I AGREE with Keith Brooks’s letter (Oxford Mail, December 3) that the A34 congestion problem needs to be dealt with, but would have to disagree with his reasoning. The high volume of light traffic currently using it is the problem, not the goods vehicles.

For those not local, or getting older like myself, the A34 as it now exists was ‘dualled’ as part of the national Trunk Road Network, the idea at that time was to keep as much heavy traffic away from small towns and villages from Hampshire to the Midlands by building task specific roadways, including the M40 for hauling freight and goods. The current A34(T) sees far too much local light traffic being forced to use a trunk road, originally designed to do something else entirely.

Road transport takes most of the raw materials and finished goods into and out of most factories, so the ‘use the railways’ argument, regularly quoted by one of my local Lib Dem councillors simply doesn’t hold water, unless of course all the factories, mills and quarries are handily placed next to a railway line. If not, it would follow that you’ll always need HGVs to actually ship stuff to and from rail terminals. And trunk routes that avoid small towns and villages are therefore a great idea.

Oxfordshire (Highways) has always failed to provide us with ‘the missing link’ to the dualled ring road around Oxford itself, by simply including and relying on a large local section of the A34, rather than stump up and build a looping western ring road extension route linking Hinksey Hill and Pear Tree.

In addition, the dualling of the A40 from Oxford to Witney would go far to relieve much of the pressure on the exhausted A40 here at the north of the city. Instead we’re getting traffic lights, guaranteeing the whole shooting match will be clogged up and congested even more. These cracks are far too big to continue papering over, especially with the Northern Gateway on the horizon.

Same problem, different solutions? I do concede that the 7.5-tonne maximum restrictions for lane two of dual carriageways in some areas of the country are a very good idea, but not for the entire A34, where the trucks simply have to be.

DAVID WILLIAMS, David Walter Close, Oxford