Bike ride from Oxford to Kidlinton - Saturday 28th

A bike ride is being organised to protest against the Campsfield Detention Centre. The rides starts in St Giles at 11am, travelling the 6 miles to Kidlington and stops in the centre. Read more...

Breaking the century!

Recently we broke through the 100 members barrier. What is also interesting is that we are now hitting over 50 posts per month. I thank all members for joining and sticking our group as we grow from strength to strength.

Are bus prices too much?

In an era of increasing prices we all look to reducing costs where we can. As part of the Oxford conurbation, I feel proud of the bus service. Largely we can catch buses to and across the City with reasonable efficiency. The cost for me to get to town is £1.80. Is this too much? Well certainly if you compare it with the cost of travelling on the London Underground you probably feel it is reasonable. However if you compare it with cost of travelling, say in Berlin then it is bad. In Berlin, as with many places on continental Europe you buy a ticket that lasts you for say 3 hours and that ticket can be used on almost any service, whether it is train or bus. That to me is an integrated system. Oh, and the price? Probably about half of what it costs in me to make a single journey into Oxford. So yes, in my opinion the bus service is expensive. However what I would like to see is a restructuring of how we pay for buses. This system of buying a ticket for one journey on one bus service cripples the value of the service to the community. It stupidly increases journey times, increases frustration, and dramatically reduces the number of people using the service. So when my inbox gets another email from the campaign for better transport complaining about the cost of fares, I would argue they are campaigning for the wrong thing. Let me be clear, I need my bus services to run at a healthy profit. The only way that I want ticket prices to come down is through concepts of competition. That model has worked well in Oxford. The Oxford bus service is second to none from my experience. The ticketing system is on the other hand something out of the dark ages.

A challenge for Kidlingtonians

On the North Oxfordshire website Kidlington is summed up as "the village is a lively community, with a modern shopping centre." To me that description is patronising and does not do justice to what Kidlington is. So what do I think of my home village?

Kidlington is a great place to live. It has a fantastic bus service, surrounded by accessible and beautiful countryside, a great open-plan and pedestrianised shopping centre that is not a mall with some great local shops residents can be proud of.

That's my take. Soon, in fact, I will be moving from Kidlington to nearby Freeland, and I will sorely miss this place. Amongst other things I will miss the market stalls on Friday and Saturday that I can walk to. So what is your take? How would you sum up this hamlet. If you have a viewpoint drop me a line.

Is an eco-town a contradiction?

I am reminded to think about the eco-town subject as councils across Oxfordshire are called to unite in their thinking - see this item on the Oxfordshire County Council website. So here are my concerns:

• No matter how many new houses are built to be eco-friendly this can only make a small dent in the fact that the UK's existing houses are very poor on the eco-scale. Surely we would be seem more serious as a society about Climate Change if we addressed the larger subject rather than be seen to tinker round at the edges.
• An eco-town sounds like a grand idea that has some poor downsides. To me THE primary goal of an eco-town is to reduce travel time to workplaces. That is as a society I feel we should stop building housing estates separate from industrial estates. Instead they should be mixed up. Get the workplace close to the home so we can all bicycle.
• Instead the current eco-town concepts seem to me to focus too much on houses on the fringe of towns and cities necessitating new transport links, thus altogether increasing our combined carbon footprints.

The above observations and thoughts are my own opinions. It may be that these have been considered by planners and taken into account. My guess, though is that both National and Local government does not have the will or resources to address the real problem.

Could Kidlington have a railway station again?

There have been people looking whether Kidlington could have its old railway station re-instated. There are huge problems against this, including lack of, what is often called, line capacity. Read more on what Oxfordshire County Council have done, and great news about increasing of capacity by dualling of the line.