Oxford Street Mayhem

I visited Oxford Street area last weekend to explore London’s premier shopping belt. I was quite impressed with the variety of shops there: branded and non-branded, small and big, etc. In essence, whatever you are looking for, you will highly likely be able to find it there. And those include exotic stuffs such as Korean and Chinese foodstuffs since Chinatown is located nearby.

Although I like the convenience of being able to get everything in one place, I am rather irritated about the small pedestrian walkways outside the shops. They are packed with people on weekends because most of the shops in other parts of London are closed and if you want to do some shopping, that’s one of the only few places to satisfy your need. Assuming that the entire London population does their shopping on weekends, you can guess how crowded that area will be.

I personally feel that it’s about time the relevant authorities consider widening the walkways or even closing some roads/streets to motor vehicles. Many cities around the world have done that. In Singapore, for example, the Orchard Road shopping belt has wide walkways. In China, almost every big cities have shopping belts whose streets are closed to motor vehicles 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

2 main benefits can be obtained from such moves. Firstly, it provides a more pleasing experience to customers as they can take their time to slowly look at the goods displayed in the display windows without being pushed or feeling hurried by the pedestrians behind. One of my purposes for visiting the area is to de-stress but I came back feeling more stressful than before the visit. Secondly, it will definitely benefit the shops because when customers have the time to look at the displayed goods and have their line of sight unobstructed, they have a higher tendency to enter the shops and hence make a purchase.

Clearly, the relevant authorities should give some serious thoughts to these win-win moves. If they do it fast enough, they may even get a bonus outcome: reducing the spread of swine flu as the transmission rate greatly decreases with increasing distance between any two people.