To: Electronic Telegraph <et.letters@telegraph.co.uk>
Re: Letting the motorcar go
Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2001
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Published version | Response from John Read |
Dear Sir/Madam, I was very sorry to read that Edinburgh's car-sharing project has not been a success (Car-share scheme proves a flop, 29 January 2001), although I suspect that from a number of your editors it elicited some self-satisfied chuckles: the inevitable end of a crazy idea. In fact, it wasn't only a very good idea, but an essential one, if cars are to have any role to play in a sustainable future. For the level of global motorisation to reach current North American and West European levels will mean a 6-fold increase in the present number of motor vehicles on the world's roads. Yet our planet's life-supporting ecosystems are already groaning under the strain of the present 500 million.. For my part, it is not the motor car that I will be sorry to see go,
but our civilisation which it is threatening to take with it - because
so many silly, infatuated, addicted, or economically dependent people refuse
or are unable to see their folly and to let the motorcar (i.e. individual
motorisation) go.
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