WHILE it is good to see work start on improvements at one of Witney’s key road junctions, to ease a notorious bottleneck, it is hard to disagree with Councillor Duncan Enright’s call for urgent action to speed up improvements at the Shores Green junction on the A40.

Almost two years have passed since the Cogges Link Road was blocked after a public inquiry.

Yet we still seem no closer to a definite timetable for work to start to create slip roads at the western side of the Shores Green junction, turning it into a full interchange.

As we reported last month, the county council and landowner James Mawle are still in dispute over money which could help to pay for this scheme.

The council’s Witney Transport Strategy will look rather threadbare if this, one of its key elements, is not delivered soon, especially when the 1,000-home Witney West development is on the horizon and plans for a total of 2,000 more homes in Carterton are also in prospect, which will inevitably add to the pressure on roads in and around Witney.

That funding is in place for the new junction on the A40 at Downs Road is welcome but this will not address the issue of cross-town traffic that the Cogges Link Road was conceived to deal with.

We cannot afford another extended period of haggling over necessary road improvements while major housing developments continue to mushroom around us.