Sir - Bill Bradshaw (Letters, July 11) is being somewhat disingenuous when he quotes 1988 as the basis for comparing the number of buses using the High Street since that was at the height of the bus wars' following deregulation.

Today, the two main bus companies run directly competing services on the London, Cowley and Iffley Roads in East Oxford resulting in over 100 buses an hour (two-way) coming together along the High Street on these routes alone.

Similar duplication exists on the Banbury Road through Summertown noted by another of your correspondents in the same issue.

Oxford is a special place for its size in the number of people travelling by bus - in itself a good thing. It is also special in the character of its city centre streets which are plainly not suited to large vehicles.

Special circumstances call for special measures. The county council should apply for powers which are available to replace the present free-for-all with a regulated system in which individual routes are franchised to a single operator (as in London), ie with operators competing for the franchises every few years, not day to day on the city's streets.

This would enable the number of buses to be reduced by about a third on these routes at the same time as holding down fares through a more economical pattern of operation.

Because of the high frequency few passengers would perceive a diminution of service - in fact for those who are presently confined to one operator or the other by the system of travelcards their situation would be improved.

It would also be possible to halve the number of stops and standing buses departing from Queen Street and Magdalen Street - another important source of blight on the city centre environment.

Peter Headicar, Reader in Transport, Oxford Brookes University