HAVING spent 10 years writing about Worcester's "traffic" I was astonished by your Editorial ('We all suffer in city', Friday, June 17).

You say "... if nothing else these statistics show the need for an integrated transport policy for the city." It's not an integrated transport policy we need for our city. It's an end to the house building and development that is destroying our city.

The statistics that are never mentioned are that nominally the number of houses in Worcester has more than doubled in 50 years. With every house now having an average of one car, don't we live in a city with 40,000 cars, and perhaps as many as 60,000 car drivers?

With the average car making eight journeys a day, don't Worcester's roads have to cope with some 320,000-car journeys a day? Aren't those the statistics that matter?

Don't those statistics make park-and ride-utterly irrelevant, unless Perdiswell is used as a satellite car park of our new hospital? Isn't taking 450 cars off our roads, and jamming the cars that do 320,000 journeys a day in our city, on to a much-reduced carriageway, to create a bus lane, causing traffic havoc? Isn't public transport jammed in that traffic, when travelling in the opposite direction of the bus lane?" If bus lanes work, why is Lowesmoor perpetually ignored by Worcester's motorists?

What is the point in building 450-car space park-and-ride sites, when Worcester's housing development is adding 500 cars, and thousands of extra car journeys a day to Worcester's ancient roads, every single year?

If we were to ban "the car," for journeys in our city, how many buses would it take to carry the people from the 320,000 car journeys done around our city each day?

And if you think that tens of thousands of Worcestershire's commuters can simply be driven from their cars, and on to trains, for their journeys to Birmingham, and other major cities, how are trains going to cope? The train operators are already planning to increase rush hour commuter fares, because those trains are dangerously overcrowded, and they want to reduce rush hour passenger numbers.

How will the train operators cope with the extra million plus passengers a day, which are now forecast to be driven on to trains, by congestion charges, over the next 10 years?

Aren't we "solving " one problem to create another, even more intractable problem, by adding 250 million additional passengers a year, to our already overcrowded rail network?

N TAYLOR, Worcester.