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Closely related is the pre-consultation on Regent Street.
https://www.westminster.gov.uk/roads-and-travel/roads-and-highways/future-regent-street
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Bump in case you'd still like to comment--I forgot to mention that the deadline is the 31st August.
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pedestrianisation is back!
Traffic will be banned from London’s Oxford Street under plans announced by the mayor, Sadiq Khan, using new powers from Labour to push through long-thwarted pedestrianisation of the capital’s famous shopping strip
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Sounds like bikes will be banned, during the day at least.
https://road.cc/content/news/cyclists-be-banned-oxford-street-during-daytime-310387
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Looks like businesses on Oxford St are not against it. The main opposition is the Taxi trade and they should have no say.
Businesses back London mayor’s £150m plan but taxi drivers said they think it will be ‘disastrous’
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I'll say again what I've said before, at the risk that fans of 'pedestrianisation' won't like it. 'Pedestrianising' Oxford Street is a very bad idea. It's just another act by a Mayor who's completely ignorant about transport and wants to make a mark. Politicians get bigprojectitis, and this is just another example. They see their role as cutting through complicated arguments (because they're generally unable and unwilling to think about them properly and want to be politicians pretending to be Alexander the Great), effectively ignoring the very necessary debates to be had around something like this, and just try to force through their will by acquiring the power to do so. The issues have been debated ad nauseam, but the fact is that Oxford Street remains a very important thoroughfare, and removing that function from it is a nonsense.
Quite apart from all that, it won't deliver the benefits the Mayor claims it will. Well-located shops are still attractive even in the age of Internet-enabled 'showrooming', but the age of simple calculations of 'the more footfall, the better' is well and truly over. Much of the traffic in Oxford Street is tourists not shopping.
Ironically, while everyone blames the candy shops and tatty souvenir shops, what has caused Oxford Street to decline has simply been rising shop rents and high business rates (the latter obviously a problem everywhere).
The candy shops are just a symptom. As they seem to be a vehicle for money laundering, paradoxically enough high rents accelerate that process ...
There's obviously a spiral going on, with Oxford Street being talked down all the time also contributing to people's perceptions of it and to less commercial value.
The other thing that people blame, because it's an easy target (as opposed to attacking landlords and the Government, who are really responsible--people will attack the easy target over the harder target, because it doesn't require understanding and because it's not as powerful), is 'the traffic', particularly buses, but obviously also taxis. Far from being responsible for the decline, they bring many potential customers and have always been part of the street's lifeblood. If anything, the cutbacks to bus services over recent decades will have contributed to the street's declining fortunes. Apart from Oxford Street as a destination, its alignment continues to be crucial for bus routes.
We're also seeing the consequences of the stupid decision to build Crossrail. This was just Livingstone reviving an outdated policy from long ago (it made sense then, when there was an exodus from London, to try to stimulate the centre by better rail provision, but it made absolutely no sense any more when it was eventually built--never mind the connection between Heathrow and Stratford, that in itself would be fine, but the problem is that the main destination on the line is Oxford Street, at the centre of the line.
The post-war model for historic town centres--build a ring road around them, a one-way system on existing streets if a ring road isn't possible, then lots of car parks around the centre so everyone can drive there, here becomes 'build a far-too-capacious railway'.
People warned from the beginning that this would overcrowd the footways at busy times (also, platforms at Oxford Circus are being closed routinely to prevent dangerous overcrowding downstairs until enough people have been whisked away by a train), and what's going on now is quite simply a battle of transport modes, with pedestrian traffic forcing more space to be made available over other modes. Buses are better, because they bring customers without causing rail-style severe overcrowding and because they don't generate more capacity underground.
People may imagine that the more footfall, the better, but there's a natural sensible limit. Overcrowding puts people off shopping, too. They might tolerate it in the sales, but not on an everyday basis. It's amazing when the Mayor references Barcelona--has he really not heard of the problems they have there?
To be clear--the proposed Westminster scheme isn't good, narrowing the carriageway so much that cyclists wouldn't be able to get through (still better than a ban), but it's likewise a logical consequence of Crossrail overcrowding. Other, non-infrastructure, interventions that Westminster are doing are better, but it remains to be seen how effective they will be.
Lastly, there's a high-level strategic issue in transport, which is that of traffic in cities versus traffic around cities (orbital) or, increasingly, under cities. In a nutshell, transport planning in many major cities is aiming at putting motor traffic underground (as it causes too many problems upstairs). Buildings in the way? No problem, let's build tunnels. Not only would it be a huge and hugely profitable industry, it would also massively increase motor traffic in/under cities. Khan builds the Silvertown Tunnel, an orbital motorway link, while wanting to close a crucial link in Central London to vehicular traffic. People often think this is a good thing, but the capacity constraints of inner cities provide a useful safety valve against even more motor traffic craziness. The 'Roads Task Force' report proposes underground motorways under Central London, too. Closing Oxford Street, a Roman road alignment, is more grist to that mill.
Well, the last word hasn't been spoken on this yet, but if the Mayor forces it through in the way proposed, it will be another permanent stain on his darkening reputation. I grant you that it's not as bad as re-ushering in motorway building in London, but still.
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Suit yourself.
Here's the Mayor making the usual smoke-and-mirrors bogus arguments about Oxford Street. Utter nonsense throughout the whole article.
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Please refrain from posting such nonsense.
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I don't remember the last time I used Oxford Street for an East-West or West-East journey given there's a far better spine to the north underneath the Post Office tower without risk of hitting pedestrians randomly stepping out into the road.
