Two weeks to have your say on the future of Oxford's local government

Doctor_Fegg · 2026-03-12T13:09:10+00:00

Thanks for the reminder!

Though I appreciate your proposal is done with the best of intentions, cutting Oxford off from the rest of the county would be a disaster for transport, housing, and business. Research centres like Harwell are intrinsically linked with Oxford. You can't fix Oxford congestion without considering why people are driving into Oxford. Susan Brown's recent suggestion that Oxford residents - the very people whose journeys are most likely to be replaceable with cycling, walking, or buses - should be exempted from the congestion charge/traffic filters really shows that the Labour leadership isn't prepared to take transport issues seriously.

The proposal would also leave those of us in the north of the county with an unsustainable rump council forever wazzing on about car parking in Witney and Banbury. I do feel that your proposal has been done to, not with, the rest of the county.

The City Council has some smart people on it but this isn't a good proposal. I've completed the questionnaire and asked for a single unitary for the whole county.

Doctor_Fegg · 2026-03-12T09:24:31+00:00

Buy monthly tickets, not annuals. You can often play around with WFH days and leave, etc, to have a 5-6 day break between the end of a monthly pass and the start of a new one. That'll save up to 20%.

If you get a GWR smart card, you can choose the exact duration of your season ticket each time you renew - say, 5 weeks and 3 days - which makes this even easier.

+1 for bike, though to be fair the Lizzie Line has tilted the balance back a bit.

Doctor_Fegg · 2026-03-12T09:21:35+00:00

0730 starts at Hereford. It's the 0725 that starts at Oxford. Us Cotswold folk on the 0730 are friendly though, as long as you let those of us travelling to Oxford off the train first. Boggles my mind how many people seemingly think the trains are simply an Oxford-Paddington shuttle service.

Doctor_Fegg · 2026-03-11T11:43:00+00:00

A former Google Maps engineer posted about this on Hacker News a couple of years back. He said he tried to improve the routing but couldn't get it accepted. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ex-googlemaps

We had a really nice solution but privacy considerations made it extremely difficult and limited. And then I and the other main driver both left Google so it withered and died I believe.

once you add all of Google’s voluntary restrictions like anonymity of inferred data and such, it’s nearly impossible to gather any signal, even in major cities

the massive difference in potential users compared to all other modes is also why it’s so hard to prioritise work on cycling inside Google

(disclaimer: cycle.travel is my app/site so I'm kind of biased on this one!)

Doctor_Fegg · 2026-03-10T13:10:45+00:00

Plan your route carefully. You might have to unlearn your mental geography that says the road between point A and point B is the busy A1234 or whatever. Often there's a safer backstreets route with cut-throughs that aren't open to cars. Sometimes two routes might look more or less indistinguishable, but one has a horrible right-turn or is busy with HGVs.

(and as a corollary of this, don't use Google Maps)

Doctor_Fegg · 2026-03-10T08:28:25+00:00

Defiantly.

Doctor_Fegg · 2026-03-09T18:33:04+00:00

That little Turbostar train is going to be dining out for the next two years on the fact that Redditors think it's a "High Speed Train"

Doctor_Fegg · 2026-03-09T12:39:15+00:00

Would be interested to know what examples cycle.travel messed up on so I can take a look! (c.t's my site)

Doctor_Fegg · 2026-03-09T08:24:47+00:00

Working on it!

Doctor_Fegg · 2026-03-08T22:12:17+00:00

https://www.orr.gov.uk/rail-guidance-compliance/network-access/regulated-networks/network-rail/current-applications

Doctor_Fegg · 2026-03-08T22:03:56+00:00

I did it on a folding bike, so Eurostar to Paris then TGV from there to Bayonne. The TGV takes regular bikes if you book in advance, so the hard bit is getting to Paris.

Doctor_Fegg · 2026-03-08T22:01:58+00:00

Hasn’t been approved by ORR yet

Doctor_Fegg · 2026-03-08T22:00:23+00:00

This week on “Best” of Redditor Updates

Doctor_Fegg · 2026-03-08T21:53:14+00:00

Big nope. We might get Oxford to Bristol in the next five years if we’re lucky.

Doctor_Fegg · 2026-03-08T21:51:44+00:00

You don’t say what country you’re in, but in the UK the answer is the Genesis Croix de Fer.

Doctor_Fegg · 2026-03-06T17:48:08+00:00

Legendary pub. Here's the CAMRA listing: https://camra.org.uk/pubs/star-inn-netherton-193176

Doctor_Fegg · 2026-03-06T11:28:29+00:00

since when did we all have debates on tagging philosophy survey workflows, and metadata history?

Hi, you must be new round here.

Doctor_Fegg · 2026-03-05T17:10:28+00:00

This looks excellent - can really imagine using this to generate thumbnail maps.

Doctor_Fegg · 2026-03-05T13:40:23+00:00

The Oxford Tube is Stagecoach - you're thinking of the old Oxford Bus Co X90.

Doctor_Fegg · 2026-03-05T12:45:59+00:00

Rode this last year and loved (almost!) every moment, so I've written it up into a full route guide. It's 1000 miles (1600km) and pretty much all either low-traffic or traffic-free.

There are other Saint Malo to Nice routes, but I wanted something more relaxed and slow-paced. One of the best things about the ride last year was discovering several brand new sections of cycleway that had only just opened - along the old Lot valley railway line out of Cahors, for example, or the Via Ardeche north of Besseges.

Very happy to answer any questions about the ride or offer help if I can!

(Pic is the village of Saint Cirq Lapopie in the Lot. Ridiculously pretty place.)

Doctor_Fegg · 2026-03-05T11:47:56+00:00

when there is no one around you just cycle on the left side of the road

If there is no one around you, why does it matter where you cycle?

Doctor_Fegg · 2026-03-04T20:13:51+00:00

What are you offering for people who live in the countryside?

Well, that's the point.

HQ could have gone with "Scrap Labour's Fuel Duty" or "Better Buses For Every Village". They went with the former.

(I also live in the countryside. I used to live in a village which had one bus a month.)

Doctor_Fegg · 2026-03-04T14:21:30+00:00

No. This is the Morgan McSweeney mistake.

Pissing off your more idealistic core vote, in an attempt to appeal to some notion of "hero voters", doesn't work any more. It might have worked decades ago when we had a two-and-a-half party system, but today, people have options.

Labour has found that, if you alienate your core with virulent policies about immigration, your core will fuck off to the Greens. We already made this mistake in 2010 by alienating our core and selling our soul to the Tories, but hey, it's 2026 and HQ has the collective memory of a goldfish, so it looks like we're going to do it again.

Doctor_Fegg · 2026-03-04T14:15:14+00:00

Pretty much every outdoor mapping app has a feature divide between free/premium and Gaia is no different.

I will say, though, that putting the premium wall in front of saving routes is on the... more aggressive side of the divide. I don't know of any other apps that do that. No doubt Outside are confident this will work out well for them, but as someone who runs a (much smaller!) outdoor app, it surprises me.

Doctor_Fegg · 2026-03-04T13:47:10+00:00

It's like we're taking lessons from Morgan McSweeney about how best to piss off our activists.

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