YP Letters: New motorways won't solve transport nightmare

I AM appalled and amazed to read that there are evidently still people who would further destroy and pollute our lovely Yorkshire landscape with yet more short-sighted and destructive schemes of road transport. It would appear that there is always someone out there calling for yet another loony idea to deprive us of yet more beauty, peace and much needed serenity.

When is this shockingly flawed 1960s mindset going to change? Philistine industrialists have been doing their best to pollute and destroy the countryside for 200 years. Initially, the landscape could absorb a few pin-pricks of industry, but not the huge rashes of ugliness that are rapidly swamping everything in their path nowadays.

Has the penny yet not dropped that we should be working to enhance the rail network and 
get freight off the roads once 
and for all?

If Britain is so enamoured of Europe, why not borrow some good continental common sense, and put more goods onto the railways and even waterways as they do?

Juggernaut lorries are a scourge of the planet, with all the noise, pollution and ravages that they bring, degrading the quality of life and the environment for man and best.

We need to be rid of this dreary idea of frantic “development” once and for all.

The railways were rightly regarded as the common carrier, and this concept needs to be swiftly revived. Surely, this would be the pinnacle of common sense from every possible angle?

Does it occur to no-one, apart from rail enthusiasts, that the Great Central railway line (connecting Sheffield with Manchester) through the Woodhead Tunnel should be promptly reinstated?

Then there is the disused route between Skipton and Colne.

Is this not better than yet more Tarmac through the countryside? Yorkshire should not end up like the nightmare that is, for example, Birmingham.

From: Allan Davies, Grimsby.

WHEN Jayne Dowle wrote her recent column on motorway traffic, I wondered if it had occurred to her that matters could be worse. In the late 1890s, city planners were worried by the growth of horse-drawn traffic and the subsequent deposits. A letter to the Times newspaper suggested that if the growth continued at the same rate, by 1940, the streets of London would be nine feet deep in the stuff. Henry Ford came to the rescue!