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.
High St should be resdesigned from scratch to support pedestrian movement and shop access, bus operations and bus passengers, and cycling. (Cycling ranks above buses in the user hierarchy, but given the importance of High St to the bus system, that probably needs to be considered first; a quid pro quo could be relocating buses off Broad St and George St to make that a safe cycle route.) To free up space to support this, the bus gate could be changed to operate 24 hours and all the general parking removed. It should then be possible to make High St better for buses and bus passengers and better for walking and cycling, while improving it as a place.