‘How can anyone argue against the introduction of people-friendly streets?’

• DOES anyone doubt that our society is over-reliant on cars?

They can be convenient to use and since the 1950s we have increasingly bowed down before them, building new infrastructure and allowing them to dominate our public space.

People on foot were pushed onto pavements and behind railings, people on bikes were largely pushed off the road altogether.

This freed up space for the cars, so more cars came onto the roads, which became more dangerous for others to use, and so on – a vicious spiral.

The Beeching cuts removed many local rail services and the privatisation of bus companies did the same on the roads.

London retained its excellent bus services, though the excessive traffic on the roads made the buses slow and less attractive as an alternative. Until recently the traffic was largely confined to main roads.

But in recent years the introduction of technology gave every driver the “knowledge” of taxi drivers so all our side roads were sacrificed to the search for a route that would save a few minutes.

For anyone with a car its use becomes automatic. Why even think about alternative modes of transport when the expensive car is sitting at the kerb ready to go anywhere?

But now people have become aware of all the problems that cars bring, each one a reason to think, for each journey, do I really need to use the car for this journey?

Briefly the problems are: our inactivity epidemic; urban air pollution; mental health problems due to noise pollution; the danger to “vulnerable road users”.

Many of these problems are disproportionately inflicted on the poor, the young, and the old. See bit.ly/3rBUYOx for more information.

And overriding all of this is the emergency that we are all in. The world is heating up and will quickly become unliveable if we don’t reduced our emissions.

At 27 per cent transport is the UK’s largest emitter of CO2 and most of this comes from cars. Given all this how can anyone argue that we don’t need, urgently, to reduce our use of cars?

How can anyone, understanding all this, argue against the introduction of people-friendly streets?

R WALFORD, N1