Against and for the car

Efforts to tame the use of cars stretch back longer than indicated in your report (“Driven away”, February 18th). In 1959 the plan for a partly elevated Embarcadero freeway in San Francisco, designed to connect the Bay and Golden Gate bridges, was cancelled by the board of supervisors following unprecedented opposition from affected residents. In London three concentric ringways, including a hugely destructive inner one called the motorway box, were cancelled in 1973 by an incoming Labour-controlled council. Homes Before Roads, an upstart political party that contested the London election in 1970, helped to damn the huge roads. The OECD held a transport ministers’ conference in 1975 themed “Better Towns with Less Traffic”. And town planners have been arguing against cars for longer than 20 years. Alfred Wood, architect planner for Norwich, persuaded his English city council to pedestrianise London Street as long ago as 1967.

The convenience of cars has certainly transformed cities, but the car did not create suburbs and the tide against their destructiveness began to turn decades ago.

Terence Bendixson

Former president

Living Streets

London

Walkable cities are great for residents and the laptop class, but banning cars makes those cities less affordable for the working class. If you prohibit cars, how is a tradesman with a 40-pound toolkit going to get to work? Turning parking spots into bike lanes is great for cyclists, but where are the trucks supposed to park when delivering goods to those cosy neighbourhood cafés?

A city dweller can work from a coffee shop with a laptop, but the coffee neither delivers, brews, nor serves itself. The Uber passenger may relish not needing a car, but the driver doesn’t have that luxury. Congestion pricing keeps traffic down in exclusive neighbourhoods, but it is in effect a tax on people driving into them. The concept of the 15-minute city, where you can walk or cycle to everything you need within 15 minutes, doesn’t seem to give much thought to the help.

Gus Downes

Los Angeles

In the 1980s owning a car for a young man was a universally acknowledged requirement by both sexes in the Darwinian struggle to find a mate. Margaret Thatcher once said that a man who has gone beyond 26 and remains without a car is a bit of “a failure”.

Paul D’Eath

Toronto