Cleaning up London’s toxic air

I saw in the paper that there are plans to pedestrianise Oxford Street by 2020.

As many people here have commented, simply closing the road is likely to have unacceptable consequences for other local roads.

At the moment the vast majority of traffic is busses and I'd suggest that a condition precedent for the road closure is a complete review of bus routes with the intention of creating new bus nodes at either end of Oxford Street linked by a very high frequency above-ground hop-on hop-off shuttle service which could be in the form of:

1. airport style travelators
2. normal buses
3. ski-lift style pods
4. trams

It would be much simpler if this could be free, but I suppose if enough Oyster readers are installed then that would probably work as well.

The obvious location for the eastern bus node is Tottenham Court Road Station which is on both Crossrail and Crossrail 2 as well as the existing tube network. Unfortunately, there is no Marble Arch station planned for Crossrail and so the western bus node will have to link to the Central line.

If this is to be effective then transfer between busses and the other means of transport should involve as little walking as possible, which might require some imaginative thinking e.g. underground bus stops at the nodes, use of "mirror image" busses for the shuttles (i.e. doors on the right hand side to allow passengers to disembark and re-embark across a platform).

The next thing is that rather than just closing OS, we should be expecting to introduce a shared environment similar to Exhibition Road (but without the parking). Use should be limited to low-emission vehicles (including private cars). Deliveries should only be permitted between 22:00 and 07:00. Control should be exercised using ANPR cameras similar to those used for the congestion zone. NB all of these ideas are already used somewhere in London at present.

Finally, we will need to decide what to do about north-south traffic. smaller roads can probably be closed to normal vehicles but left open o low-emission ones who can use OS. Regent Street however is a much bigger problem and will probably need some form of underpass.

All of this means to me that doing "pedestrianisation" properly is going to take rather longer than 2020 and involve some serious expenditure, which in turn means some investment serious political capital. It will be interesting to see if our new Mayor is up to the challenge...

What do you lot think?

I welcome this initiative. Lots of European cities have car-free days, pedestrianised areas, bicycles for hire. It's about asking people to consider alternatives and building them into their daily life. If more people do this, air pollution will decrease.

I've almost given up on this thread.

A few basic points:

1. London isn't like any other European city except possibly Paris. It is vastly bigger and more complicated. For various reasons it only has one effective ring road (the M25) rather than the three that were thought necessary in the 1960's. As a result most roads carry a mix of local and through traffic, and there are very few alternatives. Remember, Oxford Street was laid out in order to provide a northern east-west route (it was effectively a by-pass!) and without it today's through driver has to go north to the Euston Road (one of the few bits of the 1960's inner "box" to be built) or south to the Strand / Embankment. Even northbound drivers who come charging up Park Lane (another bit of the box) are then forced onto Oxford Street for a hundred yards before they can pick up the south end of the A41. Why are these central roads used as through roads? Because London is so big that it's still quicker for large parts of the population of inner London to drive through the centre than to negotiate the North / South circulars or to drive out to the M25.

2. The car brings freedom. Even in congestion it will move as fast as a bus and it takes you to where you want to go in comfort with no changes. For some journeys such as those around rather than into the centre it is much faster than public transport. To see this point look at school runs - parents do them for all sorts of reasons but essentially they are part of a society of choices. That's why driverless cars will be popular: they will allow people who can't currently access these benefits (the elderly, the infirm, the young) to do so without the need for an expensive personal "driver". result there will be even more demand for cars than there is now.

3. Cycles will never replace the car as a means of family transport - have you tried cycling with small children! On top of that unlike many of the cities that keep on being quoted as exemplars (e.g. Amsterdam), London is not only bigger (see above) but has many more hills and worse weather. On top of which the inner suburban belt of Victorian housing is still there: which is great, I wouldn't swap my Victorian house for something modern, but it means that we also have Victorian roads which are rather narrower than the boulevards of Amsterdam, which makes it very hard to fit in shared pavements. NB Amsterdam streets are also lined with parked cars...

4. making engines cleaner will happen. It is happening now and the whole problem is a matter of time, investment and regulation. However, that will not solve many of the problems, indeed it will arguably support the increase in the number of cars because owners won't be quite so guilt-ridden.

