I WAS surprised and disappointed by your highly reactive editorial on the forthcoming Transport White Paper (Smart move by Tories, May 5). Your comments were short on analysis and offered no solutions to the transport problems that this country faces.
You are wrong to say that the Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott is anti-car. He is actually ''pro-people''. He recognises that unless we reduce our reliance on the car, society will become physically paralysed as congestion grinds life to a halt. That would be the most anti-car strategy of all.
He is also concerned about the 24,000 premature deaths each year that the Government Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants estimates are caused by poor air quality, for which the car is the main culprit.
Trying to cater for more and more cars is simply out of the question. the previous Government's 1989 White Paper, ''Roads to Prosperity'', advocated the biggest road-building programme since the Romans. But even this discredited strategy would only have increased road capacity by one quarter of 1% per annum compared with a 3% per annum growth in traffic.
If we are serious about creating a more environmentally and economically sustainable society, then we must implement a package of transport measures.
We need to be more discriminating about how we charge for motoring. Driving in urban areas should be made more expensive because it is here that pollution and congestion are greatest. As you rightly point out, simply placing all the burden on fuel tax harms the rural motorist who relies on the car out of necessity.
Road-pricing revenues should be re-invested to make public transport a more attractive alternative to the car. But we should not see better public transport as a panacea. Even if we doubled the use of public transport we would only buy five years' traffic growth.
Paris has one of the best public transport systems in the world, yet the authorities there were forced to ban half the vehicles coming into the city last autumn because pollution levels were intolerable.
We must improve facilities for walking and cycling and ensure that land-use policies restrict further car-based developments. And we need to make more efficient use of road space. Every day, buses carrying 40 or 50 people are forced to sit in queues of ears each with an average of only 1.2 occupants. Councils are often criticised for using resources inefficiently - the way they allocate road space is perhaps the greatest inefficiency of all.
Councillor David Begg,
Convener of Transportation,
City of Edinburgh Council,
High Street, Edinburgh. May 6.
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