Sir – I applaud councillor Rodney Rose and our county council’s transport strategy department engineers for creative road safety experimentation with double yellow lines. Their blacking out is a dark moment in Oxford’s journey towards progressive and safer road design.

I’m an experienced road safety campaigner. But I’m at pains to imagine exactly what sort of “accident waiting to happen” councillor Ruth Wilkinson was concerned about with regard to experimental double yellow lines across a side road in Headington. Are there motorists out there so confused by a line that forbids them from parking perpendicularly across a side road that their driving would be dangerous? If so, shouldn’t they be as swiftly separated from their driving licence as the black paint was slapped down on the experimental lines?

And why remove all experimental double yellow lines, including the ones specifically requested by residents in Beechcroft Road in Summertown? Had this experiment been allowed to withstand criticism until the whingers and pedants got bored and went back to moaning about wheelie bins, the transport strategy department’s courage would be boosted to try further experiments to improve the lot of pedestrians.

Is there anyone out there who isn’t aware the “electric fence” effect? Motorists often treat pedestrians who cross over a double yellow as invaders into ‘their’ space. Pedestrians are often cowered or threatened by motorists when they step over the yellow “electric fence”, even when crossing a side-road where their priority over motorists is protected by the Highway Code.

So please, hug a road engineer. Then again, perhaps they don’t want a hug, but at least take time to find out what they’re thinking before making a fuss.

Our road engineers might seem unlikely heroes in our slow crawl towards a sustainable future; we need to allow them to be heroes, and they will be, so long as they’re not bullied by unenlightened citizens.

Ted Dewan, Oxford