The outcome of the public-consultation exercise over the future of transport in the Aire Valley was hardly a resounding roar of approval for the Option B - the one which favours extra investment in public transport over a major road-building programme to eliminate the bottleneck which will be created near Cottingley when the Bingley relief road opens.

The opinions of a total of 59,691 households were supposed to be sought via a leaflet which turned out to be highly controversial because it was loaded in favour of Option B. In the event, there was still more controversy because of doubts about the extent of the distribution of the leaflet. The claim by Fauber Maunsell, who carried out the survey, that only 0.5 per cent of households didn't receive the questionnaire was at odds with the perception of many people that the figure must have been higher than that.

One of the reasons for that perception, right or wrong, has to be that the questionnaire produced only 3,169 replies, or little more than five per cent. That does indeed seem a disturbingly poor response to what has been a burning issue in the Aire Valley for many, many years.

Everyone who travels up and down the A650/AA657 corridor knows there is a major problem there. Just about everyone has a view about how it should be dealt with. So why did so few take the trouble to make that view known?

That perhaps is a question councillors should have tried harder to answer before agreeing that council officers should start developing a strategy based on an option favoured by barely three per cent of the households concerned, especially when they're likely to find that most recipients felt it was a foregone conclusion.