Zones plan is utter nonsense

Do you know what a “15-minute city” is?

If you read their blurb, it’s “creating cities where everything a resident needs can be reached within a quarter of an hour” by so-called “active travel” or public transport.

This is the background to the city council’s desire to zone Canterbury.

Oxford and Bath residents will also take part in this social engineering of people’s lives and expect many other councils to follow suit, thanks to the influence of anti-car zealots of all the main political parties. While some readers might see this as a good idea, the vast majority would prefer to not be tied to public transport’s fixed destinations and timetables. Even if you accepted the 15-minute strategy, how would it work in practice?

The more you think about it, the more problems it creates - it is utter nonsense.

Our children and grandchildren deserve a better future than the dystopian one now promised by our political masters.

Terry Hudson

Russell Drive, Swalecliffe

Traffic is like water as it tends to flow in the easiest direction

- so rather than restricting the flow using draconian measures, the city council should offer it alternative routes [‘Fascistic restriction on people’s lives’, Gazette January 5]. Main-road traffic passing through residential areas is never a good idea, which is why the authority’s predecessors 70 years ago produced the current inner ring-road.

This has been very successful, even though it was never completed, but with the expansion of Canterbury over the intervening years the process needs to be repeated further out from the centre.

The council has made a good start to the east in establishing an alternative route from the Sturry bypass around to the A2 bypass, although preferably it should start further out from the east side of Sturry.

But this still leaves large areas to the north and west of the city with no alternative routes, which is hardly surprising as they would have to pass mainly through protected countryside. Still, as most of the large housing developments are to the south and west, the council should concentrate on getting their proposed road built and see if it eases the traffic problems. With the current financial crisis, it seems unlikely that this will happen any time soon, so until then we should all just keep calm and carry on.

Mike Armstrong

Queens Avenue, Canterbury