Sorry, Sadiq, but pedestrianising Oxford Street will have unintended consequences

Sadiq Khan’s ban on traffic through central London will not be the panacea for shoppers on foot that he imagines, says Paul Clements

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan has reannounced his plans to pedestrianise ‘the nation’s high street’ (PA Archive)

Like Madame Tussauds and Mrs Brown’s Boys, Oxford Street is both unfathomably popular and a national embarrassment.

Europe’s longest shopping parade, it attracts half a million people every day, even though it has seen better days – namely, the Georgian era, when it was known as the Ladies’ Mile, somewhere well-to-do women living in splendour on nearby streets could safely boutique-hop; or, better still, Tudor times, when all this was fields.

Today, the stretch from Marble Arch to Tottenham Court Road is unlovely, hollowed out by internet shopping and laid low by the American candy shop contagion. Two years ago, the number of vacant properties on the street hit a new high – around one in every eight – and smash-and-grab gangs moved in.

Aside from my own occasional dash-and-grab when a teenage niece has her heart set on a new puffa from Pull & Bear or a nephew with NikeTown gift vouchers to burn, I, nor any Londoner I know, ever shops on Oxford Street. Which all points to why Sadiq Khan has reannounced that he will pedestrianise “the nation’s high street”. I hope he has as much luck as he’ll have making that stick as a slogan.

Under the mayor of London’s plans, which were first outlined in 2016 and are now to be pushed through in spite of objections from Westminster’s Labour-run council, motorised vehicles are to be re-routed onto surrounding streets, never mind the gridlock (thoughts and prayers, Fitzrovia and Marylebone).

The ultimate vision is for Oxford Street to regain its shopping chops and, as a “traffic-free pedestrianised avenue”, become a “leading retail destination in the world”, one that can compete with the Champs-Élysées and Times Square.

How Oxford Street might look under the mayor’s plan to make it traffic-free (GLA)

Which is, of course, a smashing idea. Who wouldn’t want to spend an afternoon taking a constitutional from the souvenir shops clustered near the big McDonald’s at Tottenham Court Road Tube, past the empty husks of long-extinct department stores and the vape and oud shops with their noxious clouds that catch the passer-by by the throat, all the way to the Marble Arch gyratory?

Pedestrianisation looks good on paper and is wildly popular with Londoners sick of their roads being clogged with traffic – but it will not be the panacea for cleaner air and “active travel” that Khan thinks. There will be unintended consequences, creating new conflict for those on foot.

Khan’s plan is guaranteed to infuriate black cabbies, which may be in the back of the mayor’s mind (and never a bad thing in my book): taxis, along with buses, currently have the run of Oxford Street. But the traffic-free masterplan means the elderly shopper or busy mum will no longer be able to hop on a double-decker outside John Lewis or hail a cab outside Selfridges.

Oddly, there is no clear reference in the mayor’s blueprints to what happens to those on bikes. And if anyone is going to muck up Khan’s Arcadian vision, it’s cyclists.

Thanks to it being such a straight, east-west route, Oxford Street already clocks up 4,500 bike journeys a day, and without so much as a cycle lane by way of special infrastructure.

My suspicion is that cyclists will nominally be banned from the street, re-routed with other traffic onto nearby roads or required to dismount. But who exactly is going to make them?

Under Sadiq Khan’s traffic-free masterplan for Oxford Street, shoppers will no longer be able to hop on a double-decker bus outside John Lewis or hail a cab outside Selfridges (GLA)

When it comes to policing cyclist behaviour, pedestrians know to their cost how well that works. Many will bear if not scars, then bruises – like the one on my forearm, from the guy whose handlebars clipped me as he sailed past me on the pavement.

Literally nobody stops bikes from being ridden on our paths. When it gets out that there’s a mile-long stretch of smooth, lawless, car-free road in central London, I predict it will become the speedway of choice for oiks pulling wheelies and practising bunny hops, or freewheeling through the crowds for fun.

If you want to see in miniature what might happen, join the shoppers trying to cross the pedestrian bridge from Stratford station to the nearby Westfield. No cycling, skating or skateboarding, say the signs, put up when to attempt it on foot had become downright treacherous… but still, nobody stops them.

The idea that cyclists could be left to simply weave through shoppers makes me a little queasy. A fortnight ago, a phone-snatcher was filmed stealing a woman’s mobile in broad daylight on Oxford Street before calmly making off on his e-bike. And what of lawless delivery riders in a hurry? Or those vulgar and dangerous rickshaws (how’s that crackdown going, mayor?)

Khan’s measure may help London steal a march on rival big cities. Having experimented with car-free Sundays, Anne Hidalgo, the French capital’s mayor – the one who gamely went for a dip in the Seine before this summer’s Olympics to prove the water was sufficiently e.coli-free to host swimming events – has pushed through her plan to pedestrianise the Champs-Élysées’s eight lanes. But that won’t happen before the end of the decade. However, her “re-enchantment” (sounds even better in French) might have more impact than London’s because 90 per cent of Parisians last year voted to ban rental e-scooters which had made the place hellish.

For me, a pedestrianised Oxford Street will remain a place to either avoid or endure. And at least there’ll now be lots more space in the West End to badly park a Lime bike with the usual disregard for pedestrians.