Why is it that developments with a "grand vision" always create major problems for the people who live around them? The current proposals for York Central, whose public consultation ends on Monday, is a case in point.

For those who don't already know, the proposals include closing the Leeman Road underpass and could include knocking down the York Railway Institute sports hall.

The National Railway Museum will wax lyrical for hours about the benefits of closing the underpass - for the museum - and the planners are prepared to do likewise about how the approach for York Railway Station will be vastly improved by the demolition.

But neither museum nor planners want to talk about the effects on everyone else, such as those who won't need any of the 2,500 houses that could be built on the site - because they already have a home in York - or use any of the 120,000 square metres of office space which are also proposed - because they already have jobs or don't have office-based occupations, such as builders, lorry drivers, carers, emergency workers, health professionals, etc.

I'll start with the Leeman Road underpass and a simple fact that the grand design people appear to have ignored. If you live in west York you have to cross the East Coast mainline to get to the city centre.

For the 43,000 people who live in the Poppletons or the villages along the A59, or in west York excluding Dringhouses and Woodthorpe, that means either using the Leeman Road underpass or the Iron Bridge on Holgate Road.

That's the same Holgate Road where traffic is already bumper to bumper from the A59 as it approaches the Outer Ring Road all the way to Blossom Street every morning rush hour with queues of traffic trying to get on it from Beckfield Lane, Carr Lane, Water End, Acomb Road, Hamilton Drive, etc.

Close Leeman Road, and you will have gridlock every day in west York, and that's before the building of the 1,100 houses proposed for the old British Sugar and Manor School sites and from which the obvious way into the city centre will be over the Iron Bridge or Leeman Road.

Just in case that development leaves a bit of road in west York without a car on it, the people behind the York Central grand design have decided that the main route out of the development will come out onto - you've guessed it - Holgate Road.

When a senior council transport officer was asked for figures about current traffic flow over Holgate Bridge at a recent public meeting, he couldn't oblige. I wonder why.

Here is my suggestion to the people behind York Central. Close Leeman Road underpass for a single morning rush hour and try and drive to the city centre from the A59 junction on the Outer Ring Road to Micklegate Bar. If you do that, you will abandon once and for all any idea of closing the Leeman Road underpass permanently, whatever the museum may say.

As for knocking down the York RI sports hall, which had 160,000 visitors using its facilities last year, this could be a chance for brand new premises. The least those who develop York Central can do to make up for demolishing it is to replace it. After all, it's not as if they don't have the space to do it. A brand-new sports hall, built to the specifications of York RI as compensation - so at no cost to the York RI - could be constructed on the York Central site close to the railway station on the Acomb side where it would be easy to get to.

That would be a way that, for once, a "grand design" could do something popular and beneficial for the local residents.