Okay, I’m going to ask this just one more time before the roads of Cheshire East become one gigantic traffic jam.

Where is the infrastructure to support all the housing projects taking place?

You don’t have to be a civil engineer to work out that roads already insufficient for current traffic will become impossible when the flow increases by 50 per cent.

Stanneylands Road in Wilmslow has been a dangerous winding bottleneck for years. It doesn’t need a fortune teller to see that an extra 300 houses with an average of two cars per home is going to create chaos.

Gunco Lane in Macclesfield has one of the most dangerous junctions in the county where heated arguments between drivers are a daily occurrence. Adding another 120 houses less than 100 meters from that junction is an act of stupidity.

Around Cheshire East the list is endless with one development after another being rushed to completion with absolutely no indication of how the infrastructure will cope.

Central government are making £500,000 available for road improvements in Cheshire East, which is £200,000 less than the council spent investigating its own top management team.

That gives some indication of the importance they give to providing public services. It’s a question I posed last year to our council leader who told me the official policy was to build first and consider infrastructure later. Which is akin to damning a major river then building a reservoir later.

In my younger days I believed politicians were wiser and better informed than the general public and could be trusted to make sensible decisions. Sadly, my experience has changed that perception.

If no one at Cheshire East Council can work out that building thousands of new houses without any simultaneous completion of infrastructure is going to create chaos then what hope is there?

This is supposed to be the Northern Powerhouse, for goodness sake or was that just Gorgeous George blowing hot air through his dayglo safety hat?

I’m guessing a horse and cart will be as good a way as any to get around Cheshire in the future.

HERE COMES HS2 OR DOES IT?

I DO hope John Bishop gets some great new comedy material out of the HS2 project. The whole thing is a joke.

You may recall the government’s obsession with Concorde in the 1970’s which was going to transform air travel… and it did for a tiny minority who could afford the enormous cost of a ticket.

In reality Concorde was a vanity project that did nothing for anyone other than politicians and the rich and famous who were able to cross the Atlantic at twice the speed of sound. For the average family Concorde was as relevant to their lives as Sputnick. The entire Concorde fleet was retired in 2003 without benefitting a single working family.

It was Freddie Laker who gave the public access to air travel with his Sky Train bringing ticket prices within the reach of the average traveller and the rest is history.

Sky Train did nothing for the prestige of politicians but an awful lot for families and businesses giving them affordable access to new destinations.

I suspect HS2 will be no more than another vanity project from which few will benefit. The reduced time taken to travel from London to Manchester will be pointless to those wishing to alight at Crewe, Macclesfield and Wilmslow.

The premium cost of tickets on HS2 is likely to be beyond all but a small minority of passengers who, for various reasons, do not wish to travel with the general public. I doubt shaving 40 minutes off their journey will transform our fortunes.

Surely the Billions put aside for HS2 could be better used improving the service and reducing the cost of rail transport to enable more people to travel by train instead of our overcrowded roads.

At the moment we are rattling along ancient track on crowed outdated trains paying inflated prices for our tickets. Transforming that scenario would make more sense than building Concorde on wheels for a select few.

WHO ARE THE REAL CRIMINALS?

A KNUTSFORD lady was recently jailed for 20 months for stealing £13,530 from the bank account of two elderly ladies. A despicable crime fuelled by her own greed that brought anguish and distress to her victims.

This lady was named and shamed in court and in the local and national press. She has been forced to acknowledge her selfish actions.

It does however leave me wondering just what sort of justice system we have when senior bankers lost billions of customers’ money while eagerly inflating their own bonuses and pensions. The enormity of their deception left taxpayers to bail out UK banks to the tune of £850 billion.

And here’s where I have a problem. How many of those bankers were named and shamed in a court of law or faced a lengthy spell in jail?

The law (rightfully) came down hard on the lady convicted of stealing £13k but for wealthy bankers with influential friends and millions squirrelled away I see no such justice.

You can send your stories to Vic at vicbarlow@icloud.com

By Guardian columnist Vic Barlow