Sir – Nothing is more infuriating than cycling into town only to find there are no free parking spaces. Adding insult to injury, the lampposts sneer: “Do not park your bicycle here – use the nearest bike rack.”

The councils’ joint programme to free city centre racks of ‘dead’ bikes is long overdue and very welcome. They now clear the racks four times a year: once a month would be even better.

Good quality and well-sited cycle parking isn’t just good news for cyclists. Proper cycle parking benefits pedestrians and improves the public realm, as bikes are less likely to be parked ‘informally’ on pavements and against street furniture.

Bikes locked to proper racks means fewer stolen bikes, which is good news for the victims as well as for the police’s crime statistics. And it should also reduce the household insurance premiums of anyone with an OX postcode.

Plenty of cycle parking is good news for retailers. Research in Bristol by Sustrans in 2004 showed that retailers overestimated the importance of car-borne trade by almost 100 per cent; they estimated that 41 per cent of their customers arrived by car, whereas only 22 per cent had done so.

They estimated that six per cent of customers had cycled, whereas in fact ten per cent had done so. In Oxford, the figure must be much higher. Cycle parking benefits everybody. That’s why we need to build massive, secure, underground bicycle parks as cornerstones of the developments at St Aldates, the Westgate and West End.

Such a civic amenity is especially vital in St Aldates, as Carfax is such a huge trip-generator. There are precedents: in Cambridge, there is a brand-new shopping centre with John Lewis as its flagship tenant.

In the basement, there is a 500-capacity bicycle park along with a bike shop that hires and repairs bicycles. It’s brilliant. Oxford needs one.

James Styring, Chairman, Cyclox — the cycling campaign for Oxford