ROAD safety has always been used as justification for Lancashire County Council's traffic-calming, but it now appears that most of the alleged road safety benefits may be false.

I recently read an article inferring that local cycling safety experts consider some of the new junctions so potentially dangerous that they advise cyclists to dismount and use the footpath.

County council spin doctors may be able to statistically prove that traffic-calming reduces death on the roads, but perhaps this is mainly due to the excellent paramedic ambulance service which has developed over the past few years alongside traffic calming.

I believe that the residents of Billington are still fighting a proposed traffic-calming scheme for their village, as about 90 per cent of them object to it on the grounds of commonsense road safety.

But the county council seems determined to allow the scheme to justify the provision of a new junction in a potentially dangerous location, despite a very similar application for a junction at this point being once turned down as it was considered far too dangerous.

Perhaps Billington holds the key to the true pedigree of traffic-calming. The Government has recently announced that it is considering charging tolls on major trunk routes, but any future private toll roads will probably fail (drivers will vote with their steering wheel) if practical alternative free routes are available. The section of the A59 by-pass between Langho and the A671 roundabout at Bramley Meade, Whalley, may be a prime target in a long-standing secret corporate plan for private toll roads, and Billington is on a practical alternative route, especially if you are travelling from Preston towards Burnley.

The same probably applies to the A666 at Darwen. It was once fairly easy to nip over Bull Hill, to Bolton and beyond, but that means avoiding the new M65 and M61, which are probably also earmarked as toll roads.

Any future toll road scheme may also include the section of the A59 from the A671 at Clitheroe Golf Club through past Chatburn.

And the glut of 'Keep Left' bollards probably make the roads far more expensive to maintain because all the heavy lorries and buses must run in almost exactly the same track.

Perhaps the A59 at Copster Green is the best local example of the extra wear and tear caused by the introduction of traffic-calming, even though the county council may be able to hide the frequent essential repairs by doing them at night, which probably increases the cost even further.

The increased road maintenance costs caused by traffic-calming may force the county council to actively consider charging tolls for major trunk routes. Corporate lobbyists may have tricked our elected representatives into supporting traffic-calming as a road safety measure, in order to make it very difficult, if not financially impossible, for them to resit the eventual privatisation of almost all major though trunk routes.

It may be that the previous Tory government lost many votes because of its open intention to charge tolls on motorways etc. Even though the present government appeared to have no such plans at the last General Election, perhaps the increasing financial burden on the NHS has forced them to seek extra sources of revenue.

Multinational businesses are the only probable winners with traffic-calming and toll roads. The larger national distribution companies will probably be able to negotiate vastly reduced roads access rates, but the local, smaller, companies will probably have to pay full price.

Perhaps it's the case that: Never in the field of local public services has so much taxpayers' money been wasted for the benefit of so few!

G PYE, Downham Road, Chatburn.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.