Sir – Bus Users UK, Oxford Civic Society and Oxfordshire Unlimited want public transport to meet needs identified by impartial professional research.

People who want to remove buses from more of central Oxford and cram them into fewer streets further from each other cite no evidence except personal distaste for the presence of a bus.

This last decade the EU has cut bus emissions enormously. It seems unlikely that High Street’s recent emissions increases are the buses’ fault. St Aldate’s air quality was improving steadily until 2009, when the countycCouncil gratuitously moved most of Queen Street’s buses there.

The Department for Transport’s Inclusivity Guidelines cite academic data that many disabled people cannot walk more than 200 metres to catch a bus, and many able-bodied people will not bother if it is more than 250 metres. Bus stops in Magdalen Street are 400-plus metres from those in St Aldate’s.

The county council wants to close St Aldate’s two cramped, awkward stops nearest Carfax, and substitute new ones further downhill, 600 metres from Magdalen Street. Westgate’s proposed John Lewis would be 800 metres from Magdalen Street, with only one small bus every 70 minutes linking them.

Several minutes’ walk to change buses or complete one’s journey, in all weathers, with children or shopping, makes many people drive instead. High-volume, high-emission car congestion in roads including Beaumont, Worcester and Park End Streets and Longwall is partly due to banning buses from Cornmarket and Queen Street. Even in congestion, cars give seamless travel with no changes of vehicle. Public transport must rival that as closely as possible to maximise modal shift away from cars.

“Little trains” in Cornmarket would only maintain the blunder of making passengers change twice instead of reinstating through routes to restore direct travel plus one-change connections at conveniently adjacent stops.

Hugh Jaeger, Bus Users UK Oxford Group, Oxford