• I AM well used to Camden making road changes which introduce new dangers for cyclists and or make life harder for public transport users, such as Tottenham Court Road and Gray’s Inn Road recently.

But I see that West­minster City Council are not going to be left behind.

I often travel through the Strand and Aldwych areas, north of Waterloo Bridge – by foot, bike, or bus – and have recently noticed lots of road works.

With some difficulty, I have tracked down a tiny map of what’s going on: Aldwych is to become two-way.

The area is currently a major bus interchange, with opportunities to “turn the corner” by, for example, changing between south-north routes and west-east routes via adjacent stops on the same side of the road.

However, under the new scheme, one of those currently available, easy, connections – for people arriving from the north, who want to head east – will disappear… unless you brave five lanes of traffic.

What makes this worse is the fact that this relates to the only one of the four “corner turns” which has no through bus route that could be taken to avoid needing to change there at all.

One interconnection which is being kept is between buses heading west from the area and those heading south.

However this will now happen on the inside of the arc of Aldwych, where, according to the gobbledygook of the planners, this will “activate the pavement”.

Haven’t they noticed that the pavement there, outside India House, is frequently “activated”, with demonstrations?

The idea that there would be any possibility at all of getting on and off buses at stops, literally, in the middle of one of these demonstrations shows how little the scheme’s designers know of the existing use of the area.

And I note that despite the heavy cycle traffic through the area, the new design of Aldwych fails to include such basic measures as segregated cycle lanes.

And this means we’ll have to continue to get through the junction dangerously mixed in with motor vehicles as now.

ALBERT BEALE
Little Russell Street, WC1