I WAS delighted to read that our Conservatives and Independents are reassessing our park-and-ride scheme, because of "traffic congestion".

Traffic congestion is not the problem. The problem is unsustainable levels of development.

Our previous Labour council made Worcester into a commuter city. They oversaw the building of some 15,000 new homes here.

In doing so, they nearly doubled Worcester's traffic to 300,000 vehicle journeys a day. They did that knowing that they couldn't change Worcester's "medieval" road layout.

Then they banned car use on a substantial part of that medieval road network, by introducing bus lanes.

That's why Worcester's traffic becomes worse and worse. It will go on worsening until our council understands that they cannot go on building new homes, while ignoring the thousand of car journeys those new homes will continue to add to our city's traffic.

We have one, simple choice facing us. We can either continue to use their cars in our city, or stop using their cars in our city, so our council can continue to build (thousands) more homes in our city.

The homes or cars question also faces our county and our nation.

The politicians have chosen to build an additional 4m houses over a further 120 square miles of our green and pleasant land (an area equivalent to the Lake District) to accommodate the six million people government wants to bring here by 2020, to sustain "growth".

That means they will have to cope with another 32,000,000 additional daily car journeys, which their barmy development strategy will produce.

Our roads cannot cope with that additional level of urban traffic.

That's why the politicians have to force us out of our cars through taxes like congestion charges.

N TAYLOR,

Worcester.