Sir, - Frank McDonald reported (The Irish Times, December 5th) that bus travel is up to 30 per cent quicker than the car in the area served by the new Malahide Road quality bus corridor. He did not inform us to what extent this was due to a deliberately-engineered lengthening of car travel time. Also, the real comparison should be door-to-door travel time: did the survey include the walk to the bus stop and the subsequent wait?
How many buses per hour have to use a bus lane for it to carry passengers at the same rate as the displaced cars during the rush hour? This is one of the questions which should be addressed by the traffic engineers, who often seem to be hell-bent on a totally perverse policy of reducing effective road capacity as a response to congestion. - Yours, etc., John Sheehan,
Pinewood Park, Dublin 14.