Transport (General)

Transport Strategy – Headington Action response

TonyOX3

Here’s Headington Action’s response to Oxfordshire CC’s Transport consultation (reproduced with permission of Headington Action).

HEADINGTON TRANSPORT STRATEGY CONSULTATION – RESPONSE BY HEADINGTON ACTION
I am writing on behalf of Headington Action in response to the County Council’s public consultation on the Headington Transport Strategy.  Our response is the beginning of what we hope will be a continuing dialogue between Headington Action and the County Council on the development and implementation of a transport strategy for Headington. We have recently formed a Headington- wide Transport Committee and they will represent Headington Action on all transport matters.
I attach a list of suggestions gathered when our Transport Committee started its work. These have not all been discussed and agreed by the Committee, and should not be taken as representing Headington Action’s wish-list, but represent a sample of the concerns voiced by Headington residents about transport issues. I trust you will find them helpful.
There are, however, a number of issues which Headington Action is agreed in wishing to promote. They are as follows:
a.      Peaceful and safe residential streets, with enforcement of speed restrictions and measures to discourage transit traffic from using residential streets as alternatives to established through routes.
b.      Safe and clearly marked bicycle and pedestrian routes, consulting with users over design  [to avoid some of the issues over present cycle lanes].
c.      Continued vigilance that developments at major employment centres do not unduly increase the traffic burden borne by Headington.
d.      Investigation of at least some long-distance bus routes exiting Oxford by routes other than Headington.
e.      Bus services need to be considered in the light of the whole city’s needs, and not just those of Headington in isolation. Better communications between different parts of the city is clearly desirable. A particular concern for Headington is the need for better articulation of bus services – eg those on a bus from Woodstock Rdwishing to access Headington need to walk from Magdalen St to Castle St or Queens Lane.
f.        Measures to encourage car-sharing – priority to shared cars for on-street parking at signed locations.
g.      Full and proper consideration to introduction of ‘shared space’ measures at key interchanges (central Headington; Old Road/Windmill Road crossing).
I would be grateful if you would ensure that these issues are fully addressed during the preparation and implementation of the Headington Transport Strategy.
 
This table of wishes was attached: Download table (pdf)
 
 

Headington Transport Strategy Consultation

TonyOX3

Earlier this month I wrote about the sorry tale of Oxfordshire County Council’s commissioning of a ‘Headington Transport Strategy’ which was to be drawn up with no local involvement apart from the big employers and Oxford City Council. Not even local County or City Councillors knew about the project until it was well under way.

Plenty of people were upset about this when the news broke and they told the County so. County planning officers came to a meeting with the message “Don’t worry, we didn’t mean it”. And now three weeks later the County has announced a public consultation to run for a month.

Interestingly, the form of this consultation is open-ended: there is no document on which people’s views are sought. We are just asked to give our thoughts on transport problems and possible improvements. It does beg the question of what has happened to the Strategy the County’s consultants should by now – according to the original timetable – have more-or-less finished. If this re-think by the County is to be at all meaningful we must hope that work on the consultants’ report is on hold so they can take notice of the views and ideas of the local community which lives with Headington’s transport problems every day. If you use the online form rather than email you have up to 40,000 characters to express your views!

Headington Bus Routes – guest post

TonyOX3

Peter Headicar is Reader in Transport Planning in the Dept of Planning, Oxford Brookes University. He emailed me in response to my earlier post about the new bus routes in Headington. Rather than append his analysis as a comment to my earlier article he kindly agreed I could publish it here. He writes:

In principle I would say that the initiative of the County Council and Stagecoach in developing these services is to be welcomed. However the Osler Road issue you raise is just one example of more general difficulties likely to arise with the current back-to-front manner in which ‘improvements’ are being progressed. From a strategic perspective (particularly important if you are seeking innovative approaches) Headington’s problems are tied in with those of the City as a whole (especially the ‘outer city’) which as we know are complex and intractable. Ideally we would be proceeding

Strategy for the City-region → Strategy for the Eastern Arc → Plan for Headington → Individual proposals in Headington (bus services and other).

At the moment things are happening the other way around!

Measures in Headington need to be viewed in the context of planning for the Eastern Arc as a whole. The revised P&R services only cater for car drivers arriving from the East, North and West (via Water Eaton). At some stage the issue of access from the South also needs to be addressed (ie from the Abingdon/Didcot, Wallingford and Watlington corridors). There is also the question of catering for movements within the city between the Marston/Headington and Cowley/Littlemore areas (in both directions – there are major housing and employment concentrations in both). If origin/destination surveys were undertaken of N-S traffic through the eastern half of the city I would expect a significant proportion (including much rat-running) to derive from this combination of movements. (This is clear from the 2001 Travel to Work statistics and I doubt that things have got better since.)

On the details of the P&R services it’s worth pointing out that not all the changes are good news in terms of overall transport strategy. The frequency from Water Eaton is being reduced from 15 minutes to 20 in the morning peak and during the day and from 20 minutes to 25 in the afternoon peak. A contributory factor (but not necessarily the sole one) is the injection of additional running time into the timetable, presumably to combat congestion and improve reliability. Despite the bus priority measures introduced thus far the running times of P&R services generally remain slow – it takes 48 minutes in the pm peak for example to travel from Churchill to Water Eaton. This plus the reduced frequency do not exactly add up to a very appealing package for motorists whose main leg of their journey may only begin when they get to the P&R! The attractiveness/efficiency of the P&R services deserves to be addressed at the city-wide level but also needs to be kept in mind when considering local routeing and traffic management options in Headington.