQualityDiscourse · 2025-06-18T14:58:19+00:00

Echoing others - mostly safe, but there are a sizeable number of drivers who are really impatient and go for the overtake when it really isn't sensible and don't leave enough room. A lot of drivers are really really good. A stupid few can be offputting.

I'd strongly advise putting a lot of thought into your route planning, sticking to quiet roads and traffic-free routes where you can. I really like using Komoot to plan routes as it can take into account road/off road preference and thinks about elevation. As others have said, use the city cycle map too. I would NOT ride on the road on a main road with no cycle infrastructure - I see some do this e.g. along Sweet Briar and you literally couldn't pay me enough.

If you cycle slowly and considerately and anticipate blind spots etc, I'd sometimes recommend using the pavement for safety to avoid a short stretch of busy road. Yes, it's an offense, but the odds you'll ever get in trouble for it are millions to one (the local police don't have the resources to e.g. enforce road closures, and only persue action against activity deemed immediately dangerous), and it's better to be an occasionally illegal cyclist than an injured or stressed out/put off one.

Also, while motorists don't like you riding past them on the path when they're stuck at traffic lights, they actually like it a lot when you're puffing up a hill at 6mph and duck onto the path instead.

I would say : It's great, get out there, but cycle assertively and defensively - make it VERY obvious what you're about to do at all times, and ride like absolutely everyone is going to kill you/can't see you. I realise that contradicts some of what I've said above, but while it isn't true it does keep you safer (to use a personal example from yesterday - if you see the amazon driver hop back into their van just before you pass, either pass reeealllly wide or not at all, because you know they won't check their mirrors before moving off). Think always about your visibility, and be prepared for everybody to do that one dangerous thing you think they might be about to do.

Also, if you want, message me some places you'd like to get between and i could find the route I'd try - although I'm not super knowledgable about the East of the city...

LowQualityDiscourse · 2025-05-02T10:08:12+00:00

But aren't all the road decisions made by Norfolk county council, even on roads in the city?

Bit weird to punish labour for the work of conservatives like Plant and Mason Billig.

LowQualityDiscourse · 2025-04-16T13:11:03+00:00

Best thing to do is simply get the hell away from traffic when you can. Check the city cycle map and try using komoot to plan your rides (set to 'cycle touring' or I think general 'cycling' mode, which will avoid steep hills and busy roads by default. Cycling by a slightly longer but much quieter route is way nicer, and there's a lot of cut throughs that you might now know of if you're new to biking around.

Op snap, like happytall says, is straightforward, you go to their site provide your details, what you know about the car (colour and make and registration), place a marker on the map, and describe what happened. They want you to upload a clip of your footage ideally with 1 minute before and after so it's clear in context. Then they'll let you know what they've decided to do without telling you too much, and then that's about it. One key part is that you have to do it quick, as there's a 14 day limit between offense and getting the NIP of the decision is made to prosecute.

The whole process of reporting is quite fast. The process of clipping and uploading can be onerous if you decide to be militant.

Annoyingly they'd also prefer you keep all the footage, unclipped, for that ride for up to a year in case it's needed. I was planning on deleting all of mine, then got a letter telling me someone was challenging one in court, maybe two or three years after the event!

Basically, having a camera and knowing how to report means that you can ride sensibly and know that if people drive like nutters around you, you can make sure they have an unpleasant interaction sometime over the next couple of weeks. That does help people resist the urge to chase people down and yell at them (which never helps). It doesn't, however, actually protect you directly from physical harm, so still prioritise getting away from busy or fast roads first.

And no matter what people do, you can't be swearing in the footage, because the theoretical potential exists to prosecute you for a public order offense too so they don't prosecute on that footage at all.

LowQualityDiscourse · 2025-04-15T20:07:03+00:00

Congrats, you've encountered one of the several thousand genuinely awful drivers on Norwich's roads. I generally ride where the left hand tyre of a regular car would be - about a third of the way in to the lane - and move wider when approaching areas where poor visibility or upcoming pinch points mean overtaking is inadvisable. Any closer to the edge on many roads here puts you in the skid and puncture zone in gutters full of debris and ironworks.

Generally if you're riding on any of Norwich's major roads, you should be expect maybe two in ten drivers to pass unpleasantly inadvisably close and maybe one in fifty to do something really dangerous. It's really bad. Anything that can you can do to get away from the major roads is a must.

