I READ with both amusement and annoyance, not in equal measure I hasten to add, at the article you published in last week’s Andover Advertiser entitled: “Cycle route views sought”.

For those many Andoverians who regularly write to your paper lambasting Test Valley Borough Council for “not listening” to any of their varied and numerous problems I immediately concluded that any attempt to submit views to Test Valley on their so-called “improved cycle network” would be an exercise in futility and pointlessness!

Their minds have already been made up.

Much better to vent anger by writing to the Andover Advertiser, which at least generates the oxygen of local publicity!

I watched a House of Commons debate live on TV last week where Robert Goodwill, the minister with responsibility for cycling, was embracing the Government’s record on integrated cycle routes.

I listened to it with increasing incredulity.

There is nothing integrated about the cycleways currently around Andover, as I have written about in the Andover Advertiser over the last few months, nor the insane bi-directional one soon to be hoisted upon us poor residents of Weyhill Road. All the residents of Weyhill Road will miss the numerous trees to be uprooted and many of the grass verges, which will be tarmacked over.

I am a cyclist of many years but I will never cycle on a pavement where elderly people or parents with toddlers are going about their daily routine. It is simply unsafe and unfair on all pedestrians.

Sight lines on many of the driveways on Weyhill Road will also result in incidents involving drivers reversing out and colliding with cyclists, who rarely, if ever, have their lights on.

Alan Turner, Weyhill Road, Andover