Stop meddling with our city’s roads

ONCE again Cardiff councillors have raised congestion charges.

This time they say it’s about pollution, so who is to blame for this situation? Well I believe the same people who are proposing these charges have orchestrated this situation over many years.

If you look at Cardiff councillors’ policies since the 1970s, they have constantly been meddling and, rather than finding a solution, have constantly made things worse.

During the last few years things have got much worse, because they are constantly finding ways to interfere with the flow of traffic. They’ve altered traffic-light sequencing, put in bus lanes which are unused for many hours every day and cycle lanes that rarely see a cycle.

With potholes not being repaired, yet Tarmac is piled on roads, turning main roads into 20mph zones just looks like a sick joke.

The councillors say that Cardiff citizens would be exempt from the charges: this is probably to make it more palatable and everybody would be charged later. This council has form when it comes to bending the truth – how many times have they moved the date for the bus station?

When it comes to fleecing the motorist, they know no bounds. We were told money from traffic offences was ring-fenced for road improvements. Anybody know where those millions of pounds were spent?

They sell many more resident parking permits than they have spaces for – who else could sell more than 400 parking permits yet supply less than 60 spaces for those permits, as in the street where I live?

If this council is seriously concerned about pollution, why do they allow property speculators to build tower blocks that look like a two-year-old designed them with a Lego set? Property speculators also often look for permission to cut down very mature trees, which take pollutants from the air.

Cardiff is supposed to be a capital city yet the council has reduced it to only having one through road. This will soon be reduced again to just one lane in each direction, more like a road through a small town or maybe even a village.

Let’s hope when the next council elections come round there are people with a better idea of how things could be done and not just see the motorist as a piggy bank. Many more years of this lot and all the goods delivered to the shops will be arriving by horse and cart or rickshaw.

Mr Francis Spragg Cardiff