Letter: Many ways money could be better spent than on a bypass

Here in North Shropshire we have our own infallible guide: when things are going well the people of Llanymynech and Pant renew their long-standing campaign for a bypass. But of course it is not their money involved. It's the taxpayers.

Some years ago I became involved in a heated debate in these columns when it was argued that the high rate of road accidents in Pant justified such a scheme. My suspicions were aroused and I questioned the statistics.

Lo and behold it turned out the grisly record of the Llynclys crossroads had most misleadingly been included in the Pant/Llanymynech figures, when of course this junction belongs to another village entirely.

Since then, as driving standards have risen and the UK's casualty figures per mile have become the envy of the rest of the developed world, Pant remains, as it was then, a virtually accident free zone.

My protagonist back then was a local resident called Stan Brown. I return to the fray, and if Stan is still around I look forward to locking horns with him again.

It would, of course, be lovely for the people of Pant and Llanymynech to have their villages transformed into a rural idyll, not least because the value of every house in the area would rocket overnight. It might even see private developers do something to relieve the ghastly urban sprawl of which roadside Pant mainly consists.

But I can think of many things, in a still-straitened economy, on which the huge amount of taxpayers' money involved would be better spent. Life enhancing cancer drugs available elsewhere in Europe, more nurses, more teachers, up-grading the A5/A483 between Shrewsbury and Ruabon; the list is endless.

Above all, building bypasses does not save lives, as the Oswestry bypass so tragically demonstrated. When traffic crawled through the town, nobody got hurt. Now it speeds round the edge, and people die.

Exactly the same argument prevails in Llanymynech and Pant, where property owners would become the only true beneficiaries. Let us not forget that the road was there long before any of the houses.

Villagers should head off down the A21 between the M25 and the south coast. There an endless succession of really picturesque villages – something Pant clearly is not – are sliced by a highway carrying four times the traffic endured by Pant. There the people have long come to realise that only in Utopia will such problems be resolved by building bypasses.

Sam Evans, Oswestry