Frideswide Square is currently a traffic-filled horror. The layout tries to cope with being the busiest traffic junction in Oxford, giving buses and cycles some protection and priority, and being the access to the railway station.

The County Council wants to improve the square, under its Transform Oxford programme, which aims to improve the pedestrian experience in the city centre, moving the buses out of the way where necessary. It’s also part of the County’s Access to Oxford project, which seeks to make substantial improvements for journeys into Oxford, in this case by improving pedestrian/cycle/bus access to the station.

The County are understood to be considering a two-roundabout solution, adapting a “shared-space” design from Drachten in the Netherlands (report; web-review). It would have to be heavily adapted, because the Drachten design relies on bicycles having legal priority over the traffic (which we can’t do in the UK). We’d probably keep the bicycles on the road, like a half-sized version of The Plain.

The two roundabouts would probably be at the end of Park End Street and outside the station entrance. Becket Street would probably have two-way traffic, so that neither roundabout got over-loaded. There would probably be zebra crossings for pedestrians.

Roundabouts are good at handling large volumes of traffic, but don’t work well when traffic queues back onto the roundabout. Roundabouts aren’t very comfortable for cyclists (most cyclists prefer traffic lights). If the roundabouts are small, pedestrians would probably be able to cut across the square reasonably well, but some pedestrians prefer to have light-controlled crossings. Small roundabouts are uncomfortable for buses. And roundabouts don’t give any priority to buses and cycles.

So as an alternative, we’ve looked at what would happen if Becket Street took all of the traffic, rather than just part of it. Traffic would cross the square on both sides, but there would be no East-West traffic on the square, and no major traffic junction. This has a number of advantages – see the presentation for more details. At the moment, this is just a high-level idea that we’ve shared with the County Council: a lot of details need to be thought through. As with any proposal, there are inevitably some downsides, and further work needs to be done to minimise them. But overall, we think it’s a pretty good option for the County to look at.