Oxford Blog

There are three proposals for reorganising local government around Oxfordshire and a consultation on them is running.

The Oxford Clarion has an explanation, but the options are: 1) "One Oxfordshire", retaining the existing Oxfordshire boundaries as a unitary authority and merging the functions of the district and city council into that; 2) "Two Councils", dividing what is now Oxfordshire plus West Berkshire into Oxford & Shires and Ridgeway; and 3) a "Three Councils", with a Greater Oxford and North Oxfordshire and Ridgeway councils taking the rest. Here I just look at some of the transport and planning implications. more

Oxford's roads have been relatively unchanged over the last fifty five years - the last significant main road build was Marston Ferry Rd, opened in 1971 and there has been almost no attempt at road-widening. The result is that a fairly simple street classification is possible: woonerf/mews, side-streets, main roads, and strategic highways. The first three of these are for providing access to and from homes and destinations, the last also serves to enable through trips.

The division between street types can be seen as a relationship between traffic volumes (and the structure of the road network) and local features, such as street widths and the presence or absence of footways, formal crossings, cycle infrastructure, traffic calming, and grade separation. Mismatches between these result in problems, and solving those requires a decision as to which category a street falls into. more

We should resurface Alfred St to make it safe and comfortable for cycling and put in a parallel crossing across High St, connecting Turl St and Alfred St. Combined with Blue Boar St, this would create a cycling route that allowed Carfax to be bypassed. The following map shows the proposed route, along with reported injuries between 2015 and 2024.

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Looking at the last three years (2022-4) of STATS19 data, there's a nasty cluster of cycling injuries through the Summertown shops - ten injuries, five of them serious. And earlier years are only a bit better (2017-19, 7 injuries, 2 of them serious). There were also 8 pedestrian injuries (2017-2024), four of them (including the two serious ones) on the service road. (Note that these are just the injuries that made it into the police database. That doesn't include all hospital admissions, let alone the vast bulk of minor injuries.)

cycling injuries, 2022-2024

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This is an unpleasantly anti-pedestrian junction. There are signal crossings on two of the three major arms, but they are staggered (and "caged") two-stage crossings with long delays, meaning that getting from the Iffley Fields corner to Boundary Brook Rd can take four and a half minutes. So someone walking a child to Larkrise primary from Swinburne Rd (and doing this four times a day) could spend over an hour a week waiting at this junction! It is also pretty bad for cycling, most obviously in having no support for right turns from Iffley Rd and Donnington Bridge Rd.

Oxfordshire Liveable Streets has commissioned designs for this junction from CityInfinity.

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There are a lot of obstacles or barriers on cycle routes, in and around Oxford. These may

• make it impossible for some people to cycle a route all
• make a route so difficult or uncomfortable that some people won't use it
• create hazards that endanger people cycling

Here I look at three examples of gaps that are too narrow, all of them on high use cycle routes in Oxford. Cycle Infrastructure Design, LTN 1/20 is quite clear on this: "Where bollards are placed in cycle tracks a clear width of 1.5m is required for access by the full range of cycles." (There are 1.1m wide tricycles being ridden around Oxford, and many larger cycles are around 0.8m wide.)
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Oxford University's proposed Warneford Park redevelopment of the Warneford Hospital site is potentially an appropriate intensification of the site, but as it stands we object to it on transport grounds. (We are also concerned that the addition of so much employment without any housing will increase the pressure on Oxford's housing market, raising costs for both renters and buyers and offloading the negative effects of that onto both residents and other employers, but we do not address this here.)

Our primary concerns are in two domains:

1) The traffic from the planned increase of 186 car parking spaces would undermine safe and sustainable transport across Headington, both by directly increasing road danger and by taking space and time that should instead be reallocated to other modes, most obviously for safe junction redesigns. It would also increase air and noise pollution across a wide area, and in the longer-term require more drastic restrictions on car use by other organisations and individuals.

