35,000 inmates, 12,000 people working there. Only one road in and out with a toll that's most expensive at times people would actually need to travel. Sounds like a labour camp to me. There are softer regimes in open prisons!

It is naive in the extreme to expect all the residents and workers to only need to travel to places on the railway line. How could the railway and Oxford station be able to cope with a daily influx of tens of thousands? Nearly all will need buses from congested central Oxford to their places of work back out of town, adding to the Oxford gridlock. It is a ridiculous idea to force everyone who is commuting to places of work outside the eco town to go to Oxford city centre on the way, no matter how fast the train is.

Look at the map. All the yellowish green bits are super high density housing - flats - the sort of thing most maps would show as brown or grey to distinguish from the surrounding grass and trees. Could this be a deliberate blurring to make it seem more green than it is? It isn't even labeled as housing on the key to the map.

One thing is certain, housing there will certainly end up being affordable - people won't exactly be gazzumping each other to buy into this Stalinist experiment of eco - life. Ten years after it is built they will be lucky if they can give the flats away.

It will be left to the poorest and most desperate in our society to be forced to live in the "affordable" Weston Otmoor. Even if this were to be a truly "eco" way of life, these poor people will be living under the most draconian restrictions, (not just relating to transport), whilst the rest of us happily get on with our lives. Is this the way to treat the most vulnerable in our society? Why not bring in eco- housing, fuel regulations and travel restrictions for all of us instead of picking on these people?

True eco-towns are successful in Europe when they have been built as suburbs of large existing towns, with direct public transport to all the places people would need to go. They share their infrastructure with the existing town so that eco residents have access to schools that are already successful, cinemas, theatres, night clubs, shops and restaurants, and the existing town can benefit from the eco infrastructure, such as power and water schemes. Successful eco suburbs offer a way of life that middle class people who understand and want it choose to buy into, without breaking away completely from the life they know.

Weston Otmoor will fail because it is trying to be a suburb of Oxford, connected only by the tenuous thread of a railway to a single Oxford station, a thread shared with a 6,000 space park and ride. It will also fail because tens of thousands of the residents, probably the vast majority, will be people who would not, given the choice, want to live there. They will resent the intrusive and controlling regime, and rail against the loss of their rights and their enslavement to this ghetto. What happens then?

Better dead than red,gulag livin' is not for the Englishman.

DR is quite right. At best this development will be a huge private housing estate like those around Didcot, at worst it will be another poor rural ghetto like Berinsfield. What this has to do with ecology is anybody's guess.

With luck it will never be built though. The developers are just trying it on, as they always do.

One road in and out and a toll gate? What is this - East Berlin? Why not go the whole hog and build a nice tall wall around it to keep the residents from escaping, other than on officially sanctioned days and in officially sanctioned ways? And why not send people who disagree with anything there for "re-education" while you are at it? Disgraceful, the whole concept.