How will fans travel to Oxford United's new stadium at The Triangle?

I read recently that in some of the literature that Oxford United have published in their bid for approval for the Triangle, they are intending to get 90% of their fans to travel by public transport, thereby boosting their ‘green’ credentials (ignoring for the moment that they will be concreting over green belt land).

90% of their average home attendance of 8,300 last season would be 7,470.

Let’s not be overly optimistic and say that just 50%, not 90%, of those 7,470 travel by bus meaning there will be 3,735 people using a bus.

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A average double decker bus holds 70 people, meaning 53 buses will be needed.

Using the Stagecoach Saturday timetable for the 2 and 2A which will go past the stadium, there are six buses per hour during the day, so that will take all the buses for nine hours, ignoring all local non-football users.

Assuming that not more than 10% will travel by train so around 750 people will use Chiltern Railways.

The average seating capacity for the type of carriage used is between 200 and 250, with 2-carriage trains commonly used.

On Saturdays, most of the trains from Marylebone are at least three quarters full during the day, leaving about 125 spare seats; in other words there will need to be six trains required. There are two trains per hour, meaning that for three hours there will be supporters filling up the spare seats.

These figures then come into play on the return journey and it is highly possible that for a mid-week evening game the timetables for both modes of transport are reduced late at night.

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The attendance, bus and train figures are taken from various websites and of course my usage figures are purely speculative but in the unlikely event there is more than 50% bus use and 10% train use then those figures make even worse reading.

OUFC may state that arrangements will be in place for extra transport on match days but it will have to be a lot to negate the detrimental impact to non-football users.

I expect someone pro-building will produce figures showing a totally different outcome and statistics can easily be manipulated but the purpose of my research, as light-touch as it is, is to show that this 90% figure is almost certainly unachievable and unrealistic, like much of the arguments being put forward for the Triangle site.

Steve Fisher 

Kidlington

The club says on its stadium website oufcstadium.co.uk: 

As a club, we ensure we review and measure our Scope 1,2 and 3 carbon emissions – meaning the direct, indirect and wider carbon emission impact – as part of our sustainability strategy, and this will help drive our aspiration to see 90% of travel to the stadium being by sustainable modes. We expect that the stadium could result in an initial 4,000 vehicles continuing to drive to a car park given existing cultures and behaviours. These car parks will be situated away from the stadium to ensure that visitors utilise the Park and Ride schemes around the city which already offer a network of over 6,000 spaces.

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About the author 

Andy is the Trade and Tourism reporter for the Oxford Mail and you can sign up to his newsletters for free here. 

He joined the team more than 20 years ago and he covers community news across Oxfordshire.

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