Sir The county council has withdrawn a plan to convert a pavement outside St Ebbe's School in Whitehouse Road to shared use for pedestrians and cyclists. All able-bodied children should be encouraged to walk or cycle safely to school, both for their healthy development and for everyone's environment. However, shared use pavements are not the way to safer cycling.

Whether as a pedestrian or a cyclist I find Oxford's shared-use paths threatening and dangerous, and the alternative of a path divided with a white line between walkers and bicycles is equally bad. But to each objection to the Whitehouse Road scheme the county's officers replied "Existing use of the footway by cyclists has not shown there to be a problem".

Tell that to numerous pedestrians and cyclists who have collided with each other on footways!

Many car drivers already want cyclists to stay off carriageways to let them drive as fast as they like. Shared paths and divided paths encourage this attitude. Such schemes can make both footways and carriageways more dangerous.

How about a 20mph zone including Whitehouse and Marlborough Roads? 20mph zones protect not only pedestrians and cyclists, but also motorcyclists the most vulnerable road users and car users.

A Transport Research Laboratory survey of such zones reports "average speeds reduced by 9mph, annual accident frequency fell by 60 per cent, the overall reduction in child accidents was 67 per cent, and there was an overall reduction in accidents to cyclists of 29 per cent."

Sadly, few people obey 20mph zones unless they include traffic calming, and most traffic calming is a menace in itself. Chicanes, for example, are made dangerous by drivers ignoring traffic priority signs and intimidating oncoming road users.

Many Oxfordshire speed humps breach Institute of Highways Incorporated Engineers' guidelines for motorcycle safety by being either at junctions, or at entrances to traffic calming zones. Some old humps laid before the guidelines changed in 1996 would be illegal if laid now.

They are too high, too steep, or use dangerously slippery materials but the county cannot afford to remake them to modern safety standards.

Residential side roads should be designed to limit speeds to 20mph without turning carriageways into obstacle courses.

Hugh Jaeger, Oxford