We should support Oxford's crackdown on motorists

Now that Morse has cracked his final case, Oxford’s streets will be freed from the annual disruption caused by successive Jaguars and their attendant film crews. But that’s of little comfort to residents facing a new source of gridlock – one, ironically, caused by those protesting efforts to reduce the city’s notorious congestion. Last month 2,000 eclectic protestors descended on the city centre to oppose, amongst other things, Low-Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs), 15-minute cities, and ‘climate lockdowns’.

As a former resident and council candidate, I’m much too familiar with Oxford’s traffic trouble. A medieval city spared the Luftwaffe-induced redevelopment of many other English urban areas, it has long debated, but done little to alleviate, the problem of ever-greater car numbers. Notorious plans to replace Christ Church Meadow with a motorway were fortunately seen off in the 1960s. The city eventually became the first in Britain to introduce a Park and Ride in 1973.