transport failure in the Warneford Park development

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.

The Car Parking and the increase in traffic

Road Danger and Vision Zero

The development would directly add motor traffic to Roosevelt Drive, all of it making turning movements onto and off the site, but no mitigations of any kind are proposed to address this. See the discussion of Roosevelt Drive below.

The increase in traffic will cause harms across Headington, not just in the immediate area around the development. This is incompatible with the county and university commitment to Vision Zero. The University of Oxford signed up to Vision Zero following fatalities at the London Rd - Headley Way junction and at the Plain, but the increased traffic from this development would push more traffic onto both those junctions, among others, not only making them more dangerous but making it more difficult to ever redesign them for safe cycling. It seems that Oxford University's commitment to Vision Zero is being abandoned as soon as it is inconvenient.

The last decade of reported injuries at the Headington Rd-Marston Rd and London Place-Morrell Ave junctions. The Warneford Park development would push extra traffic onto these, making this even worse. It might also make it impossible to implement safer designs for these junctions, since such designs can only work with significantly lower motor traffic throughput.

The development will push more traffic onto side streets such as Lime Walk and Morrell Avenue that already carry more traffic than is is safe or appropriate.

The last decade of reported injuries at the London Rd - Lime Walk junction. The Warneford Park development would push extra traffic onto Lime Walk, making this even worse. With over 3000 motor vehicles per day, Lime Walk needs traffic reduction to get motor traffic volumes down enough for cycling to be accessible.

If the increase in car parking and traffic from this development goes ahead, in the long-term that means stronger restrictions will be needed on car use by other individuals and organisations to compensate for that. Perhaps the Churchill Hospital will have to remove 200 parking spaces, residents of Headington will be given 80 instead of 100 day passes for the traffic filters, or the St Leonards Rd car park will be closed?

Car Parking Alternatives

The Warneford Hospital currently has no restrictions on staff parking. If it were to implement a strict needs-based permit system akin to that of Brookes University, that would free up parking spaces for the new research staff and the college. And if Oxford University tightened up the parking permit allocation on the Old Rd campus, it could free up parking there which staff on the Warneford Park site could use. Given the pressing need to reduce motor traffic across Headington, all large employers need to have a plan in place for progressively reducing their car parking provision.

Given the concentration of employment that already exists around Warneford Park - at the Old Rd campus, the Churchill Hospital, Cheney School, Brookes University and the Nuffield, there should be enough scale with this development to support direct express shuttle buses from the Park & Rides and the railway station. Bus services should be a core part of the development's Transport Plan.

Walking and Cycling Schemes

The Warneford-Gipsy-Old-Roosevelt junction

The proposed design for this junction would provide for cycling by taking space away from pedestrians. The footways proposed are too narrow for the high volumes of use at the start and end of the school day, and there is insufficient space for the number of people cycling in peak times to wait for signals.

This junction should be dropped to single lane approaches to provide extra room for walking and cycling (some of the extra turn lanes were put in as recently as 2017). That would also make everything slower, safer, quieter, and less intimidating. The traffic filters and/or a bus gate on Morrell Ave should provide enough traffic reduction to make this feasible — and the county has committed to "decide and provide" in transport schemes. Following the hierarchy of users in the Local Transport and Connectivity Plan, and the cycling trip target in that, any design for this junction should prioritise walking and cycling movements over motor traffic throughput.

A CYCLOPs at the WGOR junction will be of limited use unless there is protected cycling infrastructure on the routes approaching it. The most obvious fully inclusive and accessible route enabled by this junction would be between Warneford Lane (which has separated cycle lanes) and Grays Rd (which is a low traffic residential street) - this would provide a route from East Oxford towards Headington and the JR. To achieve this, the junction needs to support cycling to and from Grays Rd and the protected cycle lanes on Warneford Lane need to continue right up to the junction.

A redesign of this junction also creates the opportunity to improve the awkward and dangerous access to Cheney School, by providing an entry to the school directly at the junction. That would give students pedestrian access to four directions and enable them to cycle directly in and out of the school. The cycle crossings of Gipsy Lane and Warneford Lane need to be two-way, to provide for direct access from Grays Rd and to the eastbound cycle lane on Warneford Lane.

Roosevelt Drive

The development will most directly increase motor traffic on Roosevelt Drive, by perhaps five hundred car movements a day, all of which will also involve turning movements onto and off the site, across people moving along the street. This will significantly increase danger for people walking and especially cycling. But the Transport Plan proposes no measures whatsoever to mitigate this.

