I BELIEVE that the “civic chiefs and town centre bosses” quoted in your paper may be over-optimistic about the benefits to Andover of planned A303 improvements.

Assuming that the primary thrust of the work will be to dual the single carriageway bottlenecks beyond Amesbury to give a dual carriage highway all the way to Exeter a likely effect will be to make the M3/A303 a much more viable alternative to the M4/M5 route to the West Country.

This is likely to greatly increase commercial and holiday traffic on the A303, which will, in turn, make Londonbound journeys more congested and increase the existing road noise problems for Andover and village residents living close to the A303.

Whilst there may be gains for those of us who want to drive west down the A303 to Stonehenge and beyond I believe these could be far outweighed by the increased traffic flow produced by the improvements.

Geoff Scard, Goodworth Clatford