Sir – We have petitioned Oxfordshire County Council regarding The Plain roundabout project. This is funded mostly with DfT’s ‘Cycle City Ambition Grant’.

This £965,000 scheme is ‘a waste of money’. It will not be a key link in an “exemplary, complete cycle network for Oxford that everyone knows about and is confident to use” (county’s application, p5).

We petitioned the council: ‘to reconsider, urgently, the current design for The Plain and the design approach. Instead, to provide ‘Space for Cycling’ with:

  • A maximum amount of segregated provision for people cycling; and
  • To positively engineer the difficult transition on to the central cycle lane
  • To make changes to the circulating carriageway to support the presence of people cycling.

All our proposals come at little or no cost and without taking space from other vehicles.

The 2013 (original) application had:

  • Tightened entries, with cycle lanes
  • Narrowed circulating carriageway, shared with vehicles
  • The whole area ‘raised to footway level’
  • Whole area conceived to read as ‘one surface’
  • All footways repaved with York stone.

By March 2014, the cabinet was presented with an entirely different scheme:

  • Widening to two-lane entry from Magdalen Bridge
  • Removing items (1-3)! The latter now having ‘flush crossovers’ only
  • Numerous detailed objections, which were smoothed away.

By mid-June 2014, a new ‘unpublished’ design reveals that (No4) is also removed: it’s too difficult to colour the circular roadway like ‘Queen Street’!

With four out of five possibly pro-cycling elements removed, only the costly stone-footway is left. The county’s concept is destroyed. Even the narrowest part of that footway has been reduced by 18 per cent.

This wasteful, mostly irrelevant design, must be revisited, urgently.

Graham Paul Smith, National Councillor, CTC (Cyclists Touring Club), with the petitioners below:

J Dawton, F Hedges, D Levy, R Hitchins, L Batty, L Cridland-Smith, I Leggett, S Watkinson, P Thompson, J Bachus, R Tucker J Styring, T Turton, S Pressel (Cllr), C Fry H Rutter, H Tomkinson