Sir, William Richter (Letters, June 30) makes an interesting point about the buses using Queen Street. All the various bodies involved in the city centre had long discussions with the Westgate Partnership. A total of 11 possible solutions to the Queen Street issue were examined, which included the extension of terminating services to the rail station.

The overriding view, and not just from the bus companies involved, was that this wasn't a very good idea. The services would have to negotiate the heavily congested area around Frideswide Square. This would reduce reliability and add about an extra ten minutes to a round trip.

This would make it more costly to run the services and, although there would be some additional passengers this would be nowhere near enough to pay for the extra costs. The services use Queen Street because that's the area where passengers want to be. Over 50 per cent of journeys into the city centre are by bus proving how important they are to the success of the city. We still hope to find an answer and indeed we are in talks with both county and city council officers to come up with a solution. If it was straightforward, we would have done it by now, but it does involve quite a lot of bus movements 28 per hour in each direction.

Philip Kirk, Managing director, Oxford Bus Company