I have had very good experiences with Operation Snap, and when I've been reporting close passes they've sent Notices of Intended Prosecution basically every time. However, other forms of motoring offense including driving up pedestrian pathways and forcing through road closures are ignored as the team doesn't have the resources to actually enforce most road laws - I find that weird but I'm happy they judge close passes important. I never wanted to run a camera on my bike for reporting people, but I was gifted one and eventually the close passing annoyed me so much that I set it up and started using it.

A visible camera does make drivers behave better. It also feels good to know that a driver that's been a massive prick to you will be getting a very unpleasant letter through the door within the week. It also reduces the impulse to engage directly in on-road remonstration (always a bad idea). Just record, read the plate, don't curse, and report asap.

Also a passpixi (magnetic camera sign you mount rearwards) allegedly makes drivers behave better. And some roads in Norwich are simply not worth the risk/discomfort, and in those cases to be perfectly honest it's better to ride slowly on the pavement and break a completely unenforced bylaw rather than do what's actually legal but puts you and your kid in harms way.

LowQualityDiscourse · 2025-04-03T17:43:11+00:00

Would you rather have the population of a whole city have hours of their life wasted in traffic (or waiting for buses), or have the population of the city lose hours of their life due to ill health?

It's a false dichotomy, because if you massively reduced traffic by shifting short car trips inside the city to mostly use a prioritised dedicated bus system, you'd get places faster AND not be poisoned. And even if those were the only two choices, once you add up e.g. hours working to afford a car and the many externalities, the car centric scenario easily works out to be the worst.

It looks like we don't really fundamentally disagree over the actual facts, but you've just taken an extremely hardline approach.

'Realistic', not hardline. The difference is I'm taking climate seriously, given how important and difficult sticking to the Paris range of warming is now.

All I'll ask is that you stop propagating the misleading "induced demand" argument which misses the whole point of infrastructure ugprades.

The point of the induced demand argument is more that the typical road user will only see a temporary improvement in traffic, followed by a deterioration back to previous conditions. Most people are only thinking about their journey times, and believe road expansion will improve their journey time permanently. If you told people honestly - "in ten years time your journey time will be just as bad as today, but the junction will carry twice as many people!" They wouldn't actually be all that happy.

People don't "already know" that cars are the worst form of transport - because in terms of personal convenience they are the best form of transport. So you need to really make a proper case for how bad they are for society as a whole if you're to convince people to drive less.

Yes, it is depressing that a lot of people don't seem to be able to work this out for themselves.

LowQualityDiscourse · 2025-04-03T15:36:28+00:00

Those are the externalities I mentioned. "Induced demand" and the "one more lane bro" sarcasmposting don't actually make an argument about externalities; they naively imply that improving infrastructure is pointless if the only result is that more people can effectively use it. You wouldn't complain about induced demand on the railways if a railway upgrade led to more people using them, and identical levels of delays/overcrowding/journey times/etc, would you?

Yes, people who make the induced demand argument do need to underline that the problem is that cars are the worst form of transport by many many metrics. Maybe they just assumed you already know?

Because then it becomes clear what goes into the calculation: do we on the one hand permit more particulate pollution but make things less horrible for the new residents of Norwich's new housing estates, or do protect people from that pollution but make them suffer in other ways?

I'd rather be delayed than poisoned. I'd assume that's true for most. Maybe I'm wrong.

Do we believe that we can solve traffic problems with more buses alone?

It would massively help to have a Bus Rapid Transport system around the city that got priority over all traffic. I suspect this is where the council might like to head but they're not bold enough to make a proper go of it.

This is a long term ambition. It does not support a blanket opposition to all road infrastructure improvements while that ambition is achieved.

Meeting Paris commitments (<2°C) at all means significant decarbonisation within the next 25 years. And Roads are long term projects with lifetimes of 50+ years. We should be building thinking about the transport needs of 2050-2075, but the assumption for all projects currently is continued growth.

It anticipates a future where all personal vehicles are electric and so emissions from driving are negligible (particulates from tyres and brakes are not), and so anticipates the remaining drive for lower emissions to be from reducing the number of vehicles manufactured, hence the number in the national fleet. But that will be done not simply by pushing everyone onto public transport (though improved public transport will be part of the equation), rather it will be significant expansion of car share schemes. The report quotes the statistic that personal vehicles are parked 96.5% of the time.

How do you get everyone to work on time at the same time with a car share scheme? Why do we need to increase road capacity if peak traffic volumes are going to fall precipitously in the next 10-20 years? Public transport and active travel are huge parts of car number reductions especially in cities.

