SEVEN years ago, the year of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, many residents in the village where I live joined together to plant a wood.

My husband and daughters were among them.

Jubilee Wood is growing well and looks lovely all year round. It is brimming with wildlife - we have seen deer grazing in there - and has a path all the way around it which attracts people out for a walk.

Now, however, much of it is to be felled to make way for a road. Not an entirely new road, but two extra lanes and a slip road added to the existing, perfectly decent road, to save people time.

Why? I really don’t know. In the 15 years that I have lived there, driving at all times of day - often in rush hour - I have not been held up for more than five minutes on the stretch of road in question.

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Do we need this new road? I would say no more than we need a third runway at Heathrow airport or a new north-south railway line across that will also cut through the countryside and do nothing more than to shave a few minutes off current journey times.

I am hoping it won’t go ahead. Like a lot of other people I was thrilled by the news that plans to expand Heathrow were ruled illegal by the Court of Appeal, as ministers did not adequately take into account the Government’s commitments to reducing emissions to tackle climate crisis.

As a knock on effect, plans for a massive road-building programme - including, fingers crossed, the road near me - could also be challenged in the courts for breaching the UK’s laws on climate change.

We storm ahead with road building schemes, while what we should be doing is looking after the roads we have got. Those near me are like the surface of Mars. Recently, I was staggered to witness a huge council lorry turn up, a team get out and fix ONE pothole, leaving the other 7,000 to live another day.

We also need to create more cycle lanes. We are so massively behind other European countries like Germany and Holland, where cyclists really are valued. There, they have wide, plentiful cycle lanes in most urban areas. Here, cyclists are often relegated to tiny channels marked out at the side of roads, with grates, gullies, rubbish and other hazards at regular intervals.

And we should be planting more trees not chopping them down. Many seem oblivious to the fact that trees are better for the environment than cars.

For decades the main solution to the UK’s congested roads has been to build more. A review by Highways England published last year found that, overall, dozens of roads were more congested as a result of road building.

It has been proved that when a new road is built, new traffic will divert onto it.

Around 30 per cent of the UK’s carbon emissions come from vehicles on our roads, including 18 per cent just from cars. Road transport emissions have increased in the last 20 years despite improvements in technology - largely because people are driving more. Building more roads isn’t going to encourage people to use alternative methods of transport.

We perpetuate the ‘car is king’ attitude by building more and more roads.

I drive a car,and I am not about to stop using it, but I would use my bike far more often did I not have to take my life in my hands every time I get on it.

I would like to see the trees in my local wood mature. Maybe when the diggers arrive I will chain myself to the branches.