I have been doing some work in Oxford, and on a recent visit, I had the chance to look at some historic traffic calming in East Oxford which has sent me down some research rabbit holes.

If "East Oxford" rings a bell, it could be the East Oxford Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs) project which has been the subject of some controversy. I say controversy as a shorthand really, because I think much of the framing is dishonest, but I have written about that before.

LTNs are a key tool in our box for delivering a Safe System (call it Sustainable Safety, Vision Zero or whatever) and they are decades old and nothing new. What was interesting about East Oxford is that it had all been tried before, but to learn more we need to jump into our DeLorean and head back to 1985.

In East Oxford in the early 1980’s, there was a movement to deal with rat-running on the side streets in the area, which got as far as an experimental project being developed and deployed at the start of 1985 in the Divinity Road area.

I have tried to search online for the traffic order without success and so I am going on the account from a website dedicated against LTNs in East Oxford, which is as you’d expect. There are also Oxford Mail stories from 2020 and 2021 which mentions it, but I guess history is recorded by the "victors".

The arguments of the 1980s are identical to those we hear in the 2020s. They are rooted in the evolution and intertwining of highway law and public perception that driving (and parking) should be unrestricted, unless that basic premise is modified nationally (e.g. national speed limits) or locally with a traffic regulation order. This means we are having to expend significant resources to change the status quo which itself is often supported by powerful and/ or noisy voices.

Indeed, the anti-LTN account I link to above ticks off the boxes of someone who thinks they should have a bigger say because they have lived somewhere a long time, (driving) locals predicting chaos with no patience, and various attributions presented as facts rather than the opinions that they are. Fine. Whatever.

In the event, the experiment simply wasn’t allowed to to run properly and objectively and it all collapsed. As a compromise, traffic calming interventions were proposed and this echoes the contemporary anti-LTN position with vague platitudes that things should work for all road users, as cover for side streets taking pressure off main roads.

The problem is of course, that physics and bio mechanics do not operate on an equal level and the most vulnerable need the most protection. On residential streets, this has to be speed and volume reduction to a point where those walking, wheeling and cycling are not put at significant risk by high driver speeds and traffic volumes.

For East Oxford, the failure to get the LTN to stick didn’t tackle the rat-running in the area, but it did lead to the fall back position of traffic calming which is a good addition to the case study because we know that it didn’t solve the problems in the long term, gives the more recent introduction of the LTNs in the area more gravity; it’s a live case study of the decades.

For the Divinity Road area in particular, Danny Yee talks about how the traffic calming added after the abandoned experiment failed to deal with traffic flow, which isn’t a surprise. He was also my guide around the city and we did pass through lots of East Oxford and some of the traffic calming I saw caught my eye.

The photograph above is Howard Street which is one-way for the most part and has a series of chicanes with alternating car parking and raised junctions.

The one-way working was not part of this scheme. This happened in 1972 when the street was made one-way between Cricket Road and Iffley Road. I can’t find out why this was the case, but I wonder if this was an early reaction to traffic flow in the area being impacted by car ownership and this narrow section of street not working for two-way flows.

The parallel (and also narrow) Magdalen Road is even more interesting. In 1964, it was made one-way but in the other direction between Iffley Road and St Mary’s Road. This was extended in 1972 to continue the one-way working as far as Ridgefield Road. Taken with the 1972 order for Howard Street, this reinforces my view that this was about (motor) traffic flow through the residential streets acting as part of the main road network.

The traffic calming came in late 1989 as part of an experimental scheme which covered both Howard Street and Magdalen Road, both of which connect Iffley Road to Cowley Road, a pair of arterial routes into the city centre. The traffic notice actually gives us the "why" which is great to find:

"At present both roads suffer from large volumes of traffic which use them as short cuts. A lot of the traffic travels at speed. The Council proposes to alter the appearance of the roads by providing tree and shrub planting in planting boxes at either end of areas of parking. The areas of parking will also be protected by kerbing, bollards or similar installations. The present parking arrangements will themselves be altered so that parking is staggered along the roads. The roads will become less obviously straight and should reduce vehicle speeds."

The measures stuck and were made permanent in mid-1991 which came with various adjustments, although the traffic order doesn’t tell us more more than that.

The photograph above is in Magdalen Road at the junction with Hurst Street showing one of the junction speed tables, and the chicanes created with parking bays. Remember, that this was one-way (in the direction the person is cycling) when the traffic calming was built; in fact the area of stone cobbles on the left used to have a bell-bollard and a tree which physically created part of a chicane.

The photograph above shows a ramp to one of the raised tables. This is interesting as we have a set of precast concrete ramps which are very much like the Dutch "intritbanden" units (entrance kerbs). They are far steeper than we tend to see these days in terms of speed table gradient, but they are compatible with the current road hump regulations. The anti-LTN piece I linked to earlier describes these humps as "vicious (and now illegal)" which again shows it is impossible to find a solution that actually has an impact that these people will support.

The latest East Oxford LTN project removed the one-way working on Magdalen Road and a short section of Howard Street, as well as adding two-way cycling to the remaining section of one-way working. The project encompasses a larger area than I have researched, but when trawling through the Gazette, I did see lots of other roads popping up with various bits of traffic management and parking control schemes over the decades.

I’ve only scratched the surface of East Oxford here, but it’s an interesting arc of the best part of 60 years of motorisation with the ebb and flow of how we’ve tried to both accommodate increasing levels of traffic, the backlash this created and then the backlash that trying to deal with the problems also creates. It also shows us that schemes sticking is almost random, but that the arguments are always the same.

In design terms, I actually liked the speed tables and chicanes created with the planters, although things aren’t perfect because there aren’t flush kerbs to cross the roads at the junctions, let alone the tactile paving that would go with them. This really is something that should be sorted out as part of the LTN scheme.

They do, however, give some local identity and work to show people that different behaviour is expected. This is lost on those wanting to blast through and so it has taken the new LTNs to complete the puzzle. It’s a shame that many modern LTN schemes don’t come with street enhancements like this.

There are lots of these interesting stories, experiments and ideas out there, but we rarely hear about their planning and engineering away from the confrontation and controversy which is often fuelled by the media. For example, the filter on Howard Street shown in the photograph above has been described the (far) right wing press as the UK’s most hated bollard and even the BBC can’t cover the story without giving air-time to conspiracy cranks.

This makes sharing knowledge and learning more difficult. The UK has got itself into a position where we won’t admit our streets not working properly as it immediately opens a crack for the status quo folks to exploit. It also means that the technical side of things has to attain perfection, whereas those against change are never held to the same standards. This all makes things risk adverse politically and professionally which keeps things the same.