Together at last: Eynsham Park & Ride to be connected to the A40
The 850-space Park & Ride at Eynsham, five miles west of Oxford, is finally to be connected to the A40.
Although the car park had been built and was under security surveillance, the link road remained unbuilt – leading to national press headlines such as “You can't park there!”
Oxfordshire County Council had assembled a complex package of funding to improve the A40, including a dual carriageway section, a new bus lane, and a wider cycleway. But construction inflation and other pressures meant the scheme had to be scaled down – and the Government’s Homes England agency, one of the funders, had not signed off the revised scheme.
What’s being built… and what isn’t
Now, finally, Homes England and the Department for Transport have signed off their £126m funding. Added to council and developer funding, this will pay for:
- A new junction onto the A40 to bring the Eynsham park & ride into use
- New bus lanes:
- Eastbound from Eynsham Park & Ride to Cassington
- Eastbound from Duke’s Cut Bridge (shortly before the bypass flyover) to Oxford North/Wolvercote
- Westbound at the Cassington junction
- Westbound approaching the Eynsham Park & Ride
- Upgraded cycleways:
- On both sides of the road between Eynsham P&R and the Eynsham roundabout
- On the south side of the road between the Eynsham roundabout and Cassington
- Between Cassington and Wolvercote (“localised upgrades” only)
- Pedestrian crossings (light-controlled) at key locations
Subject to planning permission, construction could start in early 2026 and last for two years.
Oxfordshire County Council says this cut-down programme is “focused on the parts of the route where buses and their passengers will get the most journey time savings”. A spokesperson told the Clarion:
The A40 Eynsham Park & Ride to Wolvercote scheme is capitalising the maximum travel benefit around bus priority and walking and cycling within the funding available, and with minimum environmental impact. The Access to Witney (Shores Green) scheme has separate funding and is already progressing to construction. The A40 dualling is not part of this next proposed phase of construction.
However, OCC intends to continue seeking funds for further improvements between Eynsham and Wolvercote, which could bring back elements of the original programme. These included an upgraded cycleway throughout and a cycle link to the Oxford Canal towpath.
The background
So how did a Park & Ride come to be built five miles out of Oxford without any connection to the road network?
West Oxfordshire, like the rest of the county, is earmarked for thousands of new homes – in Eynsham, the adjacent garden village of ‘Salt Cross’, and Witney. With no railway, most commuting would be by car. But the A40 is already notorious for congestion.
Oxfordshire County Council’s previous Conservative administration considered many options to fix the “A40 problem” in the years since 2000: light rail, trams, bus expressway, a reopened railway. In 2014, with housing targets forcing their hand, they settled on a package of bus-centric road improvements. Commuters would drive or cycle to a Park & Ride at Eynsham, before catching an express bus that would benefit from bus lanes all the way to Oxford.
The Park & Ride was envisaged as a model of its type, with 24-hour security; dedicated cycle storage; public toilets; and electric vehicle parking bays. The total cost would be just over £51m, principally funded by:
- Department for Transport Local Growth Fund: £35m
- Housing Growth Deal: £12m
- Oxfordshire Local Enterprise Partnership: £3m
- Developer contributions (Section 106): £1.5m
With all this funding successfully grouped together under a “Science Transit” banner, work continued through 2023 and the Park & Ride was finally complete in January 2024.
Upgrading the road
But the improvements to the A40 itself were to be funded separately. Given separate “A40 Smart Corridor” branding, these included the new bus lanes, the Witney–Eynsham dualling, and crucially, the junction giving access to the Park & Ride. These would be funded by Homes England, the Government’s house-building body. It is this funding that has finally been confirmed today.
Dan Levy, now the County Council cabinet member for finance, explained the cost overruns in a comment to Eynsham Online in May:
The scheme was too ambitious and was downsized as inflation made the costs impossible. The dualling was deferred into a later phase. However, Homes England failed to deliver the funding promised, while costs continue to increase.
Developments such as Salt Cross have proved slow to get off the ground. Meanwhile, construction costs have continued to mount. After an internal review, Oxfordshire County Council submitted a ‘Material Change Request’ to Homes England, seeking approval for the cut-down scheme. This request has only just been approved, one year on.
On building projects like this, a small percentage cost overrun on this can quickly go in to hundreds of thousands of pounds. With council budgets already stretched to pay for social care, funding the shortfall was not an option for OCC. Dan Levy was adamant: “I do not intend to spend Oxfordshire council taxpayers’ money on these junctions.”
A glance at the housing-funded road projects in Oxfordshire shows the massive risk of any cost overruns:
Housing-funded infrastructure projects in Oxfordshire. The East Oxford LTNs (initial cost plus bollard replacement) are not housing-funded but are included for comparison purposes.
Media mischief
With construction inflation rampant, it’s no surprise that the Park & Ride was built as soon as the funds were available – in fact, you could argue that it would have been negligent to delay and risk an even higher bill.
But this nuance has been lost on the nation’s newspapers, who found the notion of “a car park with no road access” extremely funny. To illustrate this, we turn (reluctantly) to the Daily Mail, who are very interested in this story. So interested, in fact, they've written about it three times: on 22 April 2024, 3 September 2024 and 6 September 2024. It's fundamentally the same article, so read any one of them. Even the Oxford Mail took time off writing about botched breast enhancements in Scotland and Jeremy Clarkson’s dog to highlight the “surreal” sight.
Our axiom of “Is it real or is it just going on a campaign leaflet?” applies here too. The story has already appeared on Conservative leaflets in West Oxfordshire – with the party able both to take credit for the P&R and castigate their LibDem/Green (and erstwhile Labour) successors for not building the road. It is an open secret that some LibDem/Green councillors feel they have been left holding a baby white elephant. Still, today’s announcement will take the heat out of the issue before May’s county elections.
Postscript
By 2026/27, motorists will be able to drive into and out of the Eynsham Park & Ride. Has anyone ordered any buses for it…? Just asking.
