Oxford’s two largest bus companies have urged a quality partnership to reduce the number of buses coming into the city by co-ordinating timetables to pave the way for further pedestrianisation.
Oxford Bus Company and Stagecoach have advised Oxfordshire that its plans to pedestrianise the historic city by diverting from a series of narrow, medieval streets from 2010 will not work, and will meet with stiff opposition.
To ‘simply decant’ 82 buses per hour from the major east-west route of Queen Street to nearby areas would ‘overload and congest neighbouring streets,’ the firms say in a joint response.
However, the Local Transport Act 2008 would allow Queen Street to be pedestrianised as planned by 2013, by reducing the overall number of buses. Similarly, buses serving Kidlington, terminating in Magdalen Street, also earmarked for pedestrianisation, could be rationalised.
A quality partnership would ‘remove a lot of the barriers that have frustrated bus users and operators for the last 20 years’, allowing the firms to work together without falling foul of the competition regulator.
Two separate 10-minute services could be combined into a single seven to eight minute service, providing ‘a more frequent and co-ordinated service while reducing twelve buses per hour to eight’. However, the bus companies state that only allowing shuttle services on the High Street and other roads ‘will not work’.
Similarly, the Oxford Civic Society attacked the ‘over-drastic proposal’ to ‘force bus passengers on all radial routes converging at the Plain to disembark and transfer to high-capacity buses’.
The bus firms claimed that a quality partnership would allow bus numbers on the High Street to be reduced by ‘an acceptable’ 25%.
Oxfordshire’s plans to extend pedestrianisation, following its scheme for the north-south route of Cornmarket, have been attacked by the Oxford Pedestrians’ Association. It said there was ‘no point having a more pleasant environment if nobody can reach it’ (Surveyor, 20 November 2008).
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