Plans for more bus gates in Oxford facing delays

The two so-called ‘bus gates’ were due to be rolled out at the north end of Cowley Road and on Warneford Lane, outside the Warneford Hospital.

They would have been funded by a government grant to encourage more people to use public transport, cycling or walking after the pandemic.

But now, in an email to Oxfordshire county councillors seen by the LDRS, the council said these bus gates and one other change to traffic in the city will not go ahead.

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The email said there was insufficient ‘time or budget within the… programme to undertake the necessary level of assessment and consultation’ for the schemes to go ahead.

Alongside the bus gates on Cowley Road and Warneford Lane, a plan to prohibit right turns into Donnington Bridge Road from Abingdon Road at the signal junction with Weirs Lane is also being removed from the works programme.

However, the email also emphasises that the three plans will not be scrapped altogether, but might be reconstituted into a larger plan to change how people travel around Oxford, called Connecting Oxford.

This scheme, not due to go ahead for a few years yet, aims to add more buses to the city, as well as more roads where only they can travel, speeding up journey times.

There are also plans to charge employers in the east of the city for the number of car parking spaces they have at their offices, a ‘Workplace Parking Levy’, to discourage private car use by commuters.

Plans for the new bus gates were revealed at the end of last summer, as a debate over two other bus gates in the city centre played out.

The Warneford Lane and Cowley Road bus gates were included in the second round of bidding for cash from the Government’s emergency active travel fund.

Cowley Road. Picture: Ed Nix

Oxfordshire County Council won £2.98m from this pot of money, and plans to spend it on several schemes in Oxford to encourage long term changes to the way people travel.

It has also spent grant money for the Local Enterprise Partnership on similar schemes in Witney and Bicester.

Yvonne Constance, the county council’s cabinet member for transport, said the authority had been concerned to ‘schedule the works right’.

She added: “When we implement the traffic restriction of that order we want to get it right.”

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Tom Hayes, the deputy leader of Oxford City Council, and its cabinet member for a zero carbon Oxford, has been working alongside the county as a ‘constructive partner’ on its future transport plans, but added he was concerned about the announcement.

He said: “If this transport plan cannot be progressed because it would be too difficult to ask the public about their opinion, that's concerning.

“If the Conservatives running the county council don't have their act together enough to implement their own Prime Minister's transport plans, what's the point of voting Conservative?”

A spokesman for the county council said: “At the time of submitting Oxfordshire’s bid for the second round of the government’s Active Travel grant, there was a government emphasis on ‘significant changes’ to the road network, with measures to be taken ‘as swiftly as possible.’ When the second round settlement was announced in November, the emphasis had changed for local authorities to focus on extensive consultation and monitoring.

“With this important stipulation, the council had to review the submission to identify schemes that may be at greater risk of non-delivery by the government’s deadline of March 2022. In parallel, more detailed cost estimates have been prepared than were possible within the extremely limited time that was available to prepare the bid.”