FOLLOWING the changes in traffic and pedestrian management in Fore Street, Okehampton, we are perhaps being lulled into a sense of false security.

We are approaching the busiest time of the year but Okehampton cannot afford to lose a single customer. Hard questions now need to be answered. They include:

1. Has business been affected in the town by the delays in the traffic flows? Are our customers going to Tavistock, Launceston with their large free supermarket car parks, easier accessibility and lack of traffic lights; or even Exeter? We are in direct competition with these and other towns and customers have a choice. Did our traffic managers take this in to account? Statistics need to be gathered from local traders and calculations done now before it is too late. This is the quietest time of the year and at certain times of the day the congestion seems significantly worse than before. Things can only get worse.

2. Have the people of Okehampton got what they want?

3. Are the roads any safer as a result? I detect more acceleration between traffic lights resulting in greater danger to pedestrians.

4. There is now a call for a northern relief road. Should we not have built this first and narrowed the main street afterwards?

It is always easy to criticise and my aim is to be constructive. Like the proverbial curate's egg the changes are not all bad and I am sure are very well intentioned but, if our traffic managers have got it wrong, it will not be them that will pay for it but Okehampton businesses.

What promises to be an exceptional and desperately needed summer's trading will slip quietly away and our much abused town will regain its unenviable reputation for traffic jams.

We should, perhaps, consider at the very least going back to two lanes of traffic at the western approach.

Richard Leonard

Menfreya

Thorndon Cross

I'M worried about David Bagshall and his simple arithmetic. This is the third time (Letters February 28) he's put up this daft assertion that traffic, in each of Okehampton's four town-centre roads, only moves once an hour.

If, as I suspect, his opinions are based on the comparative isolation and peace of Broadbury, I would just ask him to spare a thought for we who live, walk and cross busy roads in Okehampton town centre, many of whom are elderly or with young children, who at least have a sporting chance of knowing where the next lot of traffic is coming from.

In contrast 'Good on you, Dave Goodwin' (following letter, same issue) for putting Cllr Hill's hype on traffic in Exeter Road into perspective.

Zoe Bradshaw

March Court Cottage, East Street

Okehampton