As a resident of Paxcroft Mead, it was with total disbelief when I recently realised what they were doing to the A361 between Paxcroft Mead and the new roundabout for the Hilperton Gap road.

I’m guessing whoever made the decisions does not live on Paxcroft Mead, as they would have realised it was a bad idea from the start. Currently in the mornings, traffic queues at the exit of Leap Gate and is solid all the way up the left-hand lane of the A361 and along Hilperton Road. This leaves the right-hand lane clear for those who are heading to Hilperton and on to Bath.

It appears that someone has made the decision to make this bottleneck worse by narrowing the A361 to one lane by the new roundabout. This will cause absolute chaos in the morning traffic. I’m sure they will come back with the comment that suddenly all the traffic will decide to go down Leap Gate and out into West Ashton. Yes I expect some will, even though I fail to see why they have decided to route heavy traffic past two schools and a nursery.

However a lot of the morning traffic ends up going down Victoria Road, and with the best will in the world, they are not going to travel down Leap Gate, along West Ashton Road, and back along Hilperton Road to get to Victoria Road.

In fact to avoid the traffic, I imagine cars that want to go to Bath will now turn right out of Leap Gate go down to Devizes Road, through the older part of Hilperton, and then pick up the A361 at The Lion and Fiddle pub and go through Staverton, thus avoiding the bottleneck and the new gap road.

That will also allow them priority at the roundabout by the Kings Arms pub over all the lorries that will now be trying to turn left off the B3106 by the Marina.

Matt Grant, Paxcroft Mead, Trowbridge.