Sir – Two eastbound journeys made by road recently might provide food for thought.

For the first on a Tuesday, the A40 was closed at Cassington. Not that that is unusual and I used a back route but the interesting thing was the almost eerie quietness to the east of Oxford. It was like a Sunday of the Seventies. The second journey was on a Sunday and the A40 was as congested as ever.

My Sunday experience suggests that it is a seven day a week problem and my week-day journey suggests that a large part of the traffic is travelling not to Oxford but past it.

Before we get too excited about this or that solution, the traffic needs to be quantified: how many vehicles want to get to where? The commuter-targeted solutions may be attractive but we need some traffic surveys to identify what goes where before we bring in the excavators.

Ralph Ingham-Johnson
Witney