To support safe and comfortable pedestrian movements along Roosevelt Drive, all the entries onto the site should be given proper continuous raised footways, designed to keep motor vehicle speeds low and make pedestrian priority clear.

Traffic on Roosevelt Drive is already more than double the 2000 pcu/day limit in Cycle Infrastructure Design, LTN 1/20 for inclusive and accessible cycling, so no increase in motor traffic should be allowed on Roosevelt Drive unless adequate cycling infrastructure is provided there. Extra traffic here would make this route unusable by some of the people who currently use it to cycle to the Churchill Hospital, the Julia Durbin nursery, and the Old Rd campus, taking away from people what may in some cases be their only practical travel option. If there are no options to provide such infrastructure, or it is too expensive, then no traffic increase should be permitted.

Gipsy Lane

The proposed two-way cycle track on Gipsy Lane would be unacceptably sub-standard and dangerous. It would mostly be 2.5m wide, which is the absolute minimum in LTN 1/20 ("only at constraints") but sections would be even narrower. The absence of any buffer to the carriageway makes this worse: people cycling northwards will be cycling directly towards motor traffic with no separation from a narrow 5.5m carriageway, making the carriageway side of the cycle track largely unusable. And at school finish times pretty much the whole of the space needed for the cycle track is parked on by parents and carers picking up children. This could only robustly be prevented using bollards or wands, but that would reduce the effective width of any cycle track, making it even more clearly too narrow to a safe two-way track.

There is also no provision for cycling connectivity between the proposed cycle track and Brookes University or Cheney School. This is the kind of poor quality provision that will have many people choosing to cycle on the carriageway or on the footway instead, especially northbound.

We suggest instead using the east-side space on Gipsy Lane for a one-way southbound cycle track, and doing as much as possible to make northbound cycling on the carriageway workable. Almost all the demand for cycling northbound is to reach Cheney School or Brookes University, so many people will need to cycle on the east side of the carriageway anyway. This might involve an advisory cycle lane and traffic reduction. Consideration should be given to an additional traffic filter on Gipsy Lane. In the longer-term, land currently belonging to the school could potentially be used to provide a northbound cycle track.

Warneford Lane

The current traffic on Warneford Lane (5000+ AADT) is well in excess of the level at which mixing motor traffic with cycling is inclusive and accessible, and this development will add more traffic there. So the separated cycle lanes on Warneford Lane need to extend right up to the WGOR junction. A bus gate on Morrell Ave would significantly reduce motor traffic volumes, allowing for designs with floating bus stops.

The Travel Plan proposes closing the western u-turn cut-through, but this would block cycling access to Cheney Lane from the east. We propose adding a separate cycle cut-through of the median, directly connecting to Cheney Lane. This should be coupled with a reduction in the parking provision on Cheney Lane itself, where there is a large amount of unrestricted on-street parking.

A bus gate on Morrell Ave would significantly reduce motor traffic volumes here.

Old Rd

Ths is an absolutely critical cycling route, as the nearest alternatives are London Rd to the north and Hollow Way to the south, and improvements here are strategic as well as being essential just to improve the cycling accessibilty of the Warneford Park site (and Cheney School) from Headington.

So the transport plan needs to provide proper cycling infrastructure along Old Rd as far as the Windmill Rd junction, since most of the additional motor traffic created by the development will continue that far. The current cycling provision on Old Rd is not only intermittent, but where it exists consists of white lines painted down the footways, and only nominally qualifies as a "cycle track". It is so bad that many people don't use it

the Transport Plan proposes nothing to fix this dangerously sub-standard cycle track. Indeed it proposes more of the same.

The Broader Network

There are options for larger scale changes to the network system that would ameliorate some of the harms created by additional motor traffic:

• The Headington low traffic neighbourhoods would: shift motor traffic away from side street - main road junctions to signal junctions where it is much less dangerous; enable cycling routes away from main roads (though there would still be no alternative to using either Old Rd or London Rd for many east-west routes); and make large areas of Headington more pleasant to live in, work, or visit.
• A bus gate on Morrell Ave would reduce traffic on Warneford Lane, at the WGOR junction, and on Old Rd. It would also make Morrell Ave into a comfortable cycling route, and reduce problems with speeding and noise.
• A traffic filter on Gipsy Lane would inhibit use of Old Rd - Gipsy Lane as a through route. The preferred route for access to the Churchill, the Warneford and the Old Rd campus would then be via Old Rd.
• A one-way circulation system on Old Rd and Roosevelt Drive would free up enough space for two-way cycle tracks.