I WAS surprised to see the letter from Henry Pettinger praising the activities of Bradford Council in gritting his route to work – Grateful for true grit (Keighley News, February 15).

I can assure him that had he lived where I do and not on a south-facing development, so new that the only map it appears on is the planning application, he wouldn’t have been able to drive to work in an ordinary car on any of the icy days this winter.

There was a time not so many years ago when I could look out from an upstairs window in the early hours of any cold morning in winter and see considerable activity at the salt depot on Bradford Road and the presence of numerous flashing amber lights on the streets of Keighley, but not any more.

There rarely seems any activity at that depot and even more rarely more than one set of amber flashing lights in my field of view. Where have all those gritting wagons gone? Sold off to raise money or merely deployed to the centre of Bradford?

I can’t actually recall seeing a gritter on Thwaites Brow Road (not even on the bus route) since one gritter ended up jammed sideways across the road outside the Parkfield Care Home a year or two back. A telling example of the danger of driving on steep untreated hills.

Modern gritting methods continue to astound me. On the local bus route how on earth do they manage to spread the grit so thinly that there is no undissolved salt left on the roadway and in such a narrow pattern that none of it ends up on the pavements at the side of the road?

ROGER CHAPMAN Thwaites Brow Road, Keighley