1.  Why this strategy is not viable

• This objection does not oppose better buses, improved cycle routes or safer pavements. Those are worthwhile in their own right, and if the council wishes to invest in them, that investment is welcome. Buses and bikes can run alongside cars perfectly well. The problem is not the alternatives. The problem is the strategy.
• The strategy is not to improve alternatives and let residents choose. It is to degrade the car option – through parking removal, permit zones, charges and modal filters – until the alternatives look better by comparison. That is a different proposition entirely, and it is one this objection rejects.
• The car is not a problem to be managed. For the overwhelming majority of residents in this rural area it is the only mode of transport that is flexible enough to serve the complexity of a real working life: the school run that connects to a commute that connects to a supermarket visit; the elderly resident getting to a hospital appointment in a village with one bus a week; the tradesperson carrying tools; the parent with a pushchair; the woman who isn’t prepared to wait alone at an unlit bus stop at 11pm and shouldn’t have to be. No bus route, cycle path or e-scooter scheme serves those journeys. None of the plan’s proposed alternatives comes close to replicating what the private car provides in terms of flexibility, reliability, comfort, safety and door-to-door convenience.
• The plan’s own numbers illustrate the futility of the cycling proposition. Cycling currently represents a negligible share of trips in rural West Oxfordshire. The plan targets doubling it by 2031. Even if that target were met – against an infrastructure baseline the plan itself describes as fragmented, substandard and incomplete – it would remain below one percent of total trips in a rural area where 88% of households own a car. The cost of cycling infrastructure per trip avoided, in this context, is not a transport investment. It is a hugely costly ideological gesture.
• The same logic applies to buses. A network that averages 11.3mph at peak, offers no high-frequency services anywhere in the district, leaves villages without evening or weekend cover, and requires up to 119 minutes to complete a journey that takes 45 minutes by car is not a car replacement. It is a residual service for people who have no choice. Making it somewhat less bad does not change that calculation for the majority of residents – and it certainly does not justify restricting the mode those residents actually use.
• Residents should not be compelled by policy to use slower, less reliable, less safe and less convenient alternatives to the car on the basis that doing so serves an emissions target or a modal shift objective. That is not transport planning in the public interest. It is the imposition of ideological preference – a preference for a particular kind of travel behaviour – onto people who depend on their cars, have planned their lives around them, and in many cases have no realistic option to do otherwise.
• The demand management framework – parking charges, CPZs, modal filters, reduced parking stock – must be removed from this plan. Not deferred. Not qualified. Removed. The alternatives do not justify it, the evidence does not support it, and the communities that would bear the cost of it deserve better than to be told that their inconvenience is the price of someone else’s transport ideology.

2.  The Plan contradicts itself

The plan acknowledges, repeatedly, that this is a predominantly rural area with high car dependency:

• 88% of households own at least one car; the average is 1.5 cars per household
• 70% of residents drive to work
• The bus network is described as ‘slow and unreliable’ (p.8)
• Current cycling infrastructure is ‘fragmented’ and ‘of varying quality’ (p.4-5)
• 20% of the population is over 65 – a group for whom cycling and e-scooters are largely impractical
• Several named villages have ‘no realistic alternatives’ to the private car (p.29-30)

Having established all of that, the plan sets a target to remove 1 in 4 car trips by 2030 and 1 in 3 by 2040. It then proposes demand management – charges, permit zones, parking removal – as the mechanism to get there. The logic only works if the alternatives are ready and – crucially – viable. The plan’s own evidence shows they are not.  Reality and experience show they cannot be in a rural area.

At fewer than 1% of journeys, even doubling cycling (as the Plan suggests) will have an imperceptible impact on the area.

3.  Objection: Parking

3.1  Free parking is in the plan’s crosshairs

Free parking is currently available in Witney, Carterton, Burford, Eynsham and Hanborough for up to 12 hours. The plan describes this, on page 21, as a ‘barrier’ – and commits to work with stakeholders to explore ‘removal/limiting of free parking, re-locating car parking, reducing parking stock.’ Those are the plan’s words, not a paraphrase.

Removing free parking from market towns that depend on visitors arriving by car does not produce a modal shift. It produces empty shops in the real world, no matter what studies ‘prove’.

The parking strategy review underpinning this plan found a surplus of parking in Witney – and recommended modal shift before any reduction in supply. That recommendation is now being used to justify reducing supply while modal shift remains an aspiration. The ‘surplus’, in reality, does not exist with places often being at a premium. One has to wonder when any survey activity was undertaken.

3.2  Controlled Parking Zones

Action 11.5 proposes to ‘consider providing new Controlled Parking Zones or similar, where they provide benefits to public transport, walking, wheeling and cycling.’

That is the entirety of the safeguard. ‘Consider.’ ‘Or similar.’ A benefit threshold that the council defines for itself. No geographic limits, no community veto, no requirement that alternatives must be in place first. A CPZ in practice means residents in villages need permits to park outside their own homes, and visitors face charges or time limits. The plan creates the policy framework to introduce this anywhere in the district – including villages – with no objective test and no right of appeal.

