Letter of the day: Proceed with caution and ignore public opinion at your peril

Apparently these plans have been kicking around since last February and yet I haven’t seen these plans in our local newspaper until now.

These plans are only about this road proposal that has came up once before, and was never implemented, and was before this present administration took charge.

What this report doesn’t say is, when do the biggest stakeholders in this city, we, the residents, get to have our say on these proposals?

We haven’t yet seen how our own council’s new road and housing ‘masterplans’ are going to work or how soon they are likely to come to fruition.

I would also point out that there are local elections next year, so l would urge the council and the university not to ignore public consultation, and try not to use inflammatory language like pandering to car users.

Students are static, they are all basically in one place in the city.

I’m sure we would all like to have jobs in the city, but unfortunately that’s not the case and visitors and tourists need their cars to get about our fine city, otherwise there will be more jobs lost.

Lastly, the last time we had these once-in-a-lifetime ambitions the council employed Lord Esher, and we were told the city must have more office space.

Look what’s happened to that – those buildings have been demolished and replaced with something else, even the civic offices are only being used for two thirds of its intended use.

What other surprises the university has in store for us we shall have to wait and see.

After all, we all need to get around our crowded city as I have said before and if it was an easy problem to sort out it would have been done long ago.

Proceed with caution and ignore public consultation and opinion at your peril.

John Cass

Twyford Avenue, Portsmouth