They finally did it, they finally pedestrianised Oxford Street.
Not all of it, just the middle half from Selfridges to Great Portland Street, but wow, the Mayor finally pushed it through.
The big change happened at 8pm on Sunday evening as the last buses barrelled through, barriers emerged and traffic ceased. Ian Visits was there for a final ride, Darryl was watching when the road was sealed off and London Centric took photos all through the night as transformation continued apace. You should be able to access at least one of those.
I waited until Monday morning for a good look around, also to enjoy the new sense of freedom, also to ride on some buses. Unfortunately it was raining throughout, bringing a less than celebratory vibe to all the intended publicity and good feeling. But hundreds of people had come out for a look, hundreds more were here to go shopping anyway and hundreds more were discovering how their journeys would now have to change.
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First things first, this is very much work in progress. The Mayor can't introduce everything overnight, particularly when a lot of it needs to be painted, unpainted or bolted in. The intention is to watch how things develop over the next few months before a more permanent settled state is reached in a year's time. But they were able to add temporary bollards, hang additional signs and remove unwanted bus stops, so they did, also coned off sidestreets, covered over defunct traffic lights and stuck down a whopping green carpet with photo opportunities in mind. A queue of people were waiting to stand in the sweet spot to grab either a selfie or a longshot, and had it been drier I might not have had the patience to wait for mine.
Monday morning's main work task seemed to be to replace the plastic barriers laid out hastily overnight. Several fluorescent-jacketed crews were out installing what looked like giant green shark's teeth, each carefully branded with the Oxford Street logo. These all have to be spaced out carefully so cars and motorbikes can't get through but pedestrians and wheelchairs can, not just to deter ordinary traffic but also as hostile vehicle mitigation. Every entrance to the newly pedestrianised space is getting toothed, bollarded or combed, the net effect of which is that it's not quite so appealing an accessible space as it would otherwise have been.
One casualty is the famous X-shaped crossing at Oxford Circus. Formerly you could cross in all directions, but now there's no need so it's morphed into a single east-west rush. The classic X was introduced in November 2009 so lasted 17 years, if you were planning to write its obituary. I whipped out my stopwatch because I wondered if they'd changed the phasing but no, the Oxford Circus lights still cycle every 1 minute 35 seconds. What's more pedestrians still get exactly the same amount of time to cross with the countdown timer ticking down from '20'. The big beneficiaries here are thus northbound and southbound traffic who are now getting much longer to flow through the junction, and maybe that'll change after all the defunct signals have been removed but for now it's no victory for the pedestrian.
There are four other places where traffic cuts across the pedestrianised stripe - at Duke Street, Davies Street, New Bond Street and Holles Street. This is fewer crossings than before but still an intrusion, not least because they too are growing teeth. And inbetween, where traffic has been evacuated, were pedestrians yet walking in the street? Not yet, most of them were still happily walking on the pavement, but expect that to change as familiarity grows and further changes take place.
I think what most stood out was suddenly seeing signs at each end of the street saying PEDESTRIAN ZONE with a red 'No vehicles' sign underneath. We don't see these empty red circles very often and I wonder how many people know precisely what they mean. I checked the Highway Code and the official meaning is "No vehicles except pedal cycles being pushed by hand" so yes, you are supposed to get off your bike and walk. Obviously some cyclists won't and yesterday a few didn't, although a heavy official presence meant they didn't get very far before being approached.
I saw a lot of moaning online yesterday about bloody cyclists terrorising pedestrians on Oxford Street, almost all of it suppositional or based on a single example, drawing angry conclusions as blinkered grousers are prone to do. The reality, if you can be arsed to climb off your angry soapbox, is that it's barely an issue at all, as you'd know if you'd actually been there rather than amplifying hate from a distance.
Another overnight change was that all the Legible London vertical pillars had been covered over with new maps. They'd used thick board rather than stickers because it's more durable, but also much cheaper than ripping everything out and making new ones. The typeface used isn't the usual TfL one, it's the one branding company Koto have devised for everything to do with the updated Oxford Street and still feels unfamiliar. The pillars also include a local bus map, but alas that's a total TfL balls-up as I'll explain later, indeed it's probably time to start talking about some of the bus changes.
Four bus stops down Oxford Street will never see another bus, and all their flags were swiftly removed overnight. The remaining shelters join at least half a dozen others left over from previous bus stop rationalisations, all merrily scrolling electronic adverts and making TfL a nice wodge of cash. According to planning notices attached to lampposts, the intention is to retain the "internally illuminated sequential advertisement display capable of displaying static and dynamic content with automatic rotation of images" when a shelter is removed.