2) The walking and cycling schemes proposed in the area around the development have significant problems and major omissions. They fail to provide for safe and inclusively accessible cycling even to the Warneford Park site itself. And the designs have been drawn up without consultation with stakeholders, most obviously without talking to either Cyclox or Cheney School.

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Most of the questions about Oxford's proposed traffic filters and congestion charge are covered in the consultation FAQ, but here are a few that aren't:

Isn't it pointless putting traffic filters on St Cross St, Hythe Bridge St, or Thames St, because there are hardly any buses there?

All the traffic going through the St Cross filter is also going over Magdalen Bridge, which is the busiest bus route in the entire United Kingdom. All the traffic on Hythe Bridge St is traversing Frideswide Square, which is a major bus route, and most of it is also going through St Giles. And all the traffic on Thames St is also using Abingdon Rd, which is a major bus route. All of these routes also suffer significant congestion. more

In 1999, the council blocked cycling (in the middle of the day) on Cornmarket and the eastern end of Queen St; in 2017, with the redevelopment of the Westgate Centre, cycling was blocked at the same hours on Turn Again Lane; and then in 2022 cycling was blocked at the eastern end of St Michaels St. And now the county seems likely to ban cycling on a further 23 metres of Market St. This progressive removal of cycling routes has left no safe and inclusively accessible east-west cycling route through the city centre. High St and St Aldates have way too many buses, Pembroke St is unusable without a horrible dog-leg across St Aldates, and while George St is not so bad it still has too many buses, with turning movements.

Many people simply won't cycle on these routes, or let their children cycle on them. So if the councils are at all serious about enabling cycling, or about equity and inclusivity (and the Local Transport and Connectivity Plan has a goal of increasing cycling trips by 60% by 2030), then there has to be a fully accessible east-west route across the city centre. (I have previously written about the need to support inclusive cycling.) The most sensible way to achieve this is, in my opinion, to allow cycling at all times of day on Queen St and Cornmarket, but there are different options.

blue shows an accessible east-west cycling route; orange the alternative route using St Michaels St and Ship St; green a route on George St; and dashed orange a route through what was the Clarendon Centre

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People who think the new low traffic neighbourhoods in Oxford have created exceptional levels of congestion have forgotten how bad traffic was pre-pandemic. To see this, consider the following map, which shows a "cordon" around the Cowley and East Oxford low traffic neighbourhoods. This is taken from the county's Annual Average Daily Traffic Map and the red circles mark traffic count points.

This table shows average traffic (in thousands of vehicles per day) at the various count points on that cordon, for 2018-2019 and for 2023-2024, and the percentage change between those. (I am using those dates for comparison because 2020 and 2021 were during the pandemic and the Cowley and East Oxford LTNs were put in in 2021 and 2022.) more

58% of the children at Cherwell secondary school in North Oxford cycle to school, probably the second highest cycling rate for a UK secondary school. In contrast, just 10% of children at Cheney secondary school cycle to school. 41% of children at Larkrise primary in East Oxford cycle to school. In contrast, just 12% of children at Windmill primary in Headington cycle to school. (For the primary schools, "cycling" includes "being cycled".) more

One of the biggest problems with cycling infrastructure in Oxford is that it is riddled with what I call "dual provision", where two bad options are offered to people cycling instead of one good one. This usually means a choice between cycling on the carriageway (and "pretending to be a car") or cycling on the footway (and "pretending to be a pedestrian") and the absence of any space actually allocated to and designed for cycling. This is bad for people cycling, but also creates conflicts with people walking and driving.

