7/10 for Oxfordshire
Earlier this year, Oxfordshire County Council started work on a major upgrade to the A40 between Oxford and Witney.
Between Oxford and Eynsham, the existing two lane single carriageway is being widened to a four lane carriageway; with the two new lanes dedicated as bus lanes. The inbound bus lane will extend across the ring road into Oxford itself, with junction improvements to prioritise buses and dedicated cycle lanes. Excellent: 10 out of 10!
But between Eynsham and Witney, the existing single carriageway is being widened to a new dual carriageway; with all four lanes dedicated to cars:
This is such a missed opportunity!
While the more congested section on the approach to Oxford will have bus lanes, it is somewhat surprising that the section seven miles out will not.
Drivers will find it infuriating. To a motorist, they’ve built a new car lane from Witney to Eynsham, only for it to disappear just when it’s most needed? The big risk is that drivers get angry at the queues when the car lanes narrow from two to one and campaign to have the newly-built bus lanes converted to cars. You and I both know that this won’t help them (as these new lanes will rapidly fill up with cars displaced from the now slow buses) but it’ll be too late by then.
If the whole thing was built as 2 car lanes with 2 bus lanes the whole length, this risk would be avoided.
But it’s not just the risk that the bus lanes won’t survive that makes this a missed opportunity; it’s also a missed opportunity to test out the potential of creating a genuinely high-quality interurban bus corridor. With new bus lanes all the way from Witney to the ring road and then the bus lanes (plus whatever Oxfordshire comes up with for the Woodstock Road through its Bus Service Improvement Plan), Witney to Oxford could have been a fascinating experiment on whether buses can replicate (or exceed) the benefits of a new rail connection.
Witney is a town that has been campaigning for its rail connection to be restored for years, but it hasn’t happened. The local campaign group has submitted a bid to the Government’s “Restoring Your Railway” fund but there’s no certainty that will translate into feasibility funding, let alone a new rail line.
A rail service from Witney would have the potential for through trains through to London but a bus service can penetrate right through to central Oxford. The real reason why a rail service is preferred is that a rail service provides predictable journey times over a dedicated alignment. The road project is so nearly a fair experiment at creating the bus equivalent.
If a dedicated bus alignment were created, we could see if a 100% reliable bus service can provide the benefits of a rail connection but at a lower cost.
After all, the road project is costing £180 million. The campaign group estimate the cost of reopening the rail route to Carterton (which includes Witney) would cost between £168 million and £280 million, but that seems very optimistic based on the railway’s current cost base. A simple pro-rata of the cost of the adjacent East-West project would quantify a 14 mile reopening as costing £304 million, and East-West is simply upgrading an existing freight track. Witney involves a much more complex project for a railway that hasn’t existed since the 1960s.
I don’t want to sound too critical of Oxfordshire. This isn’t equivalent to the South Gloucestershire horror project. Oxfordshire deserves credit for a major road upgrade that is - largely - designed around buses and bikes. But, given how close they’ve got, it’s a real shame they haven’t got a bit further.
I don’t know if anyone from Oxfordshire reads Freewheeling but if they do, I would urge them - even now - to amend the plans for the dual carriageway between Eynsham and Witney so that the additional capacity being built is dedicated to buses not cars. That way, they can create a nationally significant transport experiment, and not just yet another road widening.
