The term "cycle street" in English is not well known; I am talking about what the Dutch call a fietsstraat, the French a vélorue and the Germans a Fahrradstraße. Here is the clearest explanation I can find, translated from Guide des Aménagements Cyclables: A cycle street is a street that accommodates transit bicycle traffic and ..read more

Paris has been radically reallocating space from motor vehicles to cycling and public space. The most visible changes are the dramatic cycle tracks (Rue du Rivoli, etc) and the space reallocation (Place de la Bastille, etc). But there are less visible changes that are just as important, in particular low traffic streets and circulation system ..read more

Central Oxford lacks any kind of playground, or even any kind of public "run around" green space. Twice I have been stopped by tourists and asked where they can take their children to play. Lots of residents tell me they would spend more time in the city centre if they had somewhere they could let their kids run around in between shops or museums. The nearest playgrounds are quite some way away. From Carfax, Friars Wharf is 900m, Great Clarendon St 1.3km, and Angel and Greyhound Meadow 1.6km. All of these require dealing with at least one main road. When my daughter was small I used to take he ..read more

There have been concerns about road danger on Barton Fields Rd, the spine road that runs through the Barton Park development on the eastern outskirts of Oxford, in particular around the primary school. One driver ploughed into the cycle parking stands outside the school, another hit one of the buildings under construction on the other side of the street, and there are a lot of other incidents that don't show up in the official road injury record. (There are also concerns about road danger at the crossing of the A40; I have written about those elsewhere.) In response to this, measurements were ..read more

The failure to make Oxford's main roads 20mph is a black spot on Oxfordshire's otherwise successful 20mph speed limit roll out. If one were to pick the roads which need 20mph limits most, it would be roads inside Oxford such as Botley Rd, Woodstock Rd and Banbury Rd, because they have very large numbers of people walking and cycling both along and across them, with clear collision hotspots at pretty much every minor road junction. Making Oxford's remaining roads 20mph is an essential step to achieving both Vision Zero and the county's cycling targets, but it is also the single most effective p ..read more

"The county should buy a unicorn and stable it on the Plain roundabout, where it will magically stop any collisions, alleviate all congestion, and make walking and cycling safe and accessible to all." This would probably make more sense than some of the transport proposals being bandied about, but here I attempt to address some of the less ludicrous suggestions. We need segregated cycle tracks on main roads We do, but in some places (e.g. Iffley Rd) that is impossible, due to spatial constraints, so we have to make do with cycle lanes. In other places (e.g. Woodstock Rd) cycle tracks are only ..read more

The legal changes to Broad St have been made permanent, but the current layout is clearly still temporary, in the sense that many of the features of the area no longer reflect its actual use. Most obviously, most of the existing kerbs are now redundant, or in the wrong place, and serve only as a trip hazard. sitting around A proper plan for Broad St needs to be part of a redesign of the entire area of the city centre north of High St and east of Cornmarket, as envisaged in the Oxford Preservation Trust's proposals twenty years ago, and any such plan will be dependent on funding which is not ..read more

Going through memorabilia, I found some old school reports. So here is a comparison of my "Report of Progress" from Year 5, in 1980 at what was then Lindfield Demonstration School, in Sydney, Australia, and my daughter Helen's "Annual Learning Journey Report" from Year 5, in 2022-2023 at Larkrise Primary School, in Oxford, England. My report consists of four A4 sheets stapled between thin cardboard covers. It was produced on a typewriter and then presumably mimeographed or photocopied, with the teacher writing in it by hand. The last sheet is blank on one side and uses the other for a ..read more

The speed limit on Oxford's ring-road (excepting the A34 outside Botley) should be reduced to 40mph and that should be enforced by average speed cameras. This would help with road danger, congestion, community severance and barriers to walking and cycling, noise pollution, air pollution, and carbon emissions. Enforcement of the existing speed limits would help. Measurements at Barton Park found nearly half of all vehicles on the A40 exceeding the 50mph speed limit (the average speed was 49mph). One interesting comparison: Paris' Boulevarde Peripherique is currently 70km/hr (43mph) and there a ..read more

At the moment, footways in Oxfordshire fall into the cracks between different county teams. Parking, Road Agreements, Transport Development Control, Active Travel, Maintenance, and different Localities teams all implement or oversee schemes that affect footways, but no one has overall responsibility for them. A single county team should be given responsibility for footways, with a watching brief over all schemes that affect them. That could be a beefed up Active Travel team, or a Parking team with an expanded mandate. pole to hold CPZ sign and marked parking Walking is at the top of the ..read more