Oxford, the city of dreaming spires. But beneath the turrets and decorated stonework, there’s an altogether more prosaic problem – traffic. Notice in the High Street, there are hardly any private cars.
What there is - is pedestrians. The student bicycles Oxford is famed for; and buses - lots of them. Over 50 per cent of journeys into the city centre are made by bus – a huge number. In other towns, it’s typically 1215 per cent.
150 buses an hour come through this street. This is all down to changes made in 1999 as part of the Oxford Transport Strategy, which had a very specific aim.
David Robertson, Deputy Leader, Oxfordshire County Council: “There’s very few access points into Oxford and the historical nature of the city is that we won’t ever be able to provide any additional access points. So it’s trying to limit the number of private cars that come into Oxford city. But we’ve another problem which is that, what we would call the trunk roads, the A34 and the A40 are also local roads for residents in Oxfordshire. So you have people nipping on and off these trunk roads.”
This is one of those trunk roads - Pear Tree Roundabout on the A34. It connects to two other roundabouts known together as 'the northern approaches'. It’s a bottleneck earmarked for improvement under an £88 million package called Access to Oxford.
Then the traffic should move as freely as here. The Green Road Roundabout has already been reconfigured with one road running straight through the middle, earning it the name “the Hamburger”. It’s brought queues down from two kilometres to 110 metres in the rush hour. This kind of thinking will be applied to the government money coming in 2013 for five transport schemes covering road and rail.
Daniel Round, Project manager of Access to Oxford, Oxfordshire County Council: “Traditionally major transport projects are a rural bypass or a new bus station. This is the first in the south-east of being a package approach to major transport planning. We have five elements to Access to Oxford, and rather than just being a single entity it is the package approach, so the Department for Transport are very keen to see how the package approach works, as are we, and it gives a real chance to be at the forefront of transport planning.”
Already established is Oxfordshire’s Park and Ride system. The five Park and Rides keep up to 5,000 private cars out of the city every day. As well as local buses, passengers can also go to London, Gatwick and Heathrow from here. It’s a big hit.
Vox pop 1: “Yes I think it’s brilliant, saves all the parking in Oxford. I’ve used it quite a lot.”
Vox pop 2: “We’ve driven through Oxford before and tried to find places to park and it’s almost impossible.”
Vox pop 3: "It’s the first time I’ve used it in Oxford but I have used it in other places before and I find it very good, very good indeed. It’s quite a cheap way to travel actually.”
Vox pop 4: “People are taking up the idea of parking and riding rather than travelling in but they need more spaces here, looking at it.”
Oxford was the first place in the UK to have Park and Ride in 1973 and it’s very well embedded in people’s mentalities. That’s means though, that this car park at least, at Thornhill, is full by 9.45 in the morning. It’s for that reason that it, and other Park and Ride facilities here are being upgraded.
This brick shed used to be the terminal but this is the new one. It’ll be light, warm and modern with a café, toilets and security facilities. This kind of successful transport project in part persuaded the Department for Transport to approve Oxfordshire’s bid for the Access to Oxford funding – only 14 of 188 bids were successful.
Oxford Rail Station will also be improved and extended in 2010-11. At the moment trains must wait for other trains to turn around north of the station. Freight tracks will be upgraded for passenger trains and a new platform built here, on part of the car park, for London trains to terminate and depart.
Mike Gallop, Route Enhancement Manager, Western Region, Network Rail: “We suffer significant delays from trains that cross over the layout at Oxford. Basically they move from one line over all the lines to the other platform and that imparts significant delays in trains running north to south, so it will deliver a major benefit in the performance of Oxford Station.”
Six million tourists visit Oxford every year and resident numbers are also set to soar with the building of 55,000 new homes in the county over the next 20 years, under the South East Plan. It’s hoped the “Access to Oxford” transport projects will manage the increase in traffic that will come with that growth.
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