When Eric Pickles, Secretary of State for Communities, said he wanted to allow drivers to park on double yellow lines for up to 15 minutes, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. His idea is that local economies are suffering and they need extra car access to give them a boost. What planet is he living on? And what a pickle we’d be in if he had his way.

Over the years, Oxfordshire’s love of the car has gone stratospheric. Most of Oxford’s arterial roads – and those in Witney, Bicester, Abingdon, Didcot – have heavy traffic at commuter times. A few are rammed all day long. It’s time, surely, for these roads to become quieter – not to open them up to free parking all day long.

Plenty of central Oxford streets are already closed to regular traffic. It is better for traders and shoppers, and for commuters, that cars can’t drive along Queen Street or Cornmarket. If they were allowed to, you can be sure they would, and the city centre would be as unusable as, say, Cowley Road, where the crawling queues start at 8am and stop-start traffic appears endlessly.

UK high streets need to provide customers with pleasant leisure and shopping experiences.

This does not mean easier car access. It means quiet, safe streets where cyclists and pedestrians can go about their business in safety, peace and quiet. Drivers form a tiny percentage of shoppers in busy cities. Allowing a handful more on double-yellows will make the experience much worse for the vast majority and make zero difference to shop takings. It’s time retailers woke up, sniffed the diesel and embraced the walking and cycling majority.

Places like Cambridge have succeeded in cutting car journeys from a percentage higher than Oxford’s to much lower by widespread use of ‘filtered permeability’. This means closing certain roads to all but bus and bike traffic using bus gates, as we have on High Street now. To stop rat-running through side streets, wooden bollards allow only bikes to pass.

To support filtered permeability in Oxford, we’d need to close the inner ring road (Longwall Street) to through traffic or block car traffic at The Plain. Motorists travelling to or through the city centre would then have a longer and more circuitous journey, incentivising them to take the bus, walk or cycle instead.

The university colleges should do everyone a favour and relinquish their thousands of car parking spaces. It would be selfish not to.

It makes economic sense: time is money, and hours wasted in queues cost us all. The diehard drivers and the few that genuinely need to drive, such as disabled people, would still have access to the centre. But if the Headington hire bike scheme goes city-wide, and with proper mass-cycle parking systems replacing car parking in the city centre, there’d be little point in driving anyway.