4.  Objection: Bus Services

4.1  The current network cannot carry the weight the plan places on it

The plan’s ambition to remove a third of car trips by 2040 rests primarily on buses. The numbers make this very difficult to take seriously:

• No route in the Lowlands runs at high frequency (four or more per hour)
• Peak bus journey time from Carterton to Oxford: up to 119 minutes. By car: around 45 minutes
• Average peak bus speed between Witney and Oxford: 11.3mph – the plan itself notes this is ‘more typically seen in dense urban areas’ (p.17)
• Fewer than 4% of bus stops in Witney and 2% in Carterton have real-time information
• Evening and weekend services are severely limited across the area
• Most villages have one bus per hour or fewer – some have none
• Buses, quite simply, cannot replace the reliability, flexibility and facility a car offers

4.2  The proposed improvements are largely unfunded

The actions under Objectives WOL7 and WOL8 are almost entirely framed as aspirations: ‘work with partners to explore,’ ‘identify opportunities,’ ‘subject to appropriate funding.’ The A40 bus priority corridor – the intervention that could make the biggest difference to journey times – has secured funding only for the Eynsham-to-Cassington section. The rest is still being sought. The Bus Plan itself isn’t due until late 2026.

Residents are being asked to accept restrictions on car use now, in anticipation of bus improvements that have no guaranteed delivery date.

4.3  Personal safety

Action 8.10 acknowledges that bus stops need better lighting, CCTV and safety measures because women and girls do not currently feel safe using them. This is a candid admission. A person – particularly a woman – who chooses to drive rather than stand alone at an unlit rural bus stop at 6am or 11pm is making a rational safety decision. The plan does not appear to consider this a reason to delay the shift away from cars.

5.  Objection: Cycling

5.1  The infrastructure isn’t there

The plan targets doubling cycling trips in West Oxfordshire by 2031. The three Local Cycling and Walking Infrastructure Plans needed to support this were only approved between March and December 2025, and are being ‘developed and delivered as funding opportunities become available.’ The primary inter-urban cycle route to Hanborough station ‘does not meet national guidance,’ being described as ‘indirect, of poor quality, and narrow’ (p.17). The A40 – the spine of the MAP Plan area – carries over 30,000 vehicles a day and is identified as a major physical barrier to cycling that requires grade-separated crossings to resolve.

Doubling cycling against this baseline, on this timetable, is not a plan. It is a target in search of one.

5.2  Cycling is not an option for a substantial part of the population

With 20% of the population over 65, and further residents who are disabled, have health conditions, carry children or tools, or live in villages with significant gradients or distances to services, cycling cannot be the primary alternative to a third of all car journeys. The plan does not grapple with this. It cannot, because the numbers don’t add up if it does.

6.  Objection: E-Scooters

E-scooters appear in the plan as a transport alternative for shorter journeys. They are currently illegal on public roads in the UK outside of specific government-authorised trials. The plan qualifies this objective ‘subject to central government legislation’ – meaning the proposal may never be lawful. The case study offered is a trial in Princes Risborough that began with 20 scooters.

Proposing e-scooters as a rural transport alternative – on the country lanes of West Oxfordshire, for a population that is significantly elderly – while simultaneously removing parking and restricting car access is not serious transport policy.

7.  Objection: Villages

Much of the plan’s focus is on Witney and Carterton. The villages across the MAP Plan area receive far less attention – but the plan’s demand management framework applies to the whole district.

The plan explicitly acknowledges that Crawley, Westwell and other villages have no realistic alternatives to the car. It acknowledges that flooding regularly cuts walking and cycling routes – in 2007, 2012, 2014, 2020 and 2024. It acknowledges that gradients across the Cotswold fringe make cycling impractical in several locations. Then it proposes parking restrictions, CPZs and modal filters with no specific exemption for any of these communities, and no independent test of whether alternatives are adequate before restrictions are introduced.

The plan’s safeguard – demand management ‘will only be proposed in locations with good levels of sustainable alternative travel options’ – is circular. The council decides what ‘good levels’ means, biased by an ideology that is already opposed to private car use. There is no threshold, no appeal, and no obligation to consult the communities affected before acting.

8.  Objection: Mass Rapid Transit

The plan safeguards land for a Mass Rapid Transit corridor between Carterton, Witney, Eynsham and Oxford. No mode has been confirmed. No funding has been secured. No timescale exists. The emerging Local Plan 2043 proposes to protect this corridor from development – taking land out of productive use to preserve a route for a scheme that exists, at present, only as a line on a map.

Meanwhile, the plan proposes to restrict car use along the A40 corridor on the basis that this unbuilt, unfunded, undefined scheme will eventually provide an alternative. That is the wrong order of events.

9.  Conclusion

Better buses and cycle routes are fine. Build them by all means – they have their place, and nobody objects to improvement for its own sake. But they cannot replace the car for the vast majority of journeys made by the vast majority of people in a rural area, and the gap between what they offer and what a car offers – in flexibility, reliability, comfort and safety – will not be closed by this plan, or any plan, on any realistic timescale.

Restricting car use before credible alternatives exist is not transport policy. It is the enforcement of a preference – someone else’s preference – onto people who have no meaningful choice.

This plan should not proceed in its current form.

Mark McArthur-Christie

16 May 2026