Transport: Full steam ahead… or on your bike?

Few people know the challenges of transporting people around Oxfordshire quickly, efficiently and affordably better than Olly Glover. Since 2024 the MP for Didcot & Wantage, he formerly worked in the rail industry, and has a background as a cycle campaigner. We invited his reflections on what the county should do next.

I am grateful to the Oxford Clarion for the opportunity to contribute an article on transport trends and challenges across Oxfordshire. 

My pre-Parliament career was in the railway sector. I have also led a cycle campaigning organisation in a voluntary capacity. More widely, I have an interest in all forms of transport, and how transport infrastructure can contribute to (and indeed is essential for) economic growth, social inclusion, and protecting our environment. 

Although I am a member of the House of Commons Transport Select Committee, I am writing in my capacity as the Liberal Democrat MP for Didcot & Wantage, and as such, the views expressed here are my own. 

In this article, I will explore the transport trends and challenges across Oxfordshire.  I will start by setting the context of general Oxfordshire trends, and considering what objectives transport policy should be trying to deliver. I have structured my thoughts based on types of journey and setting: short distance and urban; commuter and medium-distance, to/from Oxford and major employment centres; and finally longer distance, to cities in other regions and significant airports. 

My key conclusion is that, if government and society as a whole are serious about wanting to reduce congestion and improve access to key employment centres, a more radical and creative set of approaches are needed. Given rising road congestion challenges, better cycling and walking, bus and train coordination, and new rail routes on the busiest corridors will be important for achieving progress. 

The challenges in Oxfordshire

Too often, it seems that transport policy exists in isolation, rather than recognising the specific geographic, economic, and social contexts of a defined area. It is therefore important to start with a recognition of current and recent trends and developments across Oxfordshire. 

Much of the county has seen significant housing – and therefore population – growth over recent decades, with 19% growth across the county between 2001 and 2021. The former Wantage constituency (covering Wallingford, Wantage, Didcot, Grove, and Faringdon) saw even greater increases: nearly 35% growth in the same time period.

This has placed strain on existing transport, particularly roads. Congestion is a widespread source of frustration. It has created new or additional demand for transport between towns, Oxford city centre, major employment centres, and to access leisure and socialising. 

Few people believe that transport investment has matched housing or population growth, and I would argue this is a wider problem with central government’s approach to planning. Housing targets are endlessly discussed, but targets are neither set nor monitored with the same enthusiasm for all the public services and amenities that are needed to support growing populations. (As well as transport, these include health care, education facilities, leisure, commercial provision such as food shops, parks and open spaces, and much more. But that could be the subject of a whole new article.)

There have also been some interesting and perhaps contradictory trends in car ownership. Whilst some younger people are owning cars less than they used to, they are also tending to live with their parents until older, because of the price of housing. This can add to pressures with multiple cars being owned by members of the same household.

Older houses with car parking for one or two cars may now have rather more vehicles, leading to more on-street car parking. Some residents are critical of modern housing developments where provision for off-street car parking is deliberately constrained, as a way of encouraging use of other forms of transport, which again can add to car parking pressures. 

For those who need cars infrequently, the general lack of easy, quick and low-cost methods of hiring a car is a clear problem. Some formal or informal car sharing schemes do exist, but they tend to be focused on city markets, rather than smaller towns. The supply of spot-hire cars is not sufficient to represent a viable alternative to car ownership. 

Across the country, too little has been done to date to support the Government’s policy of moving towards widespread adoption of electric vehicles. Drivers must have confidence in the accessibility and reliability of charging infrastructure, at home, at work, and when on the move. 

There have been some public transport improvements in recent times. On some bus routes, quality and service frequencies have improved; others have stayed the same or got worse. Contactless payments are now commonplace on buses, which reduce boarding times compared to “exact fare only” cash purchases. Battery buses have recently been introduced to Oxford short-distance routes.

On the trains, upgrading of the North Cotswold Line over the last 20 years has enabled an hourly service between Oxford and Worcester, although regular users would welcome further track doubling to reduce punctuality problems. Great Western Main Line electrification and the upgrading of Oxford–Bicester led to some train service improvements, some of these have fallen back as a result of government policy decisions since the pandemic. This is particularly the case on Chiltern Railways where Oxford to London journey times have increased, as a result of suburban services being withdrawn in London and additional station calls inserted into the Oxford route to compensate.

