IN your Comment on the introduction of average speed cameras on the A14 (July 26), you state that there is no longer any debate that speed kills. The number of deaths and serious injuries on the road has fallen since the introduction of the ordinary safe

IN your Comment on the introduction of average speed cameras on the A14 (July 26), you state that "there is no longer any debate that speed kills. The number of deaths and serious injuries on the road has fallen since the introduction of the ordinary safety cameras."

May I suggest that it is speed that is both excessive and inappropriate to the road conditions that is the problem, and that the effect of speed cameras on deaths and serious injuries is debatable.

There must already be four cameras on each carriageway between Spittals and Girton, so I doubt that average speed cameras are likely to make any significant difference.

Furthermore, I would be most interested to hear from the Highways Agency just how average speed cameras will cut back on tailgating.

It is significant that the majority of accidents on this stretch of road occur at peak times (or so I understand), and anyone who travels the road during those times will know only too well that it is highly unlikely you will be travelling anywhere near the speed limit because of traffic density and the high level of HGVs on the two-lane carriageways.

Why is it that the only solution put forward to improve safety is to install more cameras?

I strongly believe that road safety on the A14 between Spittals and Girton would be greatly improved by the exclusion of HGVs from lane two at peak times - if not at all times - and I don't think this would be too much to ask of HGV drivers.

After all, the distance we are talking about is no more than 10 miles.

Many times I have been driving along that road in lane two in heavy traffic, the speed of which is usually 56mph - the governed speed of most HGVs - when the space I have left in front of me for braking is taken up by an HGV pulling out to try to overtake the HGV in front of it, which is doing 55mph.

That is the major reason for tailgating on that road. Leave a space and it will immediately be occupied by someone pulling out.

So, Highways Agency and Cambridgeshire police, let's have a little more radical thinking. Don't just go for the easy option because it will make little difference.

And please don't go for the next easy option of reducing the speed limit - the problem is traffic density and a grossly inadequate road.

LIONEL THATCHER

High Street

Tilbrook

THE money being spent on the A14 improvements has been really necessary, but the £92million that has been found to fund the bus link from Huntingdon to Cambridge will prove to be a long-term white elephant.

The money would be better invested improving the A1 from Alconbury through to Baldock and, in particular, bypassing Buckden, Dillington and Southoe, to stop any further loss of life along this stretch of fast road that is not a motorway.

G SANSOM

Great North Road

Buckden