Sir - Following the scenes of chaos that resulted from the implementation of the AbITS scheme in Abingdon, the county council announced that it had commissioned an independent review of the system that was supposed to regulate traffic flows through the heavily congested market town (namely SCOOT, or the Split Cycle and Offset Optimisation Technique).

This study had been entrusted to the renowned Transport Research Laboratory, an internationally recognised centre of excellence.

This sounded good to me - until I learnt that TRL is one of the co-owners of the SCOOT system, and actually developed it a fact mentioned nowhere in the report submitted for consideration by the AbITS Members group, nor in any of the paperwork provided regarding this study. The county council has a poor record for not disclosing essential information and ignoring conflicts of interest.

I invite Mr Mitchell, who appears so frequently in your letter pages, to explain here how a report produced by the co-owners and developers of a specific traffic management system can be seen, by any stretch of the imagination, as unbiased and independent, and to explain why he and his cabinet colleagues allowed this to happen.

Abingdon residents have become increasingly sceptical of the county's motives, and tired of seeing funding diverted away from the town to support hugely expensive and much less urgent projects outside the Vale of the White Horse.

Michael Hocken, Abingdon