Cycling campaign group unveils dream of a low traffic West End

The London Cycling Campaign (LCC) has published a report calling for a low traffic area across the whole of the West End to create “people-friendly streets”, but fails to provide any real detail of how motor vehicles, including buses and taxis, will be re-routed.

“This report explores the transformative potential of a ‘traffic-lite’ West End — not just for reducing congestion, but for reimagining how Londoners and visitors experience its most iconic districts,” says cyclist and architectural writer Peter Murray, who introduces the 40 page document published this week.

LCC wants Mayor Sadiq Khan to “dare to dream” on enabling safer cycling across the West End.

Murray cites Jan Gehl whose approach to urban planning in Copenhagen “has reduced [motor] traffic while enhancing public spaces, prioritising pedestrian movement, and improving conditions for cycling and micromobility”.

Tom Fyans CEO of LCC says the aim of the report is to “make the case not only to support the Mayor’s Oxford Street proposals in the short term but for a far wider and bolder transformation of the entire area”.

The Mayor plans to ban cycles on Oxford Street, something the cycling advocacy group is surprisingly uncritical of in this report. It even urged its members to give a “resounding yes” to the plans during the recent public consultation.

In the report, LCC recognises the concerns of people living in Oxford Street’s hinterland like Marylebone, Fitzrovia and Soho, about displaced motor traffic.

Residents groups in Fitzrovia fear that the Mayor will just divert all the motor traffic along Mortimer Street and Goodge Street or other east-west streets in the neighbourhood.

LCC says it wants Westminster and Camden councils “to work with Transport for London to tackle this — not by maintaining vehicles on Oxford Street, but by applying a low traffic plan to the whole of the West End,” states the report.

LCC cites the Fitzrovia West Neighbourhood Plan which calls for a Barcelona-style “superblock” to remove through traffic from the area as an example of local appetite for this vision. However, Fitzrovia West’s plan advocates Oxford Street as one of the perimeter roads for a low traffic Fitzrovia.

Mark Philpotts, founder of City Infinity, says that a low traffic West End is eminently possible in his contribution to the report.

“Such a plan should consider appropriate streets for through traffic, but those which are necessary to serve this part of London rather than a free-for-all-for private cars. There needs to be thought about servicing and access for businesses, loading space and times, appropriate streets for buses, a dense cycling network and how disabled people can access the area by all transport modes,” he says.

LCC’s report illustrates several existing, small-scale “low-traffic schemes” in the West End as good examples — yet surprisingly none of the photos used shows a single person cycling.

Camden’s changes to Tottenham Court Road are put forward as a good example of a traffic reduction scheme. But the report incorrectly states that taxis are allowed within the restricted area and it fails to mention that the project has pushed motor traffic into residential side streets — the very opposite of a low traffic neighbourhood.

LCC’s report demonstrates that more space for cycling is possible citing recent examples of traffic schemes in Ghent and Paris where motor vehicles are restricted from residential streets and confined to outer perimeter roads. Paris’s low traffic zone is similar in size to London’s West End while Ghent’s, in Belgium, is larger.

The report concludes that the pedestrianisation of Oxford Street is “not just an urbanist pipedream or a top-down imposition, but a potentially transformative initiative”.

But no answers, or even clues, are provided to the difficult question of where all those buses, taxis and other motor vehicles from Oxford Street will be re-routed to enable a low traffic West End that is safe for cycling, and turns LCC’s dream into reality.

London Cycling Campaign. A Low Traffic West End: the case for people-friendly streets in central London.

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