A 10-year plan to increase the number of cyclists in Oxford by 50 per cent will be put in place.

The Oxford Local Cycling and Walking Infrastructure Plan will aim to make both walking and cycling in the city easier for commuters and others.

But its most challenging target is to increase cycling up by half by 2031 from the current 300,000 trips a week to 450,000 cycle trips a week.

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Oxfordshire County Council’s cabinet approved plans including a ‘comprehensive’ network of cycle paths in the city, make speed limits on some roads slower so cyclists feel safer, and preventing pavement parking when it met on Tuesday.

The plan was welcomed by Simon Hunt of Cyclox, the Oxford cycling campaign, who called it a ‘clarion call’ for changing the way people travelled in the city.

thisisoxfordshire:

Simon Hunt of Cyclox.

The 10-year plan has an ‘eight-pillared’ approach to increasing the number of people cycling and walking in the city.

These eight parts of the plan are:

  • A comprehensive network of cycle routes focused on the city centre
  • Low Traffic Neighbourhoods Neighbourhood areas, where rat runs are blocked
  • Stopping cars from entering the city centre through Connecting Oxford plans
  • The workplace parking levy proposed in Connecting Oxford
  • Average speed cameras and 20mph Speed control on main roads
  • More controlled parking zones
  • Public realm improvements to spruce up city centre streets
  • Assessing routes to school for children

The new plan also provides a detailed timetable of how these measures can lead to an uptake of cycling by 2031.

While Oxford is the first town in the county to have a cycling and walking plan, similar schemes for Bicester and Didcot are currently being drawn up.

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A map of the planned cycle network. Orange routes are high traffic routes, dark blue routes are quiet off road routes, and light blue are connecting routes. Picture: Oxfordshire County Council.

The architect of the plan, council officer Patrick Ligwood, said: “It’s quite a challenging target to be honest.”

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He added it would have an affect on public health, housing growth, air quality and the climate emergency.

A report on the cycling plan said that while Oxford had seen high rates of cycling for 40 years, this had not altered in that time, and ‘wide transformative’ change was needed.