A look through the files of The Oxford Times reveals it is now 20 years since the idea of removing all traffic from Cornmarket and Queen Street in the centre of Oxford was first suggested as part of the city council’s Local Plan.

It took eight years, a lot of argument and a public inquiry before even the first phase of the plan was implemented with the closure of High Street to general traffic and the complete pedestrianisation of Cornmarket.

As our longstanding readers will recall, the course of the so-called Oxford Transport Strategy did not run smoothly from that point on either. Promised environmental improvements were slow to appear and an expensive repaving of Cornmarket with granite slabs was a disaster.

The promised next phase of removing the buses from Queen Street was often talked about but never delivered.

Two years ago, the removal of bus stops from Queen Street was achieved along with a reduction in the number of buses. The final pedestrianisation of Queen Street — and George Street and Broad Street — would be in 2011, we were told.

Today, that goal seems as far removed as ever. Lack of money today we can understand, lack of progress over the last 20 years is less easy to forgive.

Oxford was already behind many of its contemporaries when the first phase of the transport strategy was introduced in 1999. It is a depressing thought that it could be another ten years or more before we achieve the full pedestrianisation we were promised 20 years ago.

The picture is equally depressing when you consider the wider transport picture for Oxfordshire.

The county council’s local transport plan includes a few schemes that have been previously funded and are about to start including the likes of the Didcot station forecourt development and the Cogges Link in Witney.

There are lots of other schemes in the document, but little prospect of any of them being funded in the next five-to-ten years.

Indeed, in most cases there is little indication of where any funding would come from unless they were paid for in their entirety by developers.

If, as we all hope, Oxfordshire does return to a decent level of growth then it could be compromised by a lack of infrastructure improvement. Developers faced by the prospect of fully funding any infrastructure improvements in this county may decide it renders their schemes uneconomic and take their business somewhere else.

The only consolation is that we guess the picture is little different elsewhere