Yesterday I caught the bus from Magdalen Road to the train station at 6.30pm. I missed my 7.06pm train thanks to an endless caravan of slow moving, parking, and manouevering vehicles strangling Cowley Road.

Cyclists pushed around the edges, wobbling nervously between pavement and the towering metal side wall of the bus, or braving the median white line.

Normally I’d have been one of them, but I was with friends from out of town. While I am not unaccustomed to missing trains (and a plane, once), they counted down the minutes until the train’s departure with mild panic.

A friend waiting at the station texted updates: the train’s on time; it’s on the platform; departed. It was a distance we could have walked in 35 minutes but you can’t get off a bus mid-stop. Our four advance tickets were invalid on anything but the 7.06.

Over the years, Oxfordshire’s love of the car has gone stratospheric. Most of Oxford’s arterial roads, and those in the market towns, have heavy traffic at commuter times. A few are rammed all day long. It’s time, surely, for these roads to be reserved for bikes and buses only.

Plenty of central Oxford streets are already closed to regular traffic. It is better for traders and shoppers, and for commuters.

Heavy traffic is stressful and dangerous, bringing out the worst in frustrated drivers. I saw a bus driver snarl and honk his horn at a young female cyclist who shouted “Way too close!” at him through his open window.

And let’s not forget the invisible spectre of air pollution. County Hall applauds the individual’s choice to drive, but when that choice renders the road network useless and leaves us all with no choice but to choke on the fumes – what kind of choice is that?

Places like Cambridge have succeeded in cutting car journeys from a percentage higher than Oxford’s to much lower by widespread use of a technique known as ‘filtered permeability’.

This means closing certain roads to all but bus and bike traffic using bus gates, as we have on High Street now.

To stop rat running through side streets, wooden bollards allow only bikes to pass.

To support filtered permeability in Oxford, we’d need to close the inner ring road (Longwall Street) to through traffic or block car traffic at The Plain. The University colleges, those little fiefdoms at the heart of the city, should relinquish hundreds of their car parking spaces.

Motorists travelling to or through the city centre would be faced with longer and more circuitous journeys, giving those that can an incentive to take the bus, walk or cycle.

It makes economic sense – hours wasted in queues cost more than just my wasted train fare. The diehard drivers and the few that genuinely need to drive, such as disabled people, would still have access to the centre, but with proper mass-cycle parking systems replacing car parking in the city centre there’d fewer places to drive to.

The future is two-wheeled. The inexorable rise of car ownership mustn’t condemn our congested city to vehicular paralysis.

It’s time the council woke up, sniffed the diesel, and got ballsy with schemes to close Cowley Road and The Plain to cars from 8 till late.