A crash barrier is to be introduced for a section of the Oxford ring road to tackle illegal parking by drivers on a shared use path.
The barriers would be installed this summer over the bridge between the Redbridge and Heybridge Hill roundabouts, which run parallel to National Cycle Route 5 and over Weir Mill stream. Despite other sections of the road being segregated from the path, the gap in protection has encouraged drivers – including of HGVs – to turn off the dual carriageway and drive down the lane, using the designated pedestrian and cyclist space as a car-park, one with easy access to the water for boat moorings or to fish.
But as well as blocking the path, the vehicles have churned up mud from the verge, damaging the grass and dirtying the cycle path. Drivers of the illegally parked vehicles also have the dangerous challenge of using the verge to re-join the dual carriageway, which has a 70mph speed limit.
The campaign for better protection has been spearheaded by Labour councillor Anna Railton, Deputy Leader of Oxford City Council and Cabinet member for a Zero Carbon Oxford, who wrote on Facebook that efforts to prevent driving and parking alongside the path have been “a long running and low level campaign of mine.”
She added that “this has been a slowly escalating problem since COVID, with now frequently 10+ cars on there.” Railton subsequently told the Oxford Mail that she expects the crash barrier, which will defend the northern side of the bridge over the stream, “will resolve the problem” as the barriers are “pretty difficult to drive through by design.
“This has been a problem because it’s a walking and cycling path and people don’t expect to encounter vehicles on there.”
It is far from the first time cycle and pedestrian paths have been illegally blocked by drivers. In Bexley, the council dismissed residents’ concerns that school children and parents couldn’t safely use bike lanes on the school run due to cars blocking the way. The Head of Highways, Traffic and Infrastructure said that it “doesn’t matter because it’s only twice a day.”
19 thoughts on “Crash barrier to be introduced on dual carriageway after years of drivers illegally parking on cycle path”
How about they just fine and tow the fuckers doing this.
Well, fines only work as a deterrent but they don’t actually stop the people parking there do they, really they just stop people doing it again – in the meantime others who’ve not been fined yet still access the area. It’s pretty complicated, and much more expensive that a barrier, to get council enforcement on a space like that, so I believe they’ve taken the best option forward.
*than a barrier
Given how many of them seem to be council vehicles, I can’t see that being an approach that would get approved.
As the saying goes…
“If the punishment is just a fine, then it means it is legal for the rich…”
If the fine is proportional to your wealth it isn’t. If it cost some rich bastard a few thousand pounds instead of £50 he would probably not do it.
Put a sign up that all vehicles will be towed to an inconvenient location with a big cost. Then a week later start doing it and have the press there to photograph it. Put on your social media. Put it in the local paper. Put it on the local news. It’s actually got to be a will to stop it.
But they already *parked* in a cycle facility… 😉
£500 for a car, £5,000 for a truck. Fines being doubled up each time the same vehicle is wrongly parked. Building new infrastructure means the taxpayer pays for it. Fines are focused and efficient.
ICBW, maybe there is superior local knowledge at play, but from googling, I think the locations in the first sentence perhaps should be described as:
“over the bridge between the Redbridge/Kennington and Heyford Hill roundabouts”.
I can not find any “Heybridge Hill” or Heybridge in Oxford. FWIW, Google has the roundabout labelled as “Kennington roundabout”, but it’s also near Redbridge (which appears to refer to the bridge of the Abingdon road over the railway).
It’s kind of bonkers HGVs are parking in that lane. There is no other way back after the Weill Mill stream bridge (the bit at the bridge over the Thames is already blocked off with barrier it seems) to the main road other than over the verge, to join a fast dual-carriageway, nuts!
Snuck in there while I was typing mostly the same thing. The first roundabout is variously known as the Redbridge, Kennington, or Abingdon Road roundabout, but I believe Redbridge is the official name.
The barrier disappears again just after the main Thames stream bridge, so you can rejoin the dual carriageway any point between there and Heyford Hill, if you can find a gap in the traffic. Anyone who’s tried to drive through there in the mornings would definitely not refer to that stretch as ‘fast’. ;o)
Hey/ford/ Hill.
Also, your top picture confusingly shows the bridge over the main stream of the Thames, which (as you can see in the photo) already has a barrier (but can be accessed by entering through the gap at the Weirs Mill Stream bridge and driving along the shared path).
[Top two pictures, in fact.]
Looks like they access it on the bridge over Weirs Mill Stream, park on/near the bridge over the Thames, then, alarmingly, re-join here: https://maps.app.goo.gl/H52Ez2TGBj2HueLKA
Why not just make it legal to puncture the tire of any vehicle parked there, and put up a sign warning drivers of the same, and encourage citizen enforcement. Word would get around fast that it’s a bad place to park. Tires are expensive. It would be like an automatic and expensive fine for illegal parking. It doesn’t take much to punch a hole in the sidewall of an auto tire.
Or call the Tyre Extinguishers.
There are also a number of social media pages dedicated to calling out bad parking.
How long before the entitled idiots cut the barrier away?
The bollards on a piece of wide pavement near me have been vandalised so the business owners / workers can park on the pavement.
Typical motorist behaviour.
Fines don’t work. They have to be enforced which means man power which costs. Equally they are never much anyway. Stick a zero or two on all motoring fines to start with.
Unequal fines are immoral. The offence is the same for all so the punishment must be.