Letter: Don’t make it buses v bikes

Tony Abdy writes (Cycle Lanes For The Few – Letters, August 10), that Sheffield Council should spend money on buses instead of bike lanes that are only used by a handful of cycle commuters.

Nevermind that the council is not responsible for investing in or regulating the crumbling bus ‘network’ (ahem, Mayor Dan Jarvis).

Making this about bikes vs buses is a diversion from the main, and massively urgent, problem: getting commuters out of private cars and onto alternatives – any alternatives!

Imagine a city where you can make any journey by bike and/or bus as easily and cheaply as you can currently by car.

A city where thousands of commuters cycle downhill to work in the morning, and use abundant, reliable and cheap buses (with bike racks!), to get home.

Or on sunny evenings, electric bikes to help your legs up the toughest of Sheffield’s hills.

A city free of the curse of congestion and air pollution where our kids can walk to school safely and with clean air in their lungs.

This is the ambition elsewhere – it’s good enough for London, Nottingham, any other major European city, and we shouldn’t settle for anything less.

The scale of the transformation required may be beyond the imagination of our current regional mayor, but that doesn’t make it any less real.