LETTER: Money but only for existing A27

Sadly I suspect that this stipulation will not provide a long term solution to the problems which beset the existing route, nor will it provide value for money.

The existing route around Chichester is a tired and worn out scheme too deeply embedded in the suburban infrastructure.

What is required is wit and imagination not intransigence from Highways England and the Secretary of State for Transport and probably the local councils.

The ancient city of Chichester deserves a well designed, imaginative and effective bypass system.

If, in order to achieve such a scheme it strays into the National Park, so be it.

There are ways and means of disguising roads by the use of cuttings and tunnels. We have the technology, and if it costs a little more, it may well be better value in the long term than continuing to prop up a failed existing route.

Certainly the chaos and confusion which is bound to ensue along the existing route while ill considered improvements are implemented is frightening to contemplate.

I lived in Chichester before 1968 and the existing route was a mess and it still is.

Now that I have returned, I just hope that sometime in the next 50 years common sense will prevail and a new approach will be taken to relieve the city and its surroundings of this superimposed burden by the unimaginative and the immovable on the unfortunate.

Barry Jenner RIBA

Longley Road

Chichester