I have often thought that our councilors do not communicate with each other. Now I know why.

They sit in air-conditioned offices, turn off telephones, ignore emails and develop their self-important departmental quangos. It makes me wonder if they ever see daylight, let alone venture into the real world.

These are the people who encourage us to ditch our cars and climb on to our rusty cycles to have a healthy, pollution- and traffic-free journey into this glorious city of ours.

They give us cycle lanes and wide bus lanes to use, then along comes another empire building councillor who, incredibly, allows more than 350 private hire cabs to use these bus/cycle lanes.

It rather defeats the object and right hand, left hand springs to mind. Can these people ever learn to communicate?

The Greens want to put an air monitor outside the Town Hall for Joe Public to read the high levels of pollution (which currently exceed European safe levels).

Councillors have brought in legislation to fine taxi drivers for allowing engines to run for more than one minute, and then guess what? Some councillors want tot flood the town with cabs!

Who are these blinkered, shortsighted people? As if there isn't enough traffic in Oxford.

No doubt this flood of cabs will join those already nose to tail in High Street, competing against buses and coaches for space and polluting those of us who work in the city.

Petrol may be lead free, but diesel isn't. It is full of toxins which are spewed out from buses, coaches and taxis queued up around our city.

I work in Queen Street, laughingly called a pedestrian area - there seem to be as many buses as pedestrians! Traffic fumes cling to my clothes and my lungs complain of the soot!

A pedestrian area, a traffic-free city, ha! Work together, councillors, wake up and smell the coffee, but then again the aroma is no doubt suppressed by the diesel and lead cloud which hangs over our city and is slowly polluting us all with its toxins and poisons.

James Hayes, Gordon Woodward Way, Oxford