Parting the red sea
The new mayor plans to pedestrianise Europe’s busiest shopping street
IN 1963 the author of “Traffic in Towns”, a book commissioned by the Ministry of Transport, cursed Oxford Street as a “travesty of conditions as they ought to be in a great capital city”. Things have only deteriorated since then. Shoppers breathe in the highest levels of nitrogen dioxide in Britain as they navigate a road that is among the capital’s most dangerous. Those who cram into Oxford Street’s crowded buses quickly realise it would have been faster to walk.
This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline “Parting the red sea”
From the July 23rd 2016 edition
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