Sir – If one stands at Carfax and looks along Queen Street, it has indeed been visually improved, the pleasant brown roadway curving between the two broad black kerbs and showing off the reasonably attractive buildings to best advantage.

However, walking along the brown roadway reveals that it has already been ploughed up by the buses, making it a stony desert with elongated rocky black oases.

This failure will remind most readers of the lengthy Cornmarket saga, but keen regular readers will be reminded more of Frideswide Square, whose new surface also would not support buses, its primary purpose. It’s nice to have experts selecting attractive road surfaces, but it would be nicer still to have experts who could also assess in advance the practical requirements of the surface and make sure in advance that their proposal was suitable for the job.

Roger Moreton, Oxford