IT IS perfectly obvious that cars should be banned in Broad Street, except perhaps for early-morning Covered Market deliveries.

Even my mother, a conservative 75-year-old and lifelong driver, branded vehicle access to the street “neanderthal”. Where else can you imagine such a potentially breathtaking streetscape being blighted by people garaging big lumps of private property in its middle? Crazy.

Transform Oxford, the council’s plan to pedestrianise the city centre, must be welcome news to everyone, no matter what their preferred choice of vehicle. Normally, the word pedestrianisation would strike fear into the heart of any cyclist, but there’s reason to believe that Transform Oxford will be better for cyclists, not worse.

The council understands that without the more than 20,000 cyclists who visit the city centre daily, Oxford’s transport network would collapse. Can you imagine the chaos if all those cyclists drove, or even if they all took the bus?

In this age of carbon consciousness, congestion and cash concerns, cycling must form a key plank in any city’s transport planning.

Proper future investment in cycling will encourage more and more of us on to quick, quiet and economical bicycles.

With a big increase in city cycling, allowing only pedestrians to use the city’s motor-traffic-free streets won’t work. Neither will limiting cyclists to a few dedicated cycle routes through the city centre, but requiring them to dismount in other pedestrianised roads.

In fact, maximising the routes that bikes can use (and share with pedestrians) would have the effect of diluting the concentration of bicycles if they were only allowed to use a few key routes.

In other words, if cyclists can cycle along New Inn Hall, Queen, Broad, George and Magdalen Streets, there will be fewer of them concentrated on each route, providing a better experience for pedestrians as well as cyclists.

The evidence is that cyclist–pedestrian segregation is unnecessary. In Cambridge, and European cities with lots of cyclists, walkers and cyclists share streets peaceably.

Our council has seen this and so is beginning its transformation of Oxford by designating New Inn Hall Street a shared-space. New Inn Hall Street has a few van and disabled users but is otherwise free of motor traffic. The plan is to raise the road surface to the same level as the pavements, thus creating a street in which there is no clear demarcation between road and footway.

Worried? Don’t be. Most highway conflict stems from the territorialism that drivers, cyclists and walkers feel when they are given ‘their’ piece of road/footway. But if you create a shared space environment, in which no one mode has absolute right of way, then the territorialism is dissolved and all road users tend to proceed with due care for those around them.

In Oxford, the Transport and Road Research Laboratory carried out extensive real-time studies looking for conflict between cyclists and pedestrians, and found none.

Transform Oxford offers the perfect opportunity for a bus-free city centre to become an attractive space in which pedestrians and cyclists share motor-free thoroughfares. Intelligent designs can eliminate pedestrian-cyclist conflict, leaving the city’s cheapest and greenest modes of transport to co-exist in peace.