This kind of "dual provision" can occur along main roads, at junctions, and at crossings. It is quite ubiquitous in Oxford, but I look at just three examples: Woodstock Rd, Frideswide Square, and the Barton Park crossing of the A40.
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Delft has a city centre which is very largely de-motorised. As a result it is a lovely place to walk around and spend time - perhaps the most noticeable thing is just how quiet it is! The core to this seems to be a "low traffic zone" covering most of the city centre, with largely uniform restrictions. Enforcement appears to be by camera. more

Residents of Barton Park have long-standing concerns with the A40 crossing which connects it with the rest of Oxford, but there are also problems with road danger on Barton Fields Rd, the spine road that runs through the development. This is of particular concern around the primary school, where there have been a number of collisions — fortunately, so far, with walls and cycle parking stands rather than with children.

a possible bus gate location

Barton Park was designed as a low traffic neighbourhood. Barton Fields Rd is just 5.5m wide and has no priority pedestrian crossings and no cycling infrastructure. But traffic levels on it were measured in March 2024 at an average daily flow of 2550, which already exceeds the level at which most people will be prepared to cycle mixed with motor traffic. more

This is an excellent set of ideas. We support both the broader goals of the COMPF project and the list of specific ideas, though the latter will need to be fleshed out with details before we can see how they will actually work. There are also a few areas we would have liked to have seen included that weren't.

The opportunities for improvement are huge. The public realm in the city centre is of quite poor standard, making it relatively unattractive for residents or visitors: central Cambridge is significantly nicer, to make the obvious comparison, as are the centres of York, Bath, or even Birmingham. (Though to be fair, some of those cities are significantly less pleasant than Oxford just outside the centre.)

Walking around central Oxford can be quite unpleasant: narrow, cramped footways, awkward and hostile crossings where people are almost forced to cross on red, too much motor traffic (including high bus flows in some locations), and poor separation from cycling.

There is also poor provision for cycling: most notably in the absence of accessible east-west and north-south routes through the centre, and the lack of any kind of safe, coherent and consistent cycling infrastructure along Banbury and Woodstock Rds.
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A scheme for High St should be included in the Central Oxford Movement and Place Framework. High St is a major pedestrian corridor, hosts a large number of shops, is a major bus corridor with some of the busiest bus stops in the city, and is a cycle route used by over three thousand people a day.

But High St has never been designed for this mix of uses: it still has pretty much the same layout it had before the bus gate was put in in 1999. It is poor for walking (the footways are too narrow and crossing the wide carriageway with buses blocking visibility can be a real challenge), poor to terrifying for cycling, and far from ideal for bus services, either for bus movement or for passenger boarding and alighting. And the cramped footways and poor visibility can make accessing - or even finding - the shops difficult.

road injuries on High St, 2014-2023

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This was a response to a consultation on the Greenways. Please let me know of any errors or omissions. more

It is 39 metres across the Barton Park junction cycling from Barton Park to Northway, and 46 metres going the other way, measuring the distance from the stop line to the edge of the far-side A40 traffic lane. Analysis of the signal timings reveals that the time allocated for crossing this - the "intergreen" between the green light for buses and cycles ending and the green light for motor traffic on the A40 starting - is the same in both directions, just 8 seconds.

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In 2018, Andrew Gilligan wrote "Despite the huge numbers of cyclists using them, Oxford’s main roads and junctions are still laid out almost entirely for the benefit of the motor vehicle". Sadly this remains true, and though a few stretches of road have more or less decent cycling provision along them, there is still not a single Oxford junction actually designed for walking and cycling, rather than having minimal pedestrian provision and ad hoc features to support cycling tacked on as an afterthought. But if we venture a little out of Oxford, there is now one junction whose design really does take walking and cycling seriously, and which could be shown to others as a model. That is the roundabout just south of Kidlington, where Frieze Way and Bicester Rd connect with Oxford Rd.

One of the questions that keeps coming up on social media is "why are there no Low Traffic Neighbourhoods in North Oxford?" Well in fact all of North Oxford consists of low traffic neighbourhoods, with the exception only of Walton St - Kingston Rd, which carries too much motor traffic. (Moreton Rd also carries too much motor traffic for a Low Traffic Neighbourhood, but it is classified as part of the B4495 so at least theoretically its problem is a lack of pedestrian crossings and cycling infrastructure rather than too much traffic — and it is not, in any event, a significant barrier to walking or cycling.) more