DAMIAN Fantato’s account on ‘Half a century later and a relief road is unthinkable’, October 24) of the 1960s proposals for a sunken relief road across Christ Church Meadow raises many points still pertinent today.

When Sir Frederick Armer reported a road across Christ Church Meadow was “inescapable”, there were only just under two million licensed vehicles on the UK’s roads: according to the RAC on April 20, 2011, the total had risen to more than 34 million and in November 2011 the RAC predicted a 43 per cent rise in traffic volume by 2035.

Just after he published his groundbreaking report, Traffic in the City (1963), Professor Colin Buchanan declared “war on the car”. Buchanan played a major part in the I965 Christ Church inquiry and encouraged the persuasive voices of Alan Bullock and Kenneth Wheare, among others, to be raised successfully against the proposals.

In the mid-1990s Alan Bullock and his wife, Nibby, were at the forefront of the campaign against the so-called Barton and Tin-hat bypasses, in fact two spurs in a six-lane east-west route which would have flooded Oxford and its environs with new traffic.

And traffic flows today? On the increase and really nowhere to go.

The Westgate Mark II will of course attract even more traffic into Oxford’s heart. Perhaps the only hope is that fewer people in future, if practicable, will simply not learn to drive; more households and families will elect to be car-free, wherever practicable; and so on. For if the 20th century saw the rise and rise of the car, one must hope the 21st will realise a different dispensation, not because people should be denied mobility and economic opportunity but as an escape-route from further disfigurement of the earth’s environments/habitats, including the defacing of human settlements. Too much to ask?

BRUCE ROSS-SMITH

Bowness Avenue

Headington

Oxford