At the end of a letter last week was the comment “The Town Council needs to do something. We deserve some improvement in our traffic system”.

This is exactly where the Historic Core Zone project began in January 2008. In January 2012 the HCZ working group was set up. This was not a scheme to lessen the amount of traffic, nor was it intended to slow vehicles down. It was about making drivers more aware of all the other road users.

At the same time street clutter would be removed, some parts of pavements widened, crossing distances for pedestrians narrowed and generally everything smartened up. Much of the problem with the project latterly stemmed from the plan to remove the zebra crossing in Market Street and replace it with a modern courtesy crossing, with three more elsewhere in the town centre. We tried hard to keep the zebra. When it came to it the town council had no say in the matter, we could have the four crossings with no zebra or no scheme at all.

A petition with more than 1,000 signatures against the removal of the zebra crossing was sent to Cllr John Thompson, head of highways in Wiltshire, who decided that the solution would be decided by a town poll. The rest we know.

As a town council, we responded to the problem brought to us in 2008. We have worked for many, many hours with different companies, organisations, consultants and engineers. An innovative scheme was produced. These things are quite new in Britain and always go through a process of change and tweaking after installation.

In this case we made sure that the wiring for the Belisha beacons would have been kept in place, just in case. Traffic schemes are designed by terribly safety-conscious people – highways engineers don’t do things which will make a bad situation worse.

Now we are where we are. It’s no use blaming ‘No’ voters, Wiltshire Council or the experts – we had a vote in a democratic society and one side got more votes than the other. Now we have to come back to the problem. What can we do? Perhaps the real problem with this scheme was that it didn’t do anything about the traffic itself, even though it wasn’t designed to.

Bradford on Avon is a lovely, lively town full of people with all sorts of ideas. Maybe there are some answers out there, some off-the-wall idea that would make a difference. Maybe we just have to learn to live with it as they do in Bath and Bristol and many other towns. Let’s see if we can actually do something, somehow. If anybody has a good idea, jot it down with as much detail as you can, drop it in to the town council, post it there or send it by email to mrjohnpotter@hotmail.co.uk It doesn’t matter if you voted YES or NO. Let’s see what happens, I will respond as quickly as possible and somehow collate everything for further discussion.

Cllr John Potter (LibDem), Mayor of Bradford on Avon.