IN your last issue (Courier, October 3) you showed pictures of people enjoying the sunshine as they walked over the new relief road. In the same issue, you included a picture of the Mayor and Councillor Way and two Devon County councillors unveiling a plaque to mark its opening. It is a good time to examine the benefits and costs of the road, which has been such a contentious issue. I have found that it is always useful to investigate who benefits when there are different views of a subject. Now I know that there are different ways of interpreting benefit. They include financial, health, convenience and environment and I will consider each. FINANCIALLY The relief road may benefit some of the HGV owners based in, delivering to or collecting from the industrial estate, by shortening the journeys in time and distance. Whether this is a financial gain depends on whether additional fuel is used for the hill climb. It may benefit Tesco by bringing more customers from the side of Crediton who might otherwise go to Morrisons. Tesco did provide a contribution towards the cost of building the road. It will benefit the Downes Estate financially considerably by opening up access on the hillside to a site earmarked by Mid Devon District Council for housing development. The financial benefit to the Downes Estate has not been quantified. And I expect that Devon County Council (DCC) has bought the land from them through which the road runs and the developers will contribute much more to the landowners. DCC received Pinch Point funding of £2.96 million towards the road. To this they should have been able to draw on the contribution required from Tesco when they received planning permission. CONVENIENCE In 2006 South West Water Authority proposed to close Exeter Road for six weeks to allow them to carry out work on the sewers lying under the road. After protests, they discovered that they could drill under Four Mills Lane and thereby avoid the inconvenience to Exeter Road users of diverting round by Bickleigh Bridge. The new road provides an alternative route into Crediton if Exeter Road is closed for maintenance or by an accident. Those travelling to Exeter from Sandford and the Sandford side of Crediton can avoid hold-ups in Mill Street and Exeter Road by taking the new road. They may find that they are held up at the bottom of Jockey Hill or at the Blagdon/Exhibition Road junction, because these pinch points have not been improved. Users of the A377 may remember times when the road was blocked by flooding and consider that this difficulty could have been reduced if the road had been taken along the Creedy valley. HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT The new road may reduce pollution in Exeter Road, Charlotte Street, East Street and Mill Street and reduce the adverse effect on the health of those exposed to the rotten air in that region. DCC have predicted that traffic along the High Street will not be reduced, so the harmful air quality in the High Street region to which many people are exposed, will not be improved. So, summing up the pros and cons. Tesco and the Downes Estate will benefit financially, HGV users may save time and fuel, and DCC have contributed about £4 million to the construction costs. It is impossible to give an accurate figure for this, because DCC have not published their final costs nor indicated how these could be justified in a business plan. The need for a Crediton Bypass was first identified in the 1930s. It was recommended after a public consultation exercise at Paignton in 1991, but thrown out later on the grounds that Crediton did not satisfy criteria for bypasses which had been changed by the Tory government. It seems that both Tory-controlled DCC and MDDC are more concerned about satisfying landowners and Tesco, than about the health of Crediton people. National figures are that about 29,000 people die prematurely each year from the effects of air pollution. The figure for Crediton is probably about three. Sadly DCC say that the Crediton problem is solved, so there is little chance of getting them to spend more, and they have shot their fox by removing the protection previously given to the route of a bypass. John Boyle Wescott Fordton Crediton P.S. One good thing about the "relief road" is the view that you get at the top of the hill when you have driven up from the Crediton side.