The failure to electrify the railway between Didcot and Oxford now means travellers from stations between Didcot and Reading have to inconveniently change trains at Didcot – a worse service compared to the pre-electrification period. Train service reliability has deteriorated since the pandemic, particularly cancellations. This is partly due to Network Rail infrastructure but also well-documented train crew shortages on Great Western Railway on Sundays. Both Chiltern and GWR have some ageing diesel trains in their fleets, which will need replacing before long. 

But where progress has been minimal, at the very best, is on creating high-quality and continuous walking and cycling routes. As is the case nationally, walking and cycling rates have not improved in Oxfordshire, despite a temporary surge during the pandemic. This is a shame, given very clear evidence of the benefits of walking and cycling both to individual health and reducing pressure on the health service. 

Where are we going?

Too often, transport is talked about solely from one angle. Currently, the focus is its role in reducing carbon emissions.

This is one among many important aims. But high-quality transport provision also contributes to economic growth and productivity. Journey times are important, particularly from the perspective of a car driver, who can do nothing else whilst stuck in traffic. 

Transport is also needed to support growing populations, particularly where growth takes place some distance from major urban centres and employment sites. Much of the county’s transport network is focused on journeys to and from Oxford, neglecting cross-county travel flows. Out-of-town employment centres such as Harwell Campus have raised quality and consistency of transport provision as a key concern with me.

We must also remember that not everyone can drive or afford a car. Public transport, walking and cycling play a key role in improving social mobility and socio-economic equality. Transport can play a role in improving health, both from the perspective of reducing air pollution, and, in the case of walking and cycling, cardiovascular and mental health.

Finally, although pedestrianisation schemes can be controversial, they, and conversion of car parking to other land uses, can lead to large improvements to quality of public realm and land value. City centres such as Chester which are overwhelmingly pedestrianised are thriving. It is important that such policies take full account of people with reduced mobility, some of whom rely on being able to park close to or otherwise access amenities in urban centres.

Urban and short distance transport

Contrary to general assumption (and indeed the focus of government spending), most travel is local. 59% of car and van journeys are for distances of 5 miles or under. It is therefore a concern that longer-distance forms of transport dominate political discussion and policy. 

Oxford is, of course, notorious for congestion. Despite what is often asserted in online discussions, looking at traffic count data for a selection of key roads in and around the city, this is not just a recent phenomenon. Traffic is a source of frustration in most Oxfordshire towns too. 

What can be done about it? None of the options are straightforward or immediately appealing. 

The approach taken in the United States of America is road-building the likes of which we can’t imagine. New roads are rarely greeted with unquestioned popular enthusiasm, and in any case are challenging in areas with significant populations and older buildings. 

There are certainly opportunities to improve both the scale and reliability of urban bus services. But the main barrier to reliable bus services is congestion and car traffic, creating something of a Catch-22 situation. This is why traffic filters are proposed for Oxford, when Network Rail finishes work on the Botley Road bridge. The Oxford approach is a new one for the UK: instead of large-scale congestion charging, it is an attempt to strike a balance between enabling occasional journeys through traffic filters on local roads for residents within and outside of Oxford, with effort to reduce congestion to improve the attractiveness of bus services. We will have to wait a few more years to see it in action and find out if it works. 

Elsewhere, a key challenge with bus services is that potential users want them to be high-frequency and to enable connections without a change of bus, so they can at least try to match the convenience of the car. This is a challenge to achieve in small or medium-sized towns. There is more to be done to look at the viability of demand-responsive or community transport: this involves minibus-sized vehicles individually requested for journeys in off-peak periods, which can be helpful for, for example, older people wanting to visit a town centre for an appointment or for a regular food shop. 

