Sir – Your lead article (March 3) called for a combination of switching off the lights and traffic calming in Frideswide Square. You are right: we should look again at doing something simpler.

The design being developed by the county council is expensive, ambitious, and — as is the way of these things — will probably not work as well as intended.

It doesn’t feel like the best of investments in these austere times. It’s perhaps worth remembering why the layout is so complicated — it isn’t to torment people, it’s because the junction gets so snarled up in the evening that there needs to be a protected route for buses going to the station. The lights also provide an all-day controlled route for pedestrians and cyclists to cross the square in reasonable safety.

So rather than switch off all the lights, I’d suggest a partial switch-off. Convert the main junction at the mouth of Hythe Bridge Street into a temporary roundabout, and use the roundabout to simplify the other two junctions, to make them as efficient as possible. At the moment the buses get held up in Park End Street, because of turning moves: if the exit from Worcester Street into Hythe Bridge Street was reopened, those lights could be straight-ahead only.

Similarly, the right turn out of the station could be removed. A partial switch-off would be relatively easy to implement, and could be done on an experimental basis. In time, the temporary roundabout should be changed to a low-speed continental design, and some of the roads narrowed.

Repaving the square could make it look wonderful, and change how people use it, but we shouldn’t let the landscape architects seduce us with their visions, when there are simpler alternatives that could be implemented now.

Richard Mann, Oxford