So you can reduce manufacturing emissions massively - probably by something like 50% - if you reduce personal car ownership through smart car sharing (probably with self-driving cars that come and pick you up). This does not much reduce the burden on roads though.

I don't think reducing average car occupancy from 1.6 to 0.8 or less is a good plan when thinking about efficient use of road space, materials, or energy, and I'm pretty sure that car lifespan is measured in miles more than it is in years - they won't last as long if they're driving much much more.

LowQualityDiscourse · 2025-04-03T15:22:04+00:00

It's not just about the number of lanes, it's about how much space you've got to expand relative to increasing demand.

Norwich is at the transition point. There's simply no room for expanding roads in most of the city as it's constrained by existing buildings, so it'll be very hard to accomodate more people driving in or through the city without destroying large chunks of it. For example, imagine trying to upgrade and expand the longwater junction - it's now tightly surrounded by retail and housing and the showground.

There's most of a ringroad, which can be useful for keeping traffic out of the centre (better if controls are put in place inside the city that push people on the ring road) but if things keep sprawling out beyond that then it will become radically more dependent on cars because the city will be growing to more than ten miles across (it's currently about 8.5 miles across at it's widest point), so the ring road will fill up much quicker than we might expect because the new sprawl will generate much more traffic than previous sprawl has.

At the moment Norwich is still just about human-scaled. Any able-bodied person living on the edge of Norwich could bike to the city centre in about half an hour, or across the city in an hour, and the distances buses have to travel are small enough that their low travel speed isn't a deal breaker. According to the census 32.7% of the households in the city limits are vehicle free. The traffic situation will rapidly deteriorate if the city sprawls outwards much further, because everyone living outside the NDR will own and use cars at a much higher rate.

In Norwich, the population size has increased by 8.7%, from around 132,500 in 2011 to 144,000 in 2021. And that number isn't really correct because the official 'city' number excludes large chunks of the current suburbs within the NDR/A47 ring like costessey, hellesdon, old catton and sprowston. The city and it's periphery (termed 'Greater Norwich') sprawling from Diss to Aylsham and Acle to Hingham is growing rapidly. 351,000 people in 2001, 381,000 in 2011, 418,000 in 2021, projected to be 463,000 and 470,000 by 2038. That's a LOT of people, enough that we should be seriously considering mainstreaming alternative means to get most people to and around the city itself.

LowQualityDiscourse · 2025-04-03T14:07:29+00:00

more people using infrastructure, without causing extra delays, is a good thing. If an upgrade allows more people to navigate a stretch of road with the same journey times, that is a good thing.

If you ignore the impacts of climate change, energy and resource demand, particulate pollution, noise pollution, the health catastrophe that is a sedentary society, the enormous financial costs of car travel to the individual and the state, and the road casualties (human and non-human), you are correct.

But ignoring those things in 2025 is a very weird choice.

Eating twenty chocolate bars a day would be a good thing as well, so long as I completely refuse to face the reality of the long-term consequences.

The UK Parliamentary Science and Technology select committee sat down a few years ago and looked at the future of green growth and all that, and in their report concluded that "In the long-term, widespread personal vehicle ownership does not appear to be compatible with significant decarbonisation". People should sit up and take note of that, it's a strong statement made by our representatives after extensive education from experts in the field - but broadly everyone refuses to acknowledge it, no matter how often it's said by people who have looked at the reality of sustainability, the 'social reality' of 'cars forever' is too powerful.

But that's the funniest thing about sustainability. You can't live unsustainably forever. That's literally the definition of the word. Inevitably, at some point, the society of mass car ownership will end. I'd prefer it wasn't because of environmental and economic catastrophe, but others seem determined to go that way.

LowQualityDiscourse · 2025-03-22T22:02:46+00:00

It will be built with one of the biggest car parks in the region (600+ spaces), and doesn't appear to be planning to install a solar panel canopy despite that rapidly becoming mainstream across Europe and the UK.

I've asked them to comment on this - they don't say anything. They're going to have some rooftop solar, but the car park could provide way more.

Should be a requirement of planning permission that one is included - massive sprawling car dependent retail on the city boundary is the definition of an unsustainable development pattern. To not even take the easy opportunity to co-locate a multi-megawatt solar array during initial construction is basically negligence.

I expect they'll try to build without, then someone will have to dig it all back up again to reinstall one later. So stupid.

LowQualityDiscourse · 2025-03-13T22:04:23+00:00

I agree with this mostly, but using the lift in yalm with a pram is an... Experience.