These challenges with motorised urban transport are why we frequently return to discussions on the viability of walking and cycling. As a regular cyclist myself, I am aware that there can be hostility to promoting such travel methods, expressed in online groups and sometimes in real-time on the roads themselves. But polling shows widespread enthusiasm for making walking and cycling easier, more pleasant, and safer. And for short journeys of 1-5 miles, walking and cycling are viable, and often competitive with alternatives on journey time and convenience. 

There are many barriers, the first of which is the perception that cycling in particular is dangerous. The safety statistics indicate cycling fatality rates are lower than for pedestrians (admittedly the other way round for the killed and seriously injured category). But discussing relative safety statistics is not what makes the key difference. Experience from countries with high cycling rates, particularly the Netherlands and Denmark, show that only when cycling feels normal, safe, pleasant, and convenient will large numbers embrace it. Even walking is often perceived as dangerous in the context of the speed and volume of traffic on our roads, as shown by schoolchildren being made to wear high visibility clothing when walking between sites with their teachers. 

The key problem in the UK is the general absence of high-quality and continuous infrastructure – particularly for cycling, but also often for walking, with long wait times for light-controlled crossings and uneven surfaces in the case of the latter. Many of the cycling facilities in Oxfordshire are very poor. This is why experienced cyclists do not use them, even though cyclists would much rather be away from traffic. The most typical problems are paths which are too narrow to enable pedestrians and/or cyclists to pass comfortably; routes which suddenly end and dump users back onto the carriageway; crossing points with very poor visibility of passing traffic and a lack of priority; and badly maintained/non-swept surfaces. 

Oxfordshire County Council has taken some steps to planning a future compatible with much wider embrace of walking and cycling. Today, as a UK average, 29% of trips are undertaken by walking, and just 2% by cycling. Across the county, communities are being engaged in the production of Local Cycling and Walking Infrastructure Plans (LCWIPs), which identify where better infrastructure is needed to create safe and continuous routes, and to prioritise the ideas.

The problem is that funding for implementation of infrastructure is very limited. Even with an additional £300m announced by government, this is unlikely to go far when spread across the country. This is why organisations like the Association of Directors of Public Health and Cycling UK are campaigning for 10% of the Department for Transport budget to be spent on cycling infrastructure. Evidence from the Netherlands shows this level of sustained investment is needed to effect change, as well as good prioritisation and design of road space to make walking and cycling the best, and default, urban options.

Bus, walking and cycling interventions in our towns will help people who need to drive, by reducing congestion and freeing up road capacity. Absent a gigantic and unpopular urban road-building programme, which rarely succeeds in congestion elimination, it is unclear what the other alternatives are if we wish to see an end to the frustrating waste of time that being caught in traffic is. 

County connections

The significant population increases in Oxfordshire have created new or intensified transport patterns – not just between towns and villages and Oxford, but also to and from large employment centres outside of towns (for example, Harwell Campus between Didcot and Wantage).

The car dominates many of these flows, in some cases for understandable reasons. I recently needed to travel on a Sunday from Milton, where I currently live, to Carterton. I was astonished to discover that a bus from Oxford to Carterton, let alone adding Milton to Oxford, took the same amount of time as cycling all the way from Milton to Carterton (1 hour and 40 minutes). Only during weekday rush hours are express bus services offered, taking a much more attractive 35-55 minutes between Oxford and Carterton. With long journey times on some key routes, is it any wonder that people eschew the bus in favour of their car? 

This highlights a structural problem with the current approach to bus services. In Oxfordshire, they remain wholly in the private sector. Those private bus companies, understandably, focus on the most popular and profitable routes on the one hand, and where they can get subsidies and funding from the council and employers on the other.

These incentives tend to create a lot of disparities. The most popular routes end up having a very good service. For example, Abingdon to Oxford has 9 buses an hour during the day in each direction, 6 of which are expresses that run via the A34. In contrast, one of the main bus routes between Didcot and Wantage takes a circuitous route via the Great Western Park housing estate (a requirement of planning conditions), Harwell Campus (the campus funds bus operators to serve it), and the new Wantage Kingsgrove estate. Whilst the X36 offers a more direct service between Didcot and Wantage compared to this, it does not run in the late evening nor on Sundays. Such service patterns make it harder to encourage people to try alternatives to the car. 

