Sir - You are right (Editorial, February 15) - strategic planning' is degenerating into a lottery. The Government's latest initiative of inviting freestanding bids for eco towns' adds insult to injury.

Any proposal for a relatively small new settlement which is sited next to a motorway (and which presumably will be permitting its residents to own cars) is a non eco town by definition.

In Oxfordshire's case the intersection of the county's two biggest roads - the M40 and the A34 - is the worst possible place for a new settlement from the point of view of minimising car travel, and hence additional traffic and pollution. Support for a putative local rail service is all very well but a strategic red herring.

Research we conducted in the 1990s at the then new Ladygrove estate next to Didcot Parkway station revealed that barely ten per cent of its residents commuted by train. (And Weston Otmoor' is no Didcot Parkway!) What matters is how and where the other 90+ per cent travel to. With the M40 and A34 next door it does not require great sophistication to realise that it will be particularly attractive to people predisposed to car commuting and that their average journey distance will be very long. From this perspective only the other Oxfordshire candidate - at Shipton-on-Cherwell - should be allowed to enter the frame.

Peter Headicar, Reader in Transport, Department of Planning, Oxford Brookes University