"Altering transport plan would cost council £5m," warns Mr Trigwell (Bath Chronicle, September 11). Oh dear! Another bludgeon to beat the poor Bath ratepayer into accepting the imposition of the thoroughly disliked, doomed-to-failure BRT.

Just a minute, though; isn't the £50m Government grant from taxes as much our money as the £5m from the rates? So, if we can persuade the council to drop the more expensive and environmentally-damaging aspects of the scheme, we, the people, are the winners aren't we?

So, let's look at the scheme – the Bus Rapid Transport.

Well, 'rapid' it isn't. The best estimated figure that the planners have put forward is a two minutes saving on a Newbridge-bus station journey so we can be sure that the saving will generally be less than this.

Who, in their right mind, would spend millions of pounds and destroy an open area of wildlife habitat constructing a ribbon of concrete (concrete canyon?) occasionally to save two minutes?

From another angle, who are these people for whom the saving of two (or even five or seven) minutes on a bus journey is so important that it warrants the expenditure of over £50m, the loss of many people's back-gardens and the deliberate diverting of buses through residential suburbs presently free of bus pollution?

I don't see many hands going up!

Can we start calling it just the Bus Transport Plan (BTP) so that we don't sell it to ourselves as 'rapid' as the originators of the scheme no doubt intended? Neither, of course, is it clean (still, dirty diesel engines powering the buses precipitating speculates into the air we breathe) or modern (hasn't dear old Wiltshire had these bus-stops with up-to-the-minute information for years now?).

Park-and-rides are, in my opinion, beneficial to the environment of cities. I have supported their establishment for decades and decades and wonder why it took councils so long to create them.

While Newbridge park-and-ride isn't in the best place, let's start from there and take the bus over the bridge and up onto the Lower Bristol Road (A36) at the Twerton fork. I believe that it could traverse this distance in a similar time to the time it would take to travel along Newbridge Road, turn into Brassmill Lane and down to the point where it is intended to construct the bus route that I have named 'the concrete canyon'.

The advantage of my route is that the bus has not gone through a residential area and is now able to pass quickly along the Lower Bristol Road (A36) through predominantly light industrial areas as far as Windsor Bridge Road where, with or without the benefit of an underpass beneath that road, it can continue into Western Riverside onto the council's route.

It would mean no river crossing on an old railway bridge, no loss of people's gardens along the route, no minor roads crossed and no pollution of more residential areas.

This route could well cut the journey time of the buses from west of Bath by five or 10 minutes, thus encouraging commuters from that side of Bath to leave their cars further out on the A4 and catch the bus.

I also dislike the siting of the proposed park-and-ride to the east in the bowl of Bathampton Meadows where it will be visible from all around and acres of parked cars are always ugly. It also bothers me that access would be via a new junction to the by-pass that could be a source of many accidents. How much better it would be to put the park-and-ride near the railway with access from the roundabout at the eastern end of the by-pass?

Last Autumn, a letter published in this newspaper suggested using the railway line through Bath for an east-west park-and-ride people-moving route; what a brilliant idea! I take my hat off to the writer; could he/she develop his/her idea in a further letter?

Councillors, you are forcing this scheme through in opposition to the residents of the area affected and the people of Bath who do not want to see a ribbon of concrete driven through an area of wildlife habitat at great cost to the taxpayer even though your application has come to the top of the Government grants' pile. Because a grant is available does not mean you should bulldoze through a disastrous scheme!

To planners I say, by all means let's catch up to the 20th century with an improved park-and-ride scheme using the Lower Bristol Road-Western Riverside route benefiting all buses from the west but then let your minds float free and your imaginations soar on a 21st century scheme to utilise the rail route through Bath to move people between east and west park-and-ride and all places in between.

Impossible? Of course it isn't.

PATRICK McCARRON Claverton Down Bath