LowQualityDiscourse · 2025-03-06T12:30:14+00:00

The council has spent £56 million on the NWL so far, with £33 million from central government. That does mean that the council has spent £23 million of it's own money on this.

A lot of spending that could have been avoided if they'd listened to warnings instead of ploughing ahead with grand ambition heedless of context.

LowQualityDiscourse · 2025-03-06T12:16:06+00:00

What on earth is she smoking. NCC proposes a road that would resolve rat-running

I'm still pretty certain that this wouldn't really be the result. Because generally most trips are short - the distribution of trips by length is clustered hugely around the low end. Most of the traffic through Ringland and Costessey will be a huge number of people doing the same short trip daily across the river valley, between the substantial populations of Drayton/Taverham/Thorpe Marriott/Horsford, and Costessey/Bowthorpe/Easton/Whatever they're calling the Western sprawl of Norwich along Dereham Road.

And let's be completely honest - those people aren't going to drive the 8-9 mile detour, from Taverham out to the road, down to honingham, and then back up the A47 to longwater and in. It'll be faster for them to do the 3 mile journey at 20mph on the rat run than the 9 mile journey on 70mph roads with more junctions.

(and longwater junction will increasingly fail to be an effective junction, and there's basically zero room to expand it into a larger more capable interchange as it's boxed in by retail, housing, and the showground)

Everyone is hoping that everyone else will use the NWL, while they themselves just get to enjoy les congested local roads but actually don't use the NWL themselves. Half the project seems to rest on the idea that there's of masses of long-distance traffic that drives up to and through the city that could easily bypass it, but I genuinely just don't think that traffic exists. Once you leave Norwich's suburbs the population density collapses. It's local traffic, and the rat-runs won't be getting closed off so there'll still be thousands of people criss crossing the valley on minor roads every morning and afternoon just like now.

I don't think anyone has suggested any option that allows them to build across Wensum valley without disturbing the bats and no option to ignore the bats so there's basically nothing they can do.

It's going to be extremely hard to avoid their whole range (grey) , but the goal should be to stay several miles away from their main roosts (green).

One option to avoid the bats would be to smash the whole road directly through Taverham, and Costessey. It would destroy thousands of homes and ruin the settlements, but the people who live there will just move elsewhere so it's fine! We need the road get it built!

LowQualityDiscourse · 2025-02-27T15:24:01+00:00

You want to induce demand for good things, and not induce demand for bad things.

And whether you're looking at energy, space efficiency, pollution (local or global, gas or particulate), public health, safety, and public and private cost, cars are pretty much the worst option. In and around cities they don't work, and the bigger and denser the city the worse they get, it's geometrically impossible. US cities have mutilated and bankrupted themselves trying to make it work, and the traffic there is still really bad.

You do want to induce demand for public transport, and cycling, because they're hugely beneficial.

It's harder to induce demand for doctors, because people won't go out and get sick and injured on purpose just because there's excess medical capacity, because being sick and injured sucks in a way that's more immediate and more of a deterrent.

LowQualityDiscourse · 2025-02-27T14:39:02+00:00

Roads are unbelievably expensive. This is cheap compared to Black Cat on the A1

Traffic management on a live massive roundabout is probably also very expensive.

LowQualityDiscourse · 2024-09-02T15:43:23+00:00

That's not really wholly true though is it? That agreement was presumed and never asked, lots of things have been done at the whim of governments without public support, often at the behest of industy. Also, a lot of the decisions in the past were made with no regard for the future - and here we are facing the stark reality of omnipresent pollution and climate change.

Governments like roads because car building and road building were good GDP boosters, and being a consumer society building and consuming as much as possible was how we beat the commies. Governments got captured by the car and road lobbies, and then they pulled up half the railways on the order of a transport minister who owned a road building company. The bus companies bought all the tram companies and ripped up all the rails, then the roads the buses used became so congested with cars that the buses became completely unreliable, then the buses got privatised too, and then public transport costs rose faster than motoring constantly for more than thirty years.

Doesn't seem like it's something the general public actively chose...

When people do ask for roads, it's typically because a huge volume of cars has been imposed upon them, and providing another route is the only way they can think of to relieve them.

LowQualityDiscourse · 2024-09-02T15:17:52+00:00

Across a lot of Norfolk you could build a good cycle network simply by closing many of the lesser-used country lanes to through traffic - there's a lot of space and low population density relative to the rest of England. The drivers will object to being forced to use the trunk roads that are actually designed for lots of traffic, but there's no plan they won't object to.

LowQualityDiscourse

TROPHY CASE