Is Oxford a walkable city?

In a world containing the freeways of Los Angeles, the parking sprawl of London’s Westfield Centre, and the 1970s ring road of Coventry, it might seem strange to question Oxford’s walkability.

The historic centre is a grid of wide avenues and small connecting streets, several of which have long been semi-pedestrianised. And for a confident able-bodied adult, walking in Oxford is literally straightforward.

But as soon as you see the city from a wheelchair, or with a child, or as a new visitor with luggage, it looks very different. Pavements can be narrow and obstructed, crossings inconvenient or unsafe, and directions unclear. Walking to or from the railway station along Hythe Bridge Street can be a scrum with pedestrians pushed into oncoming traffic; so too squeezing past the bus queues on St Aldate’s.

City and County

The City Council will hear a motion on Monday with the provocative title ‘Making Oxford a Truly Walkable City’, proposed by Green Party councillors Max Morris and Emily Kerr. Regular Clarion readers will be asking at this point “Isn’t transport the County Council’s business?” So the motion clarifies: “Whilst some things which improve the pedestrian experience are County responsibilities, there are others which the City Council has sole or joint responsibility for, such as new benches, water fountains, public toilets, and wayfinding.”

As that list suggests, there are multiple ways to improve the experience of walking in Oxford. Others might include restricting advertising boards placed on pavements (licensed by the City Council), extending pavements at junctions, clearing leaves and gritting pavements, and providing play areas. Monday’s motion calls for an overarching walking plan; identifying bids to fund better walking infrastructure; addressing pavement parking; a ‘walkable map’; ‘Dutch entry kerbs’, and a ‘kerbside strategy’. What does all this mean?

Walking and wheeling, not walking and cycling

Walking is often grouped with cycling as ‘active travel’, but the greater need for physical infrastructure to protect cyclists from motor vehicles can mean cycling gets the lion’s share of expenditure. Combining ‘walking and cycling’ can also encourage the designation of shared paths, reducing pedestrian space.

Pedestrian advocates prefer the phrase ‘walking and wheeling’, encompassing wheelchairs and mobility scooters. Oxfordshire’s Local Transport Plan puts walking at the very top, above cycling and public transport.

Blind and partially sighted pedestrians face particular challenges. A report from the Royal National Institute of Blind People adds wheelie bins, untrimmed hedges, dockless bikes, and electric vehicle chargers to the list of pavement obstructions. Again, spaces shared with cyclists can prove problematic to navigate with a visual impairment.

Pavement parking

A Clarion investigation last year revealed that pavement parking is technically banned in most of Oxford’s Controlled Parking Zones. Without enforcement, though, the ban isn’t worth the PDFs it’s written on. The anonymous collective that is Badly Parked Oxford has no difficulty finding daily examples of obstructive parking across the city.

Nationally, the future of pavement parking is similarly obscure. The Department for Transport ran a consultation which closed on 22 November 2020 – yes, it’s just passed its fourth anniversary, yet both Conservative and Labour governments have kept the outcome locked in a filing cabinet. The suspicion is that responses were overwhelmingly in favour of a ban, but the DfT remains reluctant to confront the motorists’ lobby. If the motion passes, the City Council will write to Lou Haigh, the new Secretary of State for Transport, urging her to release the results.

What is a kerbside?

The South London borough of Lambeth introduced a Kerbside Strategy in January 2023, and Southwark and Hounslow are following suit. The ‘kerbside’ is not the pavement but the strip of carriageway at the edge of the road, mostly dedicated to parking.

A major aim of the strategy is to move obstructions like scooter parking, street trees, and electric vehicle charging from the pavement to the kerbside. Inevitably, this becomes contentious when it means removing parking spaces. But Living Streets, the national association for pedestrians, has just this month updated its ‘Pedestrian Pound’ report. To the familiar assertion that cars don’t spend money, people do, it adds a host of documentary evidence showing that improving the walking environment leads to more people visiting the high street on foot.

There is evidence for London which shows a near doubling (94%) of walking and static activities (e.g., sitting on a bench or in a café) in five mixed-use high streets in inner and outer London following public realm improvements relative to similar streets which had not had any improvements (Carmona et al., 2018)

[…] an increase in pavement width by around 3m (10ft) increased the distance people were willing to walk in San Francisco by almost 84m.

What should the urban designers in Oxford’s councils be doing to encourage this? Sometimes the changes are complex and require political bravery – like 2018’s ‘Oxford City Centre Movement and Public Realm Strategy’, which proposed a one-way bus loop around the city centre to (inter alia) free up space for pedestrians on the High.

But many solutions are simple and uncontroversial. One such is the ‘Dutch entry kerb’ mentioned in the Green councillors’ motion. Anyone who uses a pushchair or wheelchair will be familiar with the experience of suburban pavements undulating as they fall and rise for the convenience of drivers accessing their driveways. The principle of the Dutch entry kerb is that the pavement remains level, with only the kerb being dropped for cars, not the whole pavement.

Maps and motions

Finally, the motion calls for a walkable map, perhaps an official version of the Oxford Online Walking Map compiled by volunteers and hosted by Oxford Pedestrians Association. On the ground, Oxford has had freestanding maps on vertical slabs at tourist hotspots since 2012, linking to the now defunct OxfordExplore.com.

The walkable city motion is first on the agenda for the City Council meeting on Monday evening. It will be followed by motions on air quality, shuttle buses, traffic filters, streetlights, and (if any time remains) a play park. Collectively, they demonstrate the interest, and the challenges, in sharing Oxford’s public space.