Oxford Circus

[Martin Cassini]

While Boris and Westminster congratulate themselves on obvious pedestrian improvements to Oxford Circus (costing £5m) – marking diagonal as well as right-angle crossings – Oxford Street and the rest of London continue to fume at innumerable unnecessary lights. The other day I was in a bus on an Oxford St crammed as always with bumper-to-bumper diesel buses. At one junction we had to wait for three complete signal cycles before we got out of the junction. Why? Because the "experts" who run and ruin life on the road – the engineers, policymakers and traffic managers – tell traffic to enter a junction before traffic that’s already in the junction has been able to leave. Yes, it’s priority, which underpins the system and undermines our will to live, which is at fault again. Instead of being able to filter in turn at junctions, vehicles wanting to turn right have to wait for oncoming traffic to clear, or for a big enough gap to appear, or for another infernal light change to advance a few feet, before they can move. Quel cock-up. Boris made a song-and-dance about the great engineering triumph at Oxford Circus (re-paving a square - not sure where that would sit on a scale which included the Clifton suspension bridge), but as was pointed out in the Metro, diagonal crossings are nothing new - there is one in Balham.