We have got to do something about the issue of traffic in Oxford. The city centre is virtually gridlocked, writes Oxfordshire County Council Labour group leader Liz Brighouse.

Every time you have roadworks or an accident it causes massive problems with traffic across the city.

But I just think the idea of a tunnel underneath the city, because of the costs and the archaeology of Oxford, is probably something that won’t be viable.

There are other things within Ian Hudspeth’s plan that we have got to look at seriously, such as having more park-and-rides and having them further away from the city.

What is happening is that people are getting as far as the park-and- rides and thinking that they may as well stay in their cars.

The first thing we need to look at is the number of parking spaces in Oxford’s centre and decreasing that so we stop people coming into the city centre.

We really must get our buses moving but how we do that in a city which is so constricted is difficult.

You can be sat on a bus for an hour and a half just to get from the city centre to Wood Farm.

The economic development of the city has led to large numbers of people coming here to work and we need to find ways of getting them here without clogging the roads for people who live in Oxford.

There’s a range of things that we can do, such as new rail links, but we have to start by looking at some of the smaller things, like addressing car parking.

It is also an issue of planning policy and where the best places for new developments are.

If you look at the Old Road Campus there has been a lot of development and at the Churchill Hospital, but Old Road is a medieval road and it is very difficult to improve.

For some of these places the horse has already bolted and people are having to live with this problem. Some people are saying that we need to keep pouring money into potholes, but if that ends up bringing more people into Oxford we will still have to think hard about how we address the problems in the city. It is good that the county council is looking forward.

We have got to be focusing on both – making sure that potholes are being filled in and looking further upstream.