Charging ahead in Oxford

Tuesday 18th November 2025

Oxfordshire County Council took the bold step of introducing a three month “Temporary Congestion Charge” for motorists who drive through six camera points in central Oxford at the end of October. I paid a visit to the city on Saturday to take a look.

The six sites are shown on the map below, four of which are located centrally and apply every day between 07:00 and 19:00 with the two outliers, Marston Ferry Road and Hollow Way applicable during peak hours 07:00-09:00 and 15:00-18:00 Mondays to Saturdays.

Vehicles crossing these points face a daily charge of £5 which must be paid by midnight the following day or can be paid in advance, if preferred. However, there’s a long list of exemptions not least any vehicle that’s not a car (ie vans, motorbikes, mopeds, lorries, buses and coaches). Free permits are also available for Blue Badge holders, community health or care workers, unpaid carers, frequent hospital patients and many others as detailed in the following list…

Interestingly firefighters are exempt but not other emergency workers.

Depending where they live, residents can apply to receive a specified number of free daily passes. Those living centrally, within the area affected, receive an unlimited number plus 50 visitor passes; those living within the city of Oxford boundary receive 100 free day passes and those living in a wider area of Oxfordshire outside the city receive 25 free day passes. The maps below show the significant geographic areas involved, particularly Oxford (blue) and Oxfordshire (yellow) – the latter stretching from just north of Reading to north of Babury.

You might be wondering who’s left to pay the £5 after all those exemptions and free passes, especially as many visitors from outside the county have long been accustomed to using Oxford’s well established Park and Ride sites.

According to the County Council, the rationale behind the scheme is “to reduce congestion in Oxford while Botley Road is closed, and we cannot start the traffic filters trial. We expect it to improve bus services and make it easier for permit holders to travel by car into and around the city.” The aim is to reduce traffic and make bus journeys faster and more reliable as well as allowing for new and improved bus routes. Walking and cycling, air pollution, health and well being are also listed as areas for improvement as a consequence.

There’s no doubt the grossly inconvenient continued closure of Botley Road alongside Oxford railway station has been causing severe congestion problems in the city for the last few years. Losing this vital access from the west has inevitably put added strain on all other roads approaching the city centre as well as distributor roads and the ring road. Botley Road closed in April 2023 (originally for six months with another planned six months closure in 2024) but has now been closed continuously for two and a half years but has at last been given a firm date for reopening in August 2026.

Network Rail reckons it’s now on top of the project with its website explaining “on Friday 24 January 2025 a new programme for the expansion of Oxford station was launched that prioritises the reopening of Botley Road. Engineering challenges around the discovery of the true extent of an inverted brick arch and in finding a suitable location for water main connections held up progress by 18 months but we are now making good progress in the most complex utilities diversions.”

While in Oxford I took a look at what is now a much improved environment for pedestrians to walk under the railway while work continues on the project.

This is how it was in 2023…

… but now it’s wider and brighter and a PR company has obviously been involved to assist with ‘messaging’.

It was impressive to see the constant flow of pedestrians walking in a disciplined manner using the wider temporary foot tunnel where lane markings are strictly observed…

… as is the instruction for cyclists and e-scooter riders to dismount…

… helped by a security presence ensuring arrangements are enforced.

Messaging also explains the benefits of the new bridge for pedestrians and cyclists.

Passengers using bus routes from the west have been experiencing significant inconvenience since Botley Road was closed entailing a long walk from the last bus stop to teach the station and on to the city centre.

The temporary bus terminal point that had been established to the west of the station in April 2023…

… is now part of the construction site…

… for the station’s new western entrance/exit…

… so buses on seven routes (4A/B, 44, 63, E1, S6, S9) are having to use unsuitable residential side streets to turn round and layover in between journeys.

The sooner August comes round and everything can return to normal the better.

The County Council implies its “traffic filter trial” will begin as soon as Botley Road reopens next August but with the “Temoorary Cingestion Charge” said to be for a trial of three months I’m wondering what will happen between that finishing at the end of January and August. I assume the Congestion Charge will be “temporarily extended”.

August’s Traffic Filter Trial will involve “camera-operated traffic filters” at the same six points for the same periods of time during the day and week being used for the Temporary Congestion Charge “to help lower the number of private car journeys”. The filters will limit through traffic “along a small section of a road”. The County Council explains “if you drive a car you may need to take a different route or change how you travel if you don’t have a permit to drive though the filter”.

Which sounds to me that come next August, the only change will be the £5 daily charge disappears and motorists without a permit won’t be able to pass those six points, which leaves me puzzled why wait until Botley Road is reopened? And won’t the County Council miss out on the revenue it’s now gaining from all the £5 it will have collected by then?

It’s certainly a brave, bold and welcome move by the County Council to introduce a congestion charge not least when in a public consultation two thirds of the 7,100 respondents were against it and 74% commented it would impact them negatively.

One of the upsides of the current Temporary Congestion Charge for motorists has been making Oxford’s Park & Ride bus routes free for users of the car parks for three months, so Saturday saw me driving over to Oxford and trying that arrangement out.

My first impression driving into the huge Thornhill Park & Ride car park on the outskirts of the city on the A40 was how busy it was even at 09:30 on a Saturday.

