On 9 June the County’s Cabinet Member for Environment (which includes Transport) will decide the final form of the Access to Headington scheme. The Agenda papers for the meeting are here and the main paper with the officers’ recommendations is here.

The officers’ recommendation is that the latest proposals should be accepted, which means that some parking will be kept on Headley Way and Windmill Road. If you’ve read my earlier posts you’ll know that I am against keeping this parking, but it now seems very unlikely that the decision will go against the recommendation.

There’s a very telling sentence tucked away in the Cabinet Member’s paper. In para. 24 it says

Officers believe that this approach is the best compromise between the safety of cyclists, keeping some on-street parking provision, working with limited available carriageway widths and a desire to reduce the potential for any further loss of trees and grass verges.

In other words the County is prepared to compromise cyclists’ safety for the sake of car parking. This won’t help achieve the long-term objective of cutting congestion and pollution by getting more people to cycle, as one of the main reasons non-cyclists give for not cycling is that they don’t feel safe. Let’s remember this when the first cyclist gets knocked off their bike by someone opening a car door without looking.

I can’t go to the meeting but members of the public can attend and address the meeting for a strictly limited time. If you want to do so you have to inform Committee Services by 9am on the day of the meeting (9 June). This page tells you what to do and what to expect. You can apply online from there too.