Centralised discussion space for TfL plans and cycling in London

Plans that I've posted about before (2+ years ago) are about to be realised:

https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/oxford-street-green-new-plans-pedestrian-piazza-environment-b940883.html

In a nutshell, north-south Regent Street will remain a through traffic artery, whereas the east and west semi-circular sides of Oxford Street, as well, at a guess, as the sections of Oxford Street between Holles Street and Oxford Circus (west) and Oxford Circus and Great Portland Street (east), will become 'pedestrian plazas'. Buses and cabs will be re-routed north to Margaret Street and Cavendish Square.

I can't seem to find any details of proposed traffic schemes or any clear drawings. There only seem to be some illustrations ('artist's impressions'), including the one above. Some more illustrations, plus a bit of guff, here, on Westminster's page:

https://www.westminster.gov.uk/unveiling-our-plans-iconic-oxford-circus

There's also an 'Oxford Street District' site, which likewise doesn't seem to have anything concrete in their 'framework':

https://osd.london/framework/

To be fair, the plans encompass a lot of issues and aren't limited to traffic schemes. Until there is more information, I'll have to go on what is contained in the announcement and the article.

As I've said before, I think pedestrianisation of Oxford Street is a very bad idea. Yes, Oxford Street is busy, and yes, it's unpleasant at times, but if pedestrian volumes turn out anything like what they've been predicted to be, pedestrianisation, in this case of a short stretch, will mean that it'll effectively become impossible to cycle along there at most times of the day. (The pedestrian traffic pressure added by the delayed mistake that is Crossrail was completely unnecessary, and while it is clear that this needs to be addressed, I don' think this is the way to do it.)

There are, of course, a lot of claims to want to facilitate active travel, but the main travel that will be facilitated will be for people spilling out of the Crossrail stations, for commercial reasons. The illustrations dutifully show riders going along Regent Street, which of course they will do, but I can't spot any riders among the illustrative pedestrians in the 'pedestrian plazas'. The article also says 'pedestrian only'--let's hope that this is just journalistic laziness and that there will continue to be permission to cycle through.

As a bit of background, pedestrian zones, of the kind implemented in virtually all town centres in Europe post-war, generally excluded cycling and definitely contributed much to its decline--planners stopped considering it and only considered driving and walking, with cycling 'the forgotten mode'.

The idea behind pedestrian zones was to enable people to drive into the centre (from a larger area than before, leading to the decline of commercial activity in suburbs and smaller places, much as in London the introduction of the Underground system did that), park in one of the corona of car parks surrounding the pedestrian zone, and then walk to the shops, loading up the car afterwards and driving back. That way, post-war planners thought, sufficient/larger numbers of customers would come into the centre, and they'd be able to buy loads of stuff because they could carry it in their cars, while the actual small core of shopping streets would be much improved because of the absence of cars.

This didn't work pretty much from the word go, as traditional town centres could never accommodate the number of drivers wanting to come into the centre without significant congestion, not even in Germany where the major cities were 90+% destroyed in the war and new arterial roads were built, and American-style out-of-town shopping soon followed, denting the profitability of city centres and worsening congestion (owing to a greater need to travel--out-of-town centres can never match the virtue of traditional central places in being well-connected and easy to reach--some people can reach out-of-town shopping easily, while others have to drive all the way around, or through, the city). This in turn led to more ring roads, bypasses, and the like, causing people to bypass smaller centres and driving to the bigger centres, where they hoped to have greater choice and a better shopping experience, leaving the centres of smaller towns, and employment there generally, to suffer. Rinse, repeat, unless you're left with a significant shift of economic activity to only the largest places.

In London, all of this played out in a slightly different way. There was generally strong opposition to road-building, so that in London we never had anything on the scale of the motorway-building seen in smaller cities, as much though the A406 and the M25 are big, they are only two of the five concentric rings proposed at one time, and of the proposed arterial roads, only the Westway and the Eastway were realised. Obviously, there are other major dual carriageways, like the A102(M), but compared to the size of London, we've been lucky, and owe a lot to the people opposing all this road-building in decades past. (Sadly, with the Silvertown Tunnel, and possibly the proposed underground orbital motorway along the Inner Ring Road, new/old road-building plans have come back and will be an increasing issue in the next few years.) As above, over-centralisation in London happened mainly courtesy of the Underground system, and to a lesser extent non-Underground urban rail.

The main impact on London of mass motorisation was the creation of one-way systems, which are very bad for cycling, as people hate being sent on long diversions. Where permeability is increased, cycling immediately goes up. The biggest impact to date was when the Shoreditch gyratory was partially returned to two-way operation. Here, in this present scheme, the plan seems to be to send vehicular through traffic up to the Margaret Street-Wigmore Street/Cavendish Place/Mortimer Street one-way system. I'd welcome it if this were returned to two-way, but I'd be surprised. I can't see any detail on cycling in the plans, although one of the maps shows a 'cycle route' that goes along some back streets to the north. I hope that won't be the only thought spent on cycling, and that cycling across the 'pedestrian plazas' will be permitted instead, or we'll have years of enforcement blitzes and haranguing. I may well be too pessimistic here, it's just that the lack of detail doesn't inspire confidence. What is clear is that if the pedestrianisation plans gradually proceeded to take in all of Oxford Street, a very important connection would be lost to cycling, not to mention buses.

The very centre of London is insanely well-connected, in both senses, and for a long time the connection by public transport was more than enough to satisfy the powerful interests clustered there, without doing many of the things seen in smaller places. The downturn of the 60s and 70s, as more and more people moved out of London, gave birth to proposed stimulus policies such as the one that has now led to Crossrail, which had effectively become completely unnecessary by 2000, but because it was still remembered by a certain 80s GLC leader-turned-Mayor (there was also still a company tasked with getting it moving), it was pushed forward, and we'll now have to live with the consequences.

Needless to say, retail today is threatened by the Internet more than by anything else, and I personally am fully in favour of making town centres more attractive just for that reason alone. I just don't think that Oxford Street is threatened in the same way that smaller centres are, and, ironically enough, if the Internet meant that fewer people got off Crossrail in Oxford Street, it would mean that perhaps we'll see lower pedestrian volumes than expected. Who knows.

They seem to want to do the traffic work this year and next year.