Plans to pedestrianise parts of Oxford Street will move forward “as quickly as possible”, the mayor of London has said.
City Hall claims two thirds of people support the principle of banning traffic on one of the world’s busiest streets, with Sir Sadiq Khan adding that “urgent action is needed to give our nation’s high street a new lease of life”.
Vehicles would be banned from a 0.7-mile (1.1km) stretch between Oxford Circus and Marble Arch, with further potential changes towards Tottenham Court Road.
That piece of road gets a half million visitors per day. It cannot scale with cars taking up all.of the space and resources. I’m really happy to see the Mayor pushing this through. London needs to make more effective use of the scarce room it has. Returning more streets back into places for people instead of cars should be a huge part of that.
I’m yet to see a majority support from businesses when pedestrianization efforts begin(18% in this case), but they always do a 180 when they see sales growth
Arguments in favour of the abstract “people” are always just selfish interests in disguise. Business owners don’t want to be inconvenienced, e.g. with delivery vehicles having to park further away or only in strict time slots. They definitely know that more foot traffic always means more business.
This is always an interesting point.
It’s hard to believe that any small business in a busy tourist area would see less business with more foot traffic, as they almost always benefit from it.
Something tells me that businesses who are doing worse after something like this, might just have a failing business, and use this as a scapegoat.