THERE is a growing conviction that people's worst fears about the new set of traffic lights at the junction of Victoria Avenue and Skipton Road are being realised.

In a country as traffic clogged as Britain, drivers are well used to waiting in jams, but there is a level of frustration - to use the famous pedantic grammar parody coined by Winston Churchill - 'up with which we will not put'.

To be stuck in a jam is bad enough, but when stationary drivers and passengers have to watch the lights repeatedly changing from green to red and back again while one car at a time is allowed to turn right into Victoria Avenue goes way beyond commonsense.

The ideal solution of course would be to widen the road, allowing a second lane to be constructed. Traffic waiting to turn would not then block the rest of the traffic driving into the centre of Ilkley.

Simple enough, until the dreaded word 'cost' is echoed along the ornate corridors of City Hall. So despite paying an arm and a leg each year in ever increasing Council Tax bills, the citizens of Ilkley will have to rule out the obvious and sensible in favour of the make-do-and-mend cheapo version of highway improvements. Highway officials are monitoring the situation and the likely solution will be a complete ban on turning right into Victoria Avenue.

However, people may wonder just how much it cost the highways department to install the speed bumps through the village of Burley Woodhead, and whether the money could have been put to better use. Was there any real need for such prominent bumps which, according to some reports, are leaving car drivers with repair headaches?

Some people would suggest that a simple 20mph speed restriction would have solved Burley Woodhead's problem, leaving enough money in the pot to properly solve the massive jams in Ilkley.