LET me reassure Sandy Cochrane (Letters, October 23) that I too really care about the future of Evesham, but I do resent being urged by councillors to take pride in the finished bridge.

It was the county council, after all, that indicated that the residents of Evesham would have a say in the design of the replacement bridge, then presented us with a fait accompli.

The same council 'consulted' us on the traffic arrangements to be adopted when the bridge was closed and presented us with terribly misleading diagrams of the main traffic flows.

They then did not have the courtesy of commenting on very detailed and reasoned submissions of other options, despite requests, until their favoured scheme was already operating.

They quite rightly assumed a six-month closure would be unpalatable for Evesham residents and businesses, so gave us a completely unrealistic expectation of an eight-week closure.

Professional engineers are trained to identify potential hazards and if at all possible to engineer them out before they become manifest.

It would have been easy to use dome-headed coach bolts instead of hexagon heads for the handrails, to fill gaps with softer elastic materials, and to plug the ends of exposed open-sections.

I ask the question, do the various councils really care about the town of Evesham?

How long has it taken to address the Workman Garden problem?

How can development of the country park realistically bring business to the town?

How long are we going to have to suffer the nonsense of an anticlockwise one-way system?

When will the council address the traffic problem in such a way as to use the full capacity of our second town river bridge, the Workman Bridge?

Dr AR Dowling

Evesham