Also if you check government tenders you'll see the Mayor intends to introduce a heck of a lot more adverts going forward, all under the umbrella of 'Oxford Street Opportunity Advertising'. This is "expected to form a significant revenue stream within the Oxford Street pedestrianisation programme. To maximise both the commercial returns and the placemaking outcomes, the advertising opportunity will be considered as an integral component of the urban realm design rather than a subsequent overlay." They may be taking away the traffic but they intend to add a lot more commercial distraction, alas.
Four new bus stops have been added, all virgin and new, but 200m further north on Wigmore Street and Henrietta Place. They don't all have shelters, which on a day like yesterday was a serious mis-step. They also don't all have timetables, but it's a start. The really important thing is how to find the new bus stops if you've been shopping on Oxford Street, given there are umpteen sideroads you might choose to walk up. To solve this TfL have done one excellent thing which is to create big red boards with arrows and attach them to street furniture along the road. You have to know which bus you want but they are accurate and they do work... which is more than can be said for the maps.
On Day 1 each defunct bus stop had a pink-jacketed ambassador ready with advice and also a pad of tear-off colour maps to dish out. Giving out paper maps on a day it's pissing down with rain isn't exactly ideal, but you can't plan for that. One side of the sheet has a local street map, perfectly decent, but with no bus stops marked. The other side is called "Where to catch your bus" and has all the local bus stops, all 21 of them, even though several of them are irrelevant. The route list underneath only includes buses that used to travel down the pedestrianised section, not 20 other routes you might want to catch which stop nearby. But the utterly incompetent thing is that the list of bus stops
is missing all the new stops and only mentions the old.
According to the map route 139 to Golders Green only stops at stop RC on Regent Street, whereas it also now stops at RE, HB. and WB. According to the map route 390 to Victoria only stops at O and OP either side of the interruption, whereas it also now stops at BA, WA and CA. In total five routes have three of their stops missing, so if you used the map and believed it you could end up walking half a mile out of your way rather than heading to a stop just round the corner. It's a balls-up anyone competent could have spotted if they'd proofread the map properly. Instead it's been printed out thousands of times as a handout, also slapped up on Legible London signs everywhere, also it's been on the BBC news website for a week so presumably nobody noticed there either.
As for the newly diverted bus routes, TfL's Commissioner went on the lunchtime news yesterday and assured Londoners there'd be "no material change to journey time". I've given it a try and I beg to differ. I made eight journeys a couple of weeks ago to establish a baseline, you may remember, and decided it took 7-8 minutes to travel down Oxford Street. Yesterday I went out again, between the same endpoints, and rode the 98 west and the 390 east.
| 98 | west | M&S → Marble Arch | THEN | 10m 10s | (8 red lights) |
| 98 | west | M&S → Marble Arch | NOW | 14m 10s | (10 red lights) |
| 390 | east | Marble Arch → M&S | THEN | 7m 40s | (5 red lights) |
| 390 | east | Marble Arch → M&S | NOW | 21m 00s | (18 red lights!) |
The 98 took four minutes longer, or seven minutes longer if you compare it to the previous average. The 98 saved time by not having to go through the Oxford Circus junction, but wasted far more time while deviating north round Henrietta Place and Wigmore Street. And that was the quicker journey.
The 390 was a nightmare trip taking 14 minutes more than previously, or if you prefer THREE TIMES LONGER. We reached Wigmore Street fairly quickly then progressed very slowly east in a jam that couldn't quite get through the next set of traffic lights before they changed, These signals have a lengthy cycle so each delay really added up, especially those that took two attempts to pass through and one that took three. Great Portland Street was a particular pinchpoint, a most frustrating finale trying to turn the corner back into Oxford Street. And I was only going a few stops, so imagine the crushing effect on anyone trying to ride route 390 from Victoria to Euston, because in central London taking the bus can be a disastrous choice.
It could just have been a day 1 snarl-up, alternatively this was the start of half term so traffic was likely lighter than usual. You can't draw too many conclusions from only two journeys so I will come back in November and do this properly, several times, once things have bedded in. At present though, all the signs are that "no material change to journey time" is bolx.
For the vast majority of pedestrians and shoppers though, come on, this is great. Sorry to the taxis and sorry to those with accessibility needs and sorry to all the bus passengers who've just been sent all around the houses, but one day we'll wonder why it took so long to turn the nation's shopping street into somewhere you can simply walk along.
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