No increase in car parking at Warneford Park!
Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust, University of Oxford, Oxford City Council and Oxfordshire County Council
Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust and University of Oxford are jointly planning a major redevelopment of Warneford Park as detailed on the Warneford Park Consultation website, which will result in a significant increase in the number of staff, students and patients travelling to the site.
The plans include increasing the number of car parking spaces by around 50%, from the current 360 spaces to 546, which will result in hundreds of extra car trips a day into Headington, significantly increasing the volume of traffic passing through the Warneford Lane/Gipsy Lane/Old Road/Roosevelt Drive junction (the "WGOR junction") and other Headington junctions and roads.
This increase in car trips will:
- Increase congestion across Headington and East Oxford, damaging already stressed bus services not just around the Warneford Park site but more broadly.
- Increase noise pollution, air pollution and road danger across Headington and East Oxford, with the worst effects directly outside Cheney School and along pupils’ routes to school.
- Make already unsafe cycling routes such as Gipsy Lane, Old Rd, Roosevelt Drive and Morrell Avenue even more dangerous and deter some people from cycling at all.
- Make it impossible to rebuild the WGOR junction and other Headington junctions in a way that provides safety and priority for pedestrians, wheelers, cyclists and children (e.g. as illustrated in this visualisation), because this is only possible if we reduce traffic volumes from what they are now, as explained in our Re-imagining Headington's roads and junctions website post.
Headington has already suffered an increase in these harms thanks to the University of Oxford building a 417-space multi-storey car park on its Old Road Campus, for which planning permission was granted despite much local opposition. Now it seems intent on inflicting further harm in the same way, and we are concerned that Oxford City Council (as the Planning Authority) will assist the University in this anti-social endeavour by granting permission for the parking increase, not learning from its past mistakes in allowing the Old Road Campus and Westgate car parks to be built.
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To:
Oxford Health NHS Foundation Trust, University of Oxford, Oxford City Council and Oxfordshire County Council
From:
[Your Name]
I object to the increase in the number of car parking spaces that is proposed as part of the Warneford Park development.
The Warneford Park development should instead aim for a 25% reduction from the current amount of car parking space on the site in line with Oxfordshire County Council’s Local Transport and Connectivity Plan target to replace or remove 1 out of every 4 current car trips in Oxfordshire by 2030.
Headington already suffers from harmful levels of congestion, pollution and danger from cars and can't take any further increases in traffic volume.
If the proposed development is not viable without the proposed amount of car parking, then Headington is the wrong location for it.
Please ensure that the developers of Warneford Park are prohibited from increasing the amount of car parking on the site.