I cycled to the Jericho Tavern the other evening to see The Future Rays. It was a great gig, a tight set heavy on riffs and light on repartee. I nearly didn’t make it though.

I was on the “pub bike”, the kind of bike that you can leave parked outside a pub and not ruin your evening by peeking through the curtains to see if someone is trying to nick it. I’d almost be glad if someone would nick it – then I could get a different pub bike that wasn’t so leaden and ugly.

I headed for the cycle stand outside what was the doctor’s surgery on the corner of Cranham Street.

As I approached, four students on bikes stopped at the end of Observatory Street and hovered, scanning Walton Street for parking spaces. They spotted the stand, then me, and made a beeline for the racks.

I tried to step on it without looking as if I was racing, but on my jalopy it was impossible. I clunked to a halt and watched them lock their bikes to the last four unoccupied hoops.

The next nearest cycle stands, outside Freud, are a few hundred metres away. Damn the pub bike – but damn Oxford’s lack of cycle parking even more.

Given the amount of shops, bars and restaurants in Jericho, you’d expect ample places to park a bike.

The same goes for the Cowley Road area, and even more so the city centre. With 20,000 cyclists visiting daily, why isn’t there parking for thousands of bikes?

It is disgraceful that the city centre’s largest public amenity, the Town Hall, has no more than a dozen rings to tether bikes to.

And in a cycling city, you’d quite reasonably expect to park your bike outside the central post office while you pop in. But in Oxford? Forget it. We need to build several massive, secure, underground bicycle “hubs” as cornerstones of the developments at the Westgate and the station, where the council has proposed a measly 1,200 parking spaces. We need 12,000!

In Japan, they have taken hubs to another level with parking for 6,000 bikes at a time: watch www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24960489.

Cyclists ride up to the hub door, push their bike on to a metal runner and enter a code. The door opens and a robot whisks the bike away and parks it automatically, way underground. It takes seconds to get your bike back again. This sort of facility would be fantastic at the station.

Cycle parking, or rather a dire lack of it, was one of the things that prompted me to form the Oxford cycling pressure group Cyclox over 10 years ago. After cycle routes that conveniently evaporate when the going gets tough, Having nowhere to lock your bike when you’ve got to the city centre can drive you mad.

Cyclox volunteers once spent an entire weekend logging every single bike rack in the city as part of a project to demand more and better parking. The result wasn’t exactly a triumph: in Broad Street, a second row of racks was installed on the side with the shops, but outside Balliol College only a small rack was installed. It couldn’t be any longer, we were told, because that was where the council puts the Christmas tree every year.

Some laughed – some cried. It’s high time the council upped its game on cycle parking.