cycling

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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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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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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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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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

There is a consultation on removing the parking on Hollow Way to reduce congestion, with reducing bus delays as the main motivation.

"There are longstanding issues on Hollow Way, where its narrow width coupled with on-street parking create congestion and a safety risk as there is not sufficient space for vehicles to easily pass one another. This is a particular issue for local bus services who regularly use the route and report regular delays. The issue also leads to traffic congestion and makes it more difficult for residents and businesses on the road."

But this illustrates how moto-normative transport planning still is, even in Oxford. The only gains considered are congestion reduction and safety for vehicles, which are balanced against the loss of parking for residents and businesses.

There is no mention of walking, wheeling or cycling, or of Vision Zero; nor are the broader effects on the lives of people considered. There is no discussion of traffic speed, though one of the central concerns with removing the parking is that it will result in people driving faster. And there is no mention of air pollution or noise pollution, which the scheme is likely to make better in some locations and worse in others.
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In Britain the term "cycle street" is not well known and there seem to be few implementations. I am talking about what the Dutch call a fietsstraat, the French a vélorue and the Germans a Fahrradstraße; a "bicycle boulevarde" in the United States.

The Ranty Highwayman has a good explanation (focusing on Dutch implementations) and here is a translation from Guide des Aménagements Cyclables:

A cycle street is a street that accommodates transit bicycle traffic and only local motorized traffic. In some countries, a cycle street is defined by regulations and may, for example, prohibit overtaking (Belgium), or authorize several people to ride abreast (Germany). In the Netherlands, it has no regulatory basis, but is the subject of specific recommendations:

• cycles must be able to take over the carriageway: this is the case regardless of the volume of cycles as soon as motorized traffic is less than 500 vehicles per day. Ideally, cycle traffic is at least twice as high as motorized traffic, with a limit for the latter set at 2,000 vehicles per day.
• the cycle street has priority at intersections over cross streets.
• the roadway has the same surface as cycle paths (red asphalt in the Netherlands).

So, a cycle street is a low traffic, low speed street with a lot of cycling on it, optimised for cycling priority, comfort, speed, wayfinding, etc. It needs to be designed to either prohibit (Germany and Belgium) or deter motor vehicles from overtaking people cycling.

Oxford has what seems like an attempt at a cycle street in the eastern half of Jack Straws Lane. Because of the gradient, this needs lower traffic volumes to work - a modal filter would do the trick.

Here is a video about a cycle street in Vienna

Rue de Charenton, Paris - vélorue

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Paris has been radically reallocating space from motor vehicles to cycling and public space. The most visible changes are the dramatic cycle tracks (Rue du Rivoli, etc) and the space reallocation (Place de la Bastille, etc). But there are less visible changes that are just as important, in particular low traffic streets and circulation system changes. And the political and legal and design context of these changes is important.

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The photo shows a friend of mine. He can and does cycle long distances, and he can walk with crutches, but he can't dismount and push his bike. At least half a dozen women, including my sister, have told me that they could comfortably cycle in late pregnancy when they couldn't walk any distance.

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There have been concerns about road danger on Barton Fields Rd, the spine road that runs through the Barton Park development on the eastern outskirts of Oxford, in particular around the primary school. One driver ploughed into the cycle parking stands outside the school, another hit one of the buildings under construction on the other side of the street, and there are a lot of other incidents that don't show up in the official road injury record. (There are also concerns about road danger at the crossing of the A40; I have written about those elsewhere.)

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Parks Rd is a key north-south cycling route through the city centre, as well as part of National Cycle Network route 51, and its junction with South Parks Rd is currently the worst bit of that route. People cycling north are expected not only to share a section of road with high volume traffic flows but to perform an uncontrolled right turn across that traffic; people cycling south are forced to join the main motor traffic flow with no support at all.

the approved/legal movements are in red and the actual ones (using the pedestrian crossings) are in blue - alternatively, people avoid using the cycle track at all (dashed red)

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