Cycled to the Phoenix cinema in Jericho the other evening to watch The Arctic Monkeys at the Apollo.

It was good: it went straight into a tight set heavy on punky riffs and light on repartee. I nearly didn’t make it though. I was on the "pub bike", the kind of bike that you can leave parked outside a pub and not ruin your evening with peeking through the curtains to see if someone is trying to nick it. I’d almost be glad if someone would nick it, it's so leaden and ugly.

I headed for the cycle stand just outside the doctor’s surgery on the corner of Cranham Street. As I approached, four students on bikes stopped at the end of Observatory Street and hovered, scanning Walton Street.

They spotted the stand, then me, and made a beeline for the racks. I tried to step on it, but on my jalopy it was impossible — I watched them lock their bikes to the last four unoccupied hoops.

The next nearest cycle stands, outside Freud, are a few hundred metres away. Damn the pub bike — but damn Oxford’s lack of cycle parking even more.

Given the amount of shops, bars and restaurants in Jericho, you’d expect ample places to park a bike. The same goes for Cowley Road, and even more so in the city centre.

With 20,000 cyclists visiting daily, why aren’t there covered cycle racks for thousands of bikes? It's disgraceful that the Town Hall, has no more than a dozen rings along its wall. And you’d quite reasonably expect to park your bike outside the central post office while you pop in. But in Oxford? Forget it.

Too many 'dead' bikes lie abandoned in racks, but even if these were removed, demand would massively outstrip supply. We need massive, secure, underground bicycle parks as cornerstones of the proposed developments at St Aldate's, the Westgate and West End.

There are precedents: in Cambridge, there is a new shopping centre with John Lewis as its flagship tenant. In the basement, there is a 500-capacity bicycle park along with a bike shop that hires and repairs bicycles. We need one. Or more.

In the meantime, I can’t wait for Transform Oxford to remove buses from central Oxford — but the 'pedestrianisation' must help, not hinder, people cycling quietly through the centre. The daytime closure to bikes of Queen Street blocks direct east–west access across the city centre. Fiddling through Turl and George Streets adds considerable time and obstacles.

A bus-free Queen Street could become a 'shared space' in which pedestrians and cyclists share motor-free thoroughfares. Intelligent designs can eliminate pedestrian–cyclist conflict, leaving the city’s cheapest and greenest modes of transport to co-exist in peace. This is exactly what happens in Cambridge’s pedestrianised centre.

It’s fantastic that a pedestrian-friendly vision for Oxford is emerging. Transform Oxford and retail developers must not forget the 20,000+ cyclists for which Oxford is famous.