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 70s. The second journey was on a Sunday and the A40 was as congested as ever. Letters in your column approach the A40 problem as one of commuters trying to get to Oxford but my two journeys suggest otherwise. 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