The traffic lights were switched off and all flowed smoothly.

This was exactly what many of us predicted would happen at Oxford’s Frideswide Square. Work has begun on rebuilding this busy junction and set to last an astonishing five months.

That lights cause delay and congestion is obvious to all but our blinkered traffic engineers.

The couple of occasions when the lights broke down at Frideswide Square had demonstrated this to the satisfaction of most.

The arrangements at the square were, of course, an absurdity from the very start, with the vast number of movements permitted to vehicles and pedestrians leading to inevitable delays.

Nothing was more idiotic, and obvious as such from the very start, than the ridiculously short time permitted for westward-bound traffic to cross into the square from Park End Street.

Long queues of buses were a perennial feature there, with only two of them, at a push three, able to cross in those brief and infrequent periods that the traffic lights were at green.

As a result, a journey home to Osney from town for me was almost always quicker on foot.

Since the weekend switch-off, and the provision of new roundabouts at each end of the square, I have crossed through it on foot, on my bike, on buses and at the wheel of my car, on each occasion with significantly less trouble than would have been the case before.

Given this instant cure to the problem, it seems odd that so much money (nearly £6m) is being lavished on the revamp.

Odder still in the opinion of this layman is that the job is set to last so very long, a very precise 43 weeks.

Rome wasn’t built in a day, I know, but Frideswide Square isn’t Rome and we are talking about almost a year...