If we want the bus to be a more attractive option, I personally cannot see what alternative to more centralised control and planning of the service exists.

A top-down exercise of identifying the key residential, commercial, and employment zones, key travel flows, and then specification of a coherent service offer that connects these is needed. Timetables should be planned to provide connections between key bus services – for example, to reliably connect the bus routes which serve sites such as the John Radcliffe Hospital with longer distance routes which terminate in the city centre. Whether this is then franchised out to private operators or run by a state-run company is, for me, less important.

There are those who disagree and believe that the current system is working. For me, the key piece of evidence that it is not is that bus use has declined by a third in Oxfordshire in the last decade. 

Rail plays a role in connecting our county, with fairly frequent and quite fast services between Oxford and Didcot and Bicester in place today. Travellers between Oxford and Hanborough, Charlbury and Banbury are less well-served, with generally just 1 train per hour in each direction connecting these places to Oxford.

There are longstanding, but unfulfilled, proposals to increase frequencies to Hanborough. Oxford to Banbury used to be served by 2 trains per hour before the pandemic, but the ongoing sub-optimal state of the CrossCountry train operation, with central government inexplicably allowing it to maintain pandemic-level lower frequencies of service, continues to deprive residents of that.

Other, growing parts of the county continue to lack a rail service. There are campaigns for new railway stations on existing lines serving Grove and Wantage; southern parts of Oxford (the Cowley Branch Line); and Kidlington/Begbroke; as well as a new railway line west from Oxford to Eynsham, Witney, and Carterton. All of these schemes make sense, and Oxfordshire County Council is backing them all. But central government, and particularly Treasury, remains largely hostile to large-scale investment in new railways and stations, and it does not seem likely that this will change. Completion of the now-delayed upgrade of Oxford station capacity (the cause of the highly disruptive and prolonged Botley Road closure to traffic) will be necessary for most service enhancements. 

Even where decent public transport options exist – for example, between Didcot and Oxford, or serving Milton Park from a range of directions – many people still choose their car. More research is needed on understanding why. Far more is needed to make public transport feel less intimidating, including personalised travel planning, where both automated websites and human beings can look at people’s travel patterns on request, highlight the alternatives, and encourage them to give them a try. 

Whether bus or rail, the key to creating an offer that is attractive to car users is as much convenience and ease of use as possible. This means:

• designing train and bus timetables around reliable and convenient connections;
• creating cycle parking hubs and good local routes to enable villages and suburbs to access bus and rail routes (it is, alas, not possible to serve everywhere with a high-frequency bus service);
• better integration of ticketing between bus and rail.

The latter point is particularly important, since people want to go from A to B. They do not want to have to worry about where to buy tickets along the way or in advance, or whether ticket A is valid on operator B. For customer convenience, one ticket bought via one transaction, or pay-as-you-go, is where we need to get to. Whilst harder to achieve with the wide and varied geography of Oxfordshire, London-style integrated ticketing schemes are emerging in city regions like Greater Manchester, so the potential is there. There is some emerging good practice, for example the MyBus Oxfordshire ticket covering most operators and routes. 

Beyond Oxfordshire

Whilst most travel is local, Oxfordshire lies between Greater London and the West Midlands, two of the largest economic areas of the country. Transport beyond the county’s borders is increasingly important, for leisure, business, and employment reasons. 

London remains a major destination. There have been rail service improvements in the last 10 years, with faster Great Western Railway trains to Paddington, and the opening of a second route to Marylebone via High Wycombe. 

However, both routes remain partially or entirely non-electrified, and the Chiltern service has been eroded since the pandemic, with more station calls and consequent longer journey times (today, at least 1 hour 20 minutes in the off-peak, compared to just over an hour before the pandemic). 

Oxford and Cambridge are often compared to each other. Whilst they do have differences, particularly in population, they can provide useful benchmarks for each other. When it comes to the rail service, Cambridge wins, and this may go some way to explaining why Oxford has such a strong coach offer to London in comparison. Certainly there is room for improvement: we need longer and more frequent trains, and full electrification of both the Oxford-Paddington and Oxford-Marylebone routes.