So despite grabbing a headline here, it's not a big deal imo
Maybe this might force the issue of improving provision to the South? Which I guess is the Shaftesbury Avenue/Piccadilly corridor, but again sheer pedestrian/traffic volume around there makes it a slightly stressful journey and potentially unrealistic.
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More nonsense about Oxford Street, which is very obviously not comparable to Times Square, where a very short stretch of Broadway has been pedestrianised between the intersections with 7th Avenue and 6th Avenue, with the other, very close, major streets around it still available to drivers. 100% non-comparable, and anyone who does compare it is either daft or deliberately insincere.
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Sorry, this is a bit old, but I didn't see it when you posted.
I don't remember the last time I used Oxford Street for an East-West or West-East journey given there's a far better spine to the north underneath the Post Office tower without risk of hitting pedestrians randomly stepping out into the road.
So what? I haven't used Oxford Street much in the last few years, because I don't live in West London, and when I go east-west and back, I usually take the Inner Ring Road. Our personal experiences are not important here. Oxford Street was, is, and will be until all the city around it is demolished, a very important east-west connection, not least for bus passengers.
So despite grabbing a headline here, it's not a big deal imo
Unfortunately, it is a big deal.
Maybe this might force the issue of improving provision to the South? Which I guess is the Shaftesbury Avenue/Piccadilly corridor, but again sheer pedestrian/traffic volume around there makes it a slightly stressful journey and potentially unrealistic.
I don't understand why people think that somehow Oxford Street can be 'replaced' by some other 'provision'. It is where it is, and those other streets are not there.
Permeability is absolutely vital for cycling. If you force people to take extremely long detours by reducing it, no matter how many fewer pedestrians 'randomly' step into the carriageway along the detour, it *will* reduce cycling, 100% guaranteed.
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So this is how stupid it's getting. Having lost the argument, Khan now just wants to force this through.
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Of course it's shite, but this is not the way to improve it. Just because something's bad doesn't mean you have to accept the wrong project.
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About
Oxford Street revamp
Posted by
@Oliver Schick
This probably deserves its own thread. It's been discussed in various other places but really belongs here. Westminster have gone out with a consultation about plans to freshen up Oxford Street. I went along to a drop-in session, which was very interesting. There are still two sessions to come in August.
https://oxfordstreetprogramme.co.uk/index.html
Salvation Army (Regent Hall), 275 Oxford Street, W1C 2DJ
2nd August – drop in 9am-5pm (presentations at 10am, 1pm and 4pm)
9th August – drop in 9am-5pm (presentations at 10am, 1pm and 4pm)
Definitely recommended to go along, especially if you want to talk to the lead consultant directly.
There's a lot of material to plough through. The projects are basically the revamp of Oxford Street itself, plus a couple of associated side projects. Needless to say, there's so much wrong with this area that they couldn't possibly address it all. There are a number of very good aspects to the proposals, though, especially a commitment to returning one-way streets in the area to two-way operation, including the north and south sides of Cavendish Square, as well as parts of Margaret Street and Mortimer Street. This is extremely positive, and although there won't be two-way operation all along these streets (Goodge Street isn't included, for instance, as it's too far away and also in LB Camden), it's very much a step in the right direction, with the hope that more such projects will be undertaken in the future. Short of full two-way working, some contraflows are proposed in other streets, too.
The main criticism is that the proposed carriageway width in Oxford Street is meant to be a consistent 6.5m throughout (two lanes at the minimum possible width of 3.25m, just about enough for two buses to pass each other), similar to the 7m that currently exists for a stretch west of Oxford Circus. This is very poor provision for cycling and will make it all but impossible to get through. The number of bus routes has been greatly reduced, to 4 or 5 depending which side of Oxford Circus you're looking at, meaning longer dwell times for buses, in turn meaning lots of waiting behind them or difficult overtaking manoeuvres, in conflict with oncoming traffic and quite possibly drivers behind. While the street will remain largely bus, cycle, and taxi only (the access restrictions won't change materially except for a reduction in restricted hours east of Oxford Circus, and for the fact that they will be enforceable, which they are currently not), the proposed carriageway width would still maintain poor conditions for cycling.
Much better would be wide kerb lanes of 4.5m, i.e. 1.25m more each side. This would create greater flexibility while still increasing space for pedestrians along most of the length of the street except for the section that is currently narrower. There is a lot of nervousness around pedestrian footfall and overcrowding of Underground platforms, but the latter situation at least should be alleviated compared to the pre-pandemic situation because of Crossrail. While Crossrail (which I still think was a mistake to build) brings many more people to the area, it also provides more platform space. Were the carriageway width changed in the proposals, it would also affect the proposed redesigns of junctions, including Oxford Circus. It would make designing the junctions much easier and result inn fewer banned turns.
Most streets crossing Oxford Street will remain one-way under the proposals, unfortunately, there will be many banned turns, and traffic management will be largely by selective access restrictions, for instance in side streets, but overall, if the carriageway width issue is addressed, it's not a bad project in what is probably London's most difficult traffic environment, and where the scope of any project could easily grow beyond what is realistically achievable.
Also, this project certainly won't be 'once in a lifetime', as the Evening Standard article puts it. Oxford Street has been neglected for too long and a large backlog of issues has built up. It shouldn't be allowed to fall so far behind again, and there should be continuous work of a less spectacular nature on improving it and the wider area.
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/plans-oxford-street-london-traffic-cars-consultation-pedestrians-westminster-council-b1094987.html