RESIDENTS’ parking zones in parts of East Oxford will not come into force until next year at the earliest, the Oxford Mail can reveal.

Oxfordshire County Council is currently analysing responses to a consultation on controversial proposals to introduce a controlled parking zone in the Magdalen Road and Divinity Road area.

Ian Hudspeth, the council’s cabinet member for growth and infrastructure, said a final decision would be made at a meeting of the transport decisions committee in April.

He said: “It has been quite a varied and mixed consultation.

“There’s still a lot of concern from people about the pavement parking but of course the one thing a proposal would do is regularise the existing pavement parking.

“There has been quite a cross-section of responses to it and it doesn’t appear there’s a consensus one way or another.”

Consultation over the proposals has been going on for more than two years in various forms.

Different campaigns have been going on in the area, with groups on both sides of the debate.

The council had approved a CPZ for the Magdalen Road area in October but began a fresh round of consultation in November after the Iffley Fields area was excluded from the scheme.

At one stage, residents blocked Mr Hudspeth in at his Bladon home early one morning to emphasise their opposition to the scheme.

If Mr Hudspeth and fellow committee member Rodney Rose endorse the scheme in April, he said the new zone would be marked out towards the end of the year, with the restrictions coming into force from spring 2011.

He said: “We have had a very good response rate to the consultation and there have been dramatic changes from the starting point to what we have got now.

“I think the consultation process shows we have listened, we have engaged with a lot of people and even when they came to my house, we were still discussing it.

“Everyone understands there’s a parking problem and that something needs to be done.

“It’s just how to go about it and now that we’ve talked through the proposal and listened to the concerns, at some stage a decision has to be taken either to go ahead with the best possible solution or actually to say it’s not practical.”

Kate Raworth, who lives in St Mary’s Road and has campaigned in favour of the zone, said she continued to experience parking problems.

She said: “If amendments are needed to make sure it works for the very different communities in the area, that makes sense, but the main principle is for something to be done to deal with the problem.

“If it’s going to take another year, perhaps it will give other people time to start figuring out how they will be able to manage.”