Turning to north-south transport, the rail offer is clearly inferior compared to road. With CrossCountry continuing to provide a derisory 1 train per hour north to Birmingham, this is very unfavourable in relation to the A34 and M40.

The A34 sees worryingly frequent accidents, and congestion causes endless frustration. Whilst much of this traffic is for local journeys, restoration of the pre-pandemic timetable of 2 trains per hour between Oxford and the West Midlands would help provide a usable alternative. A major upgrade to the A34 would be very expensive, and locally unpopular in places. 

The east-west picture is worse still. Road connections are not very fast, and there is no direct rail service at all, requiring expensive journeys via London. Whilst the Oxford-Cambridge express road has been cancelled, East West Rail gives hope of a fairly fast and frequent connection between Oxford, Bicester, Bletchley/Milton Keynes, Bedford, and Cambridge.

However, East West Rail’s plans for the railway east of Bletchley continue to be in a poor state, with the organisation consulting today on exactly the same things it was 5 years ago – particularly on which route to choose for a new section of railway between Bedford and Cambridge, but also how to resolve the impact of increased level crossing barrier closure periods on Bicester’s London Road. It is also inexplicably recommending so-called “discontinuous electrification” for its trains, which is a combination of sections of overhead wires and battery trains. Whilst battery trains are used for some lightly-used lines in some countries, no one in the world is using them for a 100mph high-frequency railway. East West Rail claims the technology is “proven” and will be cheaper than full electrification, but to say there are unanswered questions about this is to put things mildly. I will continue to ask those questions. East West Rail has also been less than clear on its commitment to realising the route’s potential for freight. 

Looking west, GWR have recently started a trial of a limited Saturdays-only Oxford to Bristol service. Building this up to eventually being hourly will provide a good alternative to the A420 to Swindon, and to changing trains at Didcot for journeys on this route.

Both Heathrow and Gatwick are within reach of Oxfordshire by both road and rail. GWR are to be commended for the recent introduction of a half-hourly service between Reading and Gatwick Airport, although it is not a fast route. Heathrow requires either a fairly expensive journey via central London; two changes at Reading and Hayes and Harlington; or use of a Rail-Air coach from Reading. All of these are inferior to the long-proposed, and sometimes government-supported, Heathrow Western Rail Link scheme, which would see the airport served by direct trains from Slough, Reading and potentially beyond. Despite the government’s newly-found enthusiasm for a third runway at Heathrow, it has not given support to a western rail link, and Heathrow continues to be very poorly served by rail compared to European equivalents. Until it happens, driving or slower coach services will continue to be more appealing to many.

What should the future hold? 

There is a great deal about transport in Oxfordshire that frustrates residents of and indeed visitors to our county, even if some aspects which have improved over the last decade or two. 

These are the key things I think need to change in the coming years to get us to a better place:

1. For local transport, more walking and cycling are the best ways to reduce traffic congestion, and free up road space for those who need to drive, supplemented by local and potentially “demand responsive” bus services. 
2. For longer journeys within the county, whilst new rail schemes have their place, the key is improving bus services, to a point where more people have confidence in their journey times and reliability. It is unlikely that the current approach of private sector bus companies prioritising the most lucrative routes and council subsidy of others will deliver the step change we need. Instead, more county-wide centralised coordination of service specifications, and the powers to either tender contracts or run public sector-delivered bus services, is needed. 
3. Travel links beyond the county need to improve. East West Rail, if and when delivered, will provide a solution towards the east. Restoring the Reading-Oxford-Birmingham service to at least pre-pandemic levels will help make the north-south public transport more credible. Electrification towards London and a Heathrow western rail link scheme will bring Oxford more in line with Cambridge when it comes to links with the capital and the nearest airport. 

I will continue to campaign for these both within Oxfordshire and in Parliament, and to scrutinise government and policy decisions in my role on the Transport Select Committee. The challenges are great: congestion, climate change, lower amounts of driving amongst the young, and an ageing population. But together, public transport, walking, and cycling can create a happier Oxfordshire transport system. 

This is part of the Oxford Clarion’s Infrastructure Week series. Read our introduction to the series – and why it matters.