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Warneford Park development to add 500+ car trips into Headington, bringing more pollution, congestion and road danger

HLS

• 2 min read
Warneford Park development to add 500+ car trips into Headington, bringing more pollution, congestion and road danger
Cars queuing on Old Road

Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust and University of Oxford are jointly planning a major redevelopment of Warneford Park as detailed on the Warneford Park Consultation website, which will result in a significant increase in the number of staff, students and patients travelling to the site.

The plans include increasing the number of car parking spaces by around 50% from the current 360 spaces to 546, which is likely to result in over 500 additional car trips per day passing through the Warneford Lane/Gipsy Lane/Old Road/Roosevelt Drive junction (the "WGOR junction"), significantly increasing the volume of traffic in Headington.

This increase in car trips will:

  • Increase congestion across Headington and East Oxford, damaging already stressed bus services not just around the Warneford Park site but more broadly.
  • Increase noise pollution, air pollution and road danger across Headington and East Oxford, with the worst effects directly outside Cheney School and along pupils’ routes to school.
  • Make already unsafe cycling routes such as Gipsy Lane, Old Rd, Roosevelt Drive and Morrell Avenue even more dangerous and deter some people from cycling at all.
  • Make it impossible to rebuild the WGOR junction and other Headington junctions in a way that provides safety and priority for pedestrians, wheelers, cyclists and children (e.g. as illustrated in this visualisation), because this is only possible if we reduce traffic volumes from what they are now, as explained in our Re-imagining Headington's roads and junctions website post.

Note the additional parking is for the University’s new research facility (221 spaces), meaning parking for staff of Oxford University and the private sector biotech and start-up companies to whom the University intends to lease research space. The Transport Assessment states "the financial model of the entire scheme depends on the commercial tenants being part of the site’s make-up", so it seems the additional parking is mainly to make the research space a more attractive commercial proposition to lure potential private sector tenants. This isn't about parking for hospital patients and staff.

Headington has already suffered an increase in traffic harms thanks to the University of Oxford building a 417-space multi-storey car park on its Old Road Campus, for which planning permission was granted despite much local opposition. Now it seems intent on inflicting further harm in the same way, and we are concerned that Oxford City Council (as the Planning Authority) will assist the University in this anti-social endeavour by granting permission for the parking increase, not learning from its past mistakes in allowing the Old Road Campus and Westgate car parks to be built.

The developers have recently submitted a planning permission application for this application. The consultation ends on 29 September. Join us in opposing these plans by:

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