READING the Echo (20/10) about the £2.6m being made available to Bournemouth to improve Wallisdown Crossroads gave me a sense of déjà-vu. Whatever happened to the last lot of funding they received back in 1999?

There was a public consultation (three days at Wallisdown Methodist Church) in October that year, following previous consultations, and options put forward - then virtually nothing!

A pelican crossing on Kinson Road and the traffic lights and crossing at the junction of Mossley Avenue and Alder Road (paid for from the Poole allocation for the scheme) is all that was delivered.

This is despite a site having been cleared several years previously at the crossroads that was to be divided between a permanent library and making the roundabout bigger. It now sells top of the range cars. This latest change follows Poole's scrapping of the mobile library stop in 2015.

Some of the ideas put forward in 1999 included incorporating parts of Mossley Avenue, Bryant Road, and the Wallisdown shops in a giant gyratory system. Thankfully that was scrapped that time, but are we likely to see more overkill in the 2017 plan? It seems that the latest ideas are not being shared.

Back in the mid-1980s, with the help of a group of local residents, I put forward an alternative plan to improve Wallisdown Road between Canford Avenue and Alton Road. There were 20 recommendations that including turning lanes, crossing facilities, and bus lay-bys. They all look like they would still significantly help traffic flow more than 30 years later, and would cost well under the £2.6m being talked about now, but only three of the recommendations have ever seen the light of day - one of them in a different form.

Surely we need an open discussion and public consultation on the options for the latest project, and also ideas to sort out the problems further along at the Mountbatten Arms Roundabout. I could add an affordable recommendation to help there if I repeated the 1980s exercise today, based on being an actual user of the road. The savings could be used to sort out other pinch points in the area!

TONY TRENT (former Poole Councillor for Alderney)

FRASER ROAD, WALLISDOWN