I FIND it difficult to believe that the quotation in your March 7 edition, “the city’s rail crossing was closed for more than 35 minutes in every hour” can be true for all hours of the day for all days of the week.

This has prompted me to write to you, because there seems to be a culture of minimal and even misleading information given to the Ely public.

For example, I cannot believe that councillors have not been given statistical breakdowns on the average queuing times for car-driving residents of Ely at different time intervals, different days plus the number and temporal distribution of the surveys used.

Those and more would have been required to make the decisions for the proposed bypass. However such in-depth statistics are not readily publicised for the public to consider.

Instead we have been treated to statements which tell us that if we were unlucky enough to drive up and down Stuntney Causeway for an hour we may have had to wait up to the order of 30 minutes.

I am a person who regularly uses Stuntney Causeway and even works close to it irregularly, both during and out of rush hours.

I am not interested in the amount of time that the principally non-local lorry drivers have to wait by the crossing gates as part of their ‘rat-run’, only how much time that I may be held up by them.

In my experience, which I admit is far from conclusive, I have never been working near to the road when the traffic has been stopped for one minute in every two minutes for an hour, the worst I have seen is about one minute in four or 15 minutes an hour, and that was an exceptional single occurrence.

Of course there may have been other exceptional examples which I missed but if I had the relevant statistics I would have a better idea!

I do think that the lack of complete information is a serious denigration of our local democracy and I have just noticed that it has continued with the advertising video of the finished bridge which fails to include the street lighting posts on the bridge nor gives us public a view of the cathedral past the bridge and the new roundabout (also not shown and also having lights) on which some objections are based.

I would hope that if the statistics and the plans are compelling the public would accept them but if not, maybe we would think that the cost, all the construction queues and all those objections aired by many societies and individuals were enough to reject the scheme.

Please give us Elysians a proper chance - we are sensible adults!

DR TERRY MOORE

Ely

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