Invest in buses and trains — not roads

YOU reported that nearly €1.5bn is to be invested in the national roads development programme” (Irish Examiner, November 20).

This works out at more than €1,000 per vehicle; far more than most motorists pay annually in road and fuel taxes. In addition, there is spending by local councils and the cost of lighting, policing, accidents, etc, not to mention environmental costs.

This exposes the road lobby’s myth of the over-taxed motorist. This is not money ‘invested’; this is money squandered. Given our obsession with roads, we are digging a deeper and deeper hole in which to bury ourselves in the future.

More roads generate more traffic and as the price of oil soars, the State will be faced with recession and bankruptcy.

We have long since destroyed three-quarters of our railways and we are now engaged in the lunacy of road-building rather than learning from the mistakes of other countries.

Far better to spend this money on buses in the short-term and railways in the long-term. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that even if we put only half the number of people travelling by car into buses, there would be a bus every two or three minutes on main roads. Whereas roads become less efficient the more they are used, the reverse is true of public transport.

Politicians are in a state of denial, or make absurd claims that subsiding biofuels, hydrogen, or some as yet undiscovered technical fix, will get us out of the mess.

Meanwhile, we either travel by car or we don’t travel at all.

Michael Job

Rossnagrena

Glengarriff

Co Cork