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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.

New Bus Routes for Headington

TonyOX3

We’ve known for a while that there were plans for new bus routes in Headington with an announcement expected at the begining of August. Although there’s still not been any official announcement, the eagle-eyed @HeadingtonNews spotted the new timetables on the @Stagecoach_Ox website.

Starting on 23 September the 700 service will be extended to Kidlington, serving Water Eaton P&R and the JR, Nuffield and Churchill Hospitals. New service 800 will run between Thornhill P&R and the JR Hospital every 20 minutes, and new service 900 will link Thornhill, the Nuffield and Churchill at the same frequency. Like the existing 700, both the 800 and 900 services will run Monday to Friday only. See the route maps and timetables here:

These files are all pdfs. You can get to these pages, and to interactive maps of the routes, by entering “Stagecoach Oxfordshire” in the ‘Operator’ box on this page.

These new buses will be welcome in many respects as they offer the possibility of fewer journeys by car to the hospitals. However, whether enough journeys will be avoided to compensate for six more buses an hour in each direction running along the London Road and through Headington shops is bound to be queried. Maybe we’ll learn more of the transport planners’ thinking when the official announcement is made.

The most controversial, indeed unwelcome aspect is that the 800 is routed down Osler Road. I find this astonishing, and it’s bound to provoke antagonism locally. The problems of congestion on Osler Road are well-known, and adding three more buses each way every hour is asking for trouble. Whether this is Stagecoach’s idea or the County transport planners I don’t know, but whoever pushed the idea is out of touch with local conditions and the community’s feelings.

None of these new developments has so far entered the discussions around @OxfordshireCC‘s Headington Transport Strategy about which I wrote last week.