Headington Headlines #126

TonyOX3

Here’s my weekly round-up of local news for 19 – 25 August.

The improvements to the Croft Road cycle path in Marston have been delayed because the company supplying two bridges has gone bust, according to a message on the Marston Cycle Path flood information message board.

The official announcement of the new Headington bus routes finally emerged on Monday. The services are being subsidised with £1.2m from the Department for Transport’s Local Sustainable Transport Fund (LSTF). I assume that’s £0.4m for each of the three years of the initial contracts. Peter Headicar of Oxford Brookes University sent me a considered appraisal.

The people who run Brambles own the business and the premises. They’re selling because they want to retire.

@SunderSandher, who runs the Londis store, has reminded everyone that the shop will soon be open 24hrs a day.

The Wood Farm neighbourhood policing team moved to a new base at the Churchill Hospital on Tuesday.

The planning application to build three houses on the car park next to the Crown & Thistle on Old Road has been approved.

The Prime Minister has a bad back. It is thought he was treated at the Nuffield on Monday.

The campaign by Cllr @laurencepbaxter to persuade Oxfordshire County Council to reinstate the right turn into Risinghurst from the A40 continued. He tells me that if the County Council can’t or won’t fund a crossing with safety improvements – preferably a crossing with lights – it would be difficult to justify re-opening the turn.

Ther are reports that Hill View Farm in Marston may be turned into a conference centre. A twitter account @SaveOxfordFarm has been set up but as yet hasn’t really got going.

My favourite Headington-related tweet of the week:

Active topics on the Headington & Marston e-democracy forum this week:

  • Crown and Thistle
  • New Headington Bus Routes
  • Hill View Farm, Marston
I try to cover news from the OX3 postcode in Headington and out as far as Barton, Sandhills and Risinghurst (see map). To feed into next week’s summary you can comment on this article, or tweet either with the hashtag #ox3 or @mentioning @TonyOX3.

Deprivation Survey – How Does Headington Fare?

TonyOX3

I came across some interesting data the other day about levels of deprivation in England. It’s from the Societal Wellbeing Theme in the Dept of Communities & Local Government’s (DCLG’s) Open Data Communities database. The Deprivation Indices 2010 have just been released: they are based on 2008 data so they show the situation 5 years ago. I have not yet found where you can see the detailed definitions behind the indices.

The data cover 32,482 areas in England. These maps show how each area is ranked. Clicking the thumbnails will get you a larger image, but to get the interactive maps where you can zoom in, pan, and see the results for any area you want, click here and enter a local postcode in the search box. To investigate the areas that make up OX3 I used OX3 9AH which is by the Headington traffic lights. This gets you to the Multiple Deprivation map. You get the other maps by using the drop-down menu box at the top left. Yellow areas are least deprived, dark blue most deprived. Click on an area to see its actual rank – the most deprived area has a rank of 1 and the least deprived a rank of 32482, so it’s better to live in an area with a high number than a low one.

Index of Multiple Deprivation
Index of Multiple Deprivation

The Index of Multiple Deprivation combines 7 individual indices into one overall measure. The two areas covering Barton rank 4043 and 4096 out of 32482. Within the Headington/Marston/Barton area the least deprived part covers parts of New Marston and Northway and ranks 27552.

The Income data show a similar pattern. Barton ranks 3683 and 5097, while this time Jack Straw’s Lane is the least deprived, ranked at 28655.

For Employment, Health & Disability, and Education Skills & Training, the picture is similar, with Barton standing out in blue against the yellows and greens of other parts of the local area.

Income
Income
Employment
Employment
Health & Disability
Health & Disability
Education, Skills & Training
Education, Skills & Training
Barriers to Housing & Services
Barriers to Housing & Services

 

It won’t be a surprise that Housing (technically ‘Barriers to Housing & Services’) presents a very different picture. The whole of Oxford is blue or blue-green. Once again the New Marston and Northway area comes out best with a rank of 11169 while the area around Gipsy Lane and the Warneford Hospital ranks as the 108th most-deprived area in England.

When it comes to Crime, OX3 comes off quite well compared to other parts of Oxford. The area north of the London Road around Barton Road, and over the A40 into the western parts of Barton is the most affected: it ranks 1275. The best local area on this measure is between Headley Way and the JR Hospital, ranking 27454.

Crime
Crime
Living Environment
Living Environment

The last index, Living Environment, shows a better picture, with the most deprived areas in the centre of the city. The outer neighbourhoods of Sandhills, Risinghurst and Quarry rank in the low- to mid-25000s.

Although anyone might raise a quizzical eyebrow over some of the scores the individual areas are quite small and anomalous figures are probably just due to statistical variation. The maps do confirm what is already well-known, that on most measures there is a marked polarisation locally and in the City as a whole.

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.