5. I would argue that the answer is communal car ownership as we have currently with the various car clubs that operate in London. We decided not to replace our car a few years ago because we couldn't find anything modern that met our need for a versatile but fun car to drive that wouldn't break the bank. This was possible because our children were old enough that a school run didn't make sense any more. Instead we do most of our driving in car club cars. it's very rare that we can't get a car within 5 or 10 or at most 15 minutes walk at almost no notice. Bigger cars are rarer but if more people used them I'm sure their numbers would increase. The biggest problem is finding an economic solution to the summer holidays where we normally drive to either Scotland or France. In this way we can drive to a school event, to a friend where we used to live safe in the knowledge that there is a reserved parking slot to put the car back into and for a cost that isn't much more than two adult fares on public transport.

So, please can we get a bit more practical and a bit less ideological about these problems. As someone else said there are good and bad in every category of road user and yes, if we were always nice to each other, the world would be a better place, but the reality is that we live in one of the biggest and most complicated cities in the world with problems that exist on the same scale. Change is going to be slow, incremental and insufficiently radical for some, but it will happen and with a bit of luck some changes (such as the ludicrous 20mph limits spreading everywhere) will be reversed as well!

Toodlepip...

I've suggested this before and got no response - but here it is again:

Tomorrow you could replace ALL the buses and taxis on Oxford Street at a stroke with "clean"
electric or hybrid vehicles.

These could provide a shuttle service from one end of Oxford Street to the other, and people travelling on to other destinations could connect with traditional transport at either end.

The buses and cars could be sponsored by the Oxford Street businesses.

They could be run at capacity thus reducing the volume of vehicles on Oxford Street,

This would require ZERO INVESTMENT in infrastructure and cause no disruption.

And it would improve air quality. TOMORROW...

Oxford Street should not be pedestrianised. When Oxford street was only one way, Wigmore Street traffis was very slow moving, the traffic at times coming to a long stand still. With no traffic on Oxford Street the situation would be impossible. This must not happen.

I'm in complete agreement with monthly traffic free days, alternating this as we have seen along Regent St/Oxford St, and from an environmental perspective I think it is about time that the Government seriously addressed this important issue, but I think it is wrong to demonise drivers, as some have already outlined that you do pay for the congestion charge, road tax etc, but cyclists do not and are free to cycle without penalty, and some cyclists are a law unto themselves and do jump lights and cause accidents, and use foul language in the process. But the idea of permanently making Oxford St a pedistrianised zone is quite unthinkable, I think perhaps banning cars along the main thoroughfare would be fair, but keeping buses and taxis along the main street is a must, but updating all vehicles to reduce carbon omissions is the way forward, all buses to be electric and all taxis to be zero-emitting as law. The problem of banning all vehicles is what about the disabled, the elderly, expectant mothers, families with buggies, tourists, it's bad enough that under Ken Livingstone reduced the amount of bus stops along London's main shopping street, and I have personally witnessed disabled people and people who are genuinely struggling with walking far distance due to pre-existing injuries, let's face it, none of us can see if a person is an amputee can we?? So I'm not sure this has been completely thought through by the London Mayor!!

I am in favour of this plan. I live in Fish Island in Tower Hamlets and enjoy using the pedestrian only bridge on Monier Road. Shockingly, the LLDC is proposing to demolish the treasured foot bridge and replace it with a vehicle bridge. It would be great to get some airtime on this specific plan - it flies in the face of the Mayor's promise to keep London green and maintain air quality. Please see our petition! https://www.change.org/p/london-legacy-development-corporation-say-no-t…

OXFORD STREET PEDESTRIANISATION PLAN - why the wait...?

The Mayor has announced his intention to pedestrianise Oxford Street permanently - but not for four years. Why?

One of the most sensible comments I heard during the Mayoral Election Campaign came from Zac Goldsmith in which he stated that he was in favour of TRIALING any future proposed Cycle Lanes by temporary means rather than commiting to full and "permanent" redevelopment of London's roads based on mere projections.

The plan to close Oxford Street to traffic could be tested far sooner by putting in a temporary closures to mimic the proposals and it could be done in a weekend at comparably litte cost.

What are you waiting for Mr Mayor?

Thanks to "TFL" for this discussion forum.
Many motorists as well as shop-keepers are often left-out in such valuable discussion forum probably because of the nature of job/occupation; but it is worth finding new ways for their full participation for matters relating to sustainability across-the-board of the general spectrum of nation building.
A shopping arena such as Oxford street & other areas of the city requires its historical analysis in terms of the weight and quantity of commodities often purchased.
Air pollution requires an intellectual guidance to reduce the looming pointless anger in our road traffic system.
Fear and scare is becoming an "art" even when it portrays some magical concept of community-feud.