As I parked up I noticed motorists standing by lampposts tapping away on their smartphones and realised they were following instructions how to pay for the parking. Because although the bus ride into the city centre is free, there’s still a charge of £2.50 to park which can be paid using the RingGo app.

Wandering over to the centrally located bus terminal point which has toilets, a seated area, a coffee stall…

… printed timetable leaffets…

…and electronic departure signs…

…I noticed many more motorists also paying for their parking at ticket machines…

… as well as a long queue of passengers for the Oxford Tube to London…

… and more boarding the next departure on Oxford Bus route 400 into the city.

Route 400 runs every 10 minutes (15 minutes on Sundays) via Headington and Brookes University to the centre of Oxford terminating at the rail station. It was particularly busy on Saturday morning when I travelled due to an Open Day at the University.

It’s quite a slow journey into the city with buses acting as a standard city bus route observing all stops and we stopped at most of them. It took just under half an hour for the bus to reach Westgate where frustratingly the driver waited for three minutes before leaving on time for the next and final stop at the station.

In addition to Oxford Tube, Oxford’s Airlink and route 400, other routes from Thornhill include Stagecoach’s 600 which links the site to John Radcliffe Hospital, Cowley, Kassam Stadium, Science Park and the Redbridge Park and Ride site…

… and Thames Travel’s H2 to Eynsham and Witney which was being operated with a Pulhams bus on Saturday.

Aside from three months worth of free bus travel on Park and Ride routes another benefit flowing from the Temporary Congestion Charge is a raft of improvements to the city’s bus routes and in particular shorter journey times with timetables being sped up to take advantage of better flowing traffic conditions.

Oddly Oxford Bus and Stagecoach are introducing these improvements on different dates. Whereas Oxford Bus brought in its changes on 9th November, Stagecoach’s alterations don’t commence until 30th November.

This has the effect of an uncoordinated timetable between Stagecoach’s route 1 and the parallel Oxford Bus route 5 between the city centre and Blackbird Leys during this interregnum period. Checking the departure listing at Oxford’s railway station…

… showed the duplication now inherent in the timetable with the evening peak after 17:00 particularly bad with buses from each company running at the same times or within a minute of each other.

I am also puzzled looking at some of the journey times applying from 30th November where, for example, the 06:55 from Blackbird Leys Pegasus Court currently takes 38 minutes to the station, arriving 07:33…

… but the new, supposedly quicker, timetable from the end of the month has the 06:56 departure taking 44 minutes arriving at 07:40. The same also applies to Oxford’s parallel route 5 with the 06:49 taking 36 minutes and the new 06:51 taking 44 minutes.

Looking at Stagecoach’s route 8 timetable I can see a significant improvement with, for example the 07:00 departure from Barton currently taking 49 minutes…

…but from the end of November the 07:05 is given 39 minutes to reach Westgate making for a whopping 10 minute speeding up.

Similar improvements apply to other Oxford Bus and Stagecoach routes in the city so perhaps it shows the previous timetable on the 1 and 5 was unrealistically inadequate.

Other changes from the end of the month include Stagecoach extending its route 600 from Redbridge Park & Ride to Oxford Parkway Park & Ride making for another route connecting three Park & Ride sites, but unlike Cambridge’s infamous route T2 the 600 serves many useful destinations along the way as described earlier. Also extended to Oxford Parkway is the 800 with some journeys continuing to Begbroke, London Oxford AIrport (!!) and Yarnton Village.

Oxford Bus improvements already introduced include extending routes 3/3A to the railway station, frequency improvements on the 5A and 700 and new route 20 between Rose Hill, Iffley Road, Brookes University, JR Hospital and Marston Road.

So there are some very welcome upsides to the Temporary Congestion Charge but the proof of the pudding will be whether congestion eases. Saturday wasn’t the best day to test that out although it was busy with retailers enticing shoppers into the city centre with ridiculously early Christmas marketing but I took a look on Google maps yesterday morning and afternoon to see how some of the bottlenecks were doing.

Here’s the junction of Marston Road and Headington Road at St Clements Street leading to the roundabout at the south end of Magdalen Bridge where Cowley Road and Iffley Road also join. It’s a notorious congestion hotspot in the city. This is what it was like at 08:18 yesterday morning…

… as you can see, it wasn’t particularly traffic free with delays approaching the roundabout on all roads, but an hour later at 09:19 it had cleared.

… although was bad again in the afternoon at 16:00….

Back in the morning, another hotspot is at the western end of Botley Road where its closure has put extra traffic on to the A34 Southern By-Pass as can be seen at 08:38.

In fact all the roads surrounding the city were slow going.

And even more so at around 17:00.

Better that than having buses held up within the city itself. But it does demonstrate that old habits die hard and motorists are clearly still wedded to their cars.

It’s a bold move by Oxfordshire, and good to see the bus companies responding with improvements. If it was down to me, I’d have made the Congestion Charge at least £10 a day (London’s is £15) but I guess it comes down to what is politically acceptable to introduce in today’s febrile atmosphere. Here’s hoping it’s a success and buses become more reliable and much quicker and other cities, particularly Mayoral Combined Authorities keen to “take back control” will take note and follow this example.

Roger French

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