On the afternoon Oxford Street went traffic-free, Cllr Tim Barnes, Deputy Leader of Westminster City Council, told Sky News that the Mayor's scheme takes "the only great east-west road that we have in central London" out of use and pushes the buses, taxis and deliveries into streets "which were never really able to take something like a bus or something like a delivery truck".
A £120 million plan was already on the table
Asked whether pedestrianisation was the way to give Oxford Street the attention it needed, Tim said: "The idea that this was the only scheme on the table is one of the fallacies on which some of the Mayor's comments have been based." Even before the Mayor's announcement there was a £120 million revitalisation plan backed by the Conservatives, the Labour Party, local residents and businesses, who were going to chip in about £60 million of it. "The Mayor's £150 million scheme is all coming from the taxpayer. So this is a much more costly scheme that doesn't have the breadth of approval or the breadth of support from the people who know the street best that the previous scheme had."
Put to him that the New West End Company says 86% of its members back pedestrianisation in principle, Tim said: "If you were running a business on the street and you had previously been asked to contribute £60 million, and then somebody turned up and said, well, we'll pay for the whole thing, you'd probably have been quite enthusiastic about it as well."
The heart of a much bigger business area
Everybody who comes to Oxford Street to see the shops thinks that is what the street is all about, Tim said, "but Oxford Street is really the heart of a much bigger business area. The shops on the street are only one part of that." More floor space is given over to service businesses and offices than to retail. The buses, the taxis, the service vehicles and "the plumbers that are needed when there's a leak in a shop" are all necessary traffic, and private cars were banned a decade ago. "So all of that traffic is still going to have to go somewhere, and it's being pushed onto much smaller side roads, 100 metres or so away from the street itself. And that will be a case of large vehicles on streets that are really too small to accommodate them."
The council will do the monitoring the Mayor's team won't
"Interestingly enough, to perhaps suit his own purposes, the Mayor's team are not really continuing with any of the serious monitoring that they had promised in the run-up to this." The council will keep looking at pollution, noise and traffic levels and at the economic impact on the street and on the streets around it. "We care about the district as a whole, not just the street that people might see. And we think that the risks, if we don't get this right, could really outweigh the gains."
"Nobody has ever said that Oxford Street didn't need some form of investment. That's why we'd previously put forward the plans for all of that investment and loving care and attention that was needed before. But what we did want was a plan that worked for the district as a whole and for central London as a whole, and not just for one row of shops and one street."
Six weeks of summer
Asked whether the street could become London's Las Ramblas, with street theatre and people sitting out in the summer, Tim said: "Not surprisingly, all of the Mayor's computer-generated images of what the street's going to look like take place on really nice summer days with long summer evenings. And that works for about six weeks of the year." Those long evenings are not about the weather, he added. "There are some things that even the Mayor and his outsized ego can't change, and one of them's the orbit of the earth."
The scheme will be a good idea for some people and for some things, Tim said. "We've never said it wouldn't be. We're trying to work out what's the best for everybody that's involved."
The lesson of Barcelona
The comparison with Barcelona was an apt one, Tim said, but not for the reason the presenter had in mind. The lesson of Barcelona and of the great pedestrianised schemes across Europe "is that they take those stretches of really good connectivity, where buses and trains and metros and all sorts of other things go, and they keep those open so that people can get about, and then they pedestrianise the little pockets around them."
"The Mayor has done completely the opposite. He's taken the only great east-west road that we have in central London, pedestrianised that, and forced the traffic through the small streets of Mayfair, Soho, Marylebone and Fitzrovia, which were never really able to take something like a bus or something like a delivery truck. And it really will push up some of the noise, some of the traffic congestion that we've expected."
Longer bus journeys, fewer buses
TfL's own plans suggest that every bus route serving the street will be longer by an average of about 8 to 10 minutes, "and that's the optimistic view". Frequencies have been cut by about 25% across most of those routes "because there isn't room for all the buses that there were before". Many people will find it harder to get to Oxford Street as a result, "particularly those with mobility problems and those in wheelchairs, who really, without the buses, aren't left with any solution on how to get to the east end of the pedestrianised zone."
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