Transport boss: Oxford Street double deckers will stay

London’s top public transport chief has dismissed calls to rid Oxford Street of its “wall of red double deckers” saying it would require two vast “unacceptable and desecrating” bus stations to be built in the heart of the West End.

The Mayor’s Transport Commissioner Peter Hendy was responding for the first time to growing demands from West End business that the volume of buses on London’s premier shopping street should be dramatically scaled back.

One proposal put forward is for east-west bus routes to stop at either end of Oxford Street with a shuttle service or tram running its one and a half mile length.

But Mr Hendy said while the option had been looked at it had been decided that “having the huge bus station you would need at Marble Arch would completely desecrate a very important place to people in Britain.”

He went on: ”If you built a bus station at the Tottenham Court End it would take up a significant amount of space and would be prohibitively expensive. A Hammersmith bus station is the sort of size you would need and I don’t think that’s acceptable.”

Mr Hendy was appearing before Westminster Council’s West End Commission investigating the future of the district’s £50 billion economy.

One member of the Commission, the pop concert promoter Harvey Goldsmith, said Oxford Street was plagued by “a never ending line of buses one after the other, half of which are completely empty even in the rush hour.”

But Mr Hendy insisted that bus routes were set only in response to demand from passengers.

He said: ”We’re not proscribing answers but the reason there is so much transport in the West End is people want to go there.

“So it’s counter intuitive to say ‘we’re going to cut down on public transport.’ It’s really not our job to say to people at Paddington ‘sorry we’re not taking you to Tottenham Court Road.’”

According to Transport for London around 220,000 people - equivalent to more than the entire population of Northampton - travel down Oxford Street by bus every day.