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.
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.
This stops most residents from cycling, to school or otherwise, and also deters people who might want to cycle through Barton Park (between Barton and Northway, say). This level of motor traffic also brings with it air pollution, noise pollution, and road danger, and at peak times becomes a deterrent to even crossing the road for the slower and less confident, given the lack of pedestrian priority crossings.
Traffic on Barton Fields Rd is only going to grow as the housing in Barton Park is completed, and growth elsewhere (most obviously at Land North of Bayswater Brook) increases the number of people using it as a short-cut. Siting the primary school right on Barton Park Rd made sense if that were a low traffic local access road, but is going to prove a terrible choice as it becomes a through route with high levels of noise, air pollution, and road danger. The Barton Park development supposedly had "a masterplan to support outdoor exercise, walking and cycling", but that is clearly a failure.
Speeding makes all these problems worse, and traffic calming may help with some of them, but ultimately there is simply too much traffic. (To see that traffic calming alone won't work to enable walking and cycling, consider pre-LTN East Oxford: Rymers Lane had 14 chicane-humps in under a mile and Howard St had junction tables so aggressive they would be illegal to put in now; both were still huge barriers to both walking and cycling.)
The solution is simple: put a bus gate at the eastern end of Barton Fields Rd and turn Barton Park into a low traffic neighbourhood. This does not have to wait on the roads in Barton Park being adopted, because the bus gate could be situated on a stretch of road that is already highways land.
Clear and well-argued - a bus gate is the only option to make the roads in Barton Park safe enough for all resident road-users. Please Oxfordshire CC listen to us and act with the degree of urgency that is required.