The other day, a Land Rover parked outside my house. It darkened my day in more ways than one.

There’s a good four metres between my bay window and the kerb, so cars never shade the burnished-peachy autumn sunlight from my front room. But this Land Rover snuffed out the sun.

It wasn’t any old Land Rover. With souped-up suspension and super-chunky off-road tyres, it was parked with two wheels on the pavement, and it towered over the street. A huge plastic snorkel snaked out of the bonnet and stood sentry above the roof, an extra no doubt essential for stalking the boggier side of Cowley Marsh. On the roof a stout telecommunications mast: a must in the wilds of East Oxford where the mobile networks rarely penetrate.

My day was further darkened because the driver was an Oxford Brookes University student who lives down the street. He epitomises a phenomenon that blights East Oxford during both of OBU’s semesters.

In term time, the roads are impassable with youngsters in shiny Golfs and Audis speeding to and fro, causing head-banging traffic jams in narrow Divinity Road. The sheer volume of students in cars is making the roads ever more lethal for cyclists and pedestrians.

More than 80 per cent of students at Brookes’s Gipsy Lane live within five miles of the campus, and probably more like one mile in most cases. Yet 15 per cent of students admit to driving to Gipsy Lane – that’s over 1,000 car journeys. (At Harcourt Hill, 44 per cent of students drive despite the Brookes Bus.) Only 12 per cent of students say they cycle to Gipsy Lane, a sad statistic ameliorated only by the 40 per cent who say they walk.

The ratio of drivers vs cyclists is sad for two reasons: Firstly, the problems this causes in terms of pollution congestion, and parking pressure.

Secondly, young undergrads at Brookes come from a culture where everyone drives. The students’ stay in Oxford is an opportunity for them to develop cycling habits that will last them a lifetime. If they never cycle in Oxford, will they ever start cycling? I doubt it.

Brookes provides plenty of incentives. There’s the on-site bike doctor, good parking, and undergraduates are offered free cycle training during freshers’ week. But in week one, students are thinking safe sex not safe cycling – and who can blame them? The take-up of cycle training is often less than one per cent.

While students at Oxford University are famous for their bicycling, way too many OBU students appear immune to the bug. A small number of students no doubt do need a car, but what of the vast majority of 18 to 22 year-olds who bring cars en masse? They should all be walking or cycling to lectures, and taking buses to Wheatley. They can get home in the holidays using trains and buses.

Although both universities have strict policies regarding non-car-ownership for students in university accommodation, this rule is hard to enforce.

Worse, neither university is willing to prohibit car ownership among undergraduates living in private rented accommodation. OBU has gone as far as to claim it would infringe students’ human rights if it were to ban cars for off-campus students. Please, spare me!

Both universities should unleash their green tigers and completely ban young undergrads from having cars within the ring-road, and employ proctors to enforce the ban.