LAST week’s regeneration page carried an article, ‘Roads lead to future prosperity’. Do they?

Its title resembles that of a government white paper 20 years ago.

Around that time research findings revealed the consumption of (decidedly finite) public space according to mode of travel.

This basic information attests that per person car devours 10 times that of the bus passenger and 17 times that of the rail user.

Human-powered propulsion is similarly strikingly land-use efficient.

The government-instigated reports – Standing Advisory Commitee on Trunk Road Assessment in 1994 and 1998 – concluded respectively that more roads equals more traffic and that road construction is not synonymous with job creation.

Bypasses – or whatever current euphemisn is used – also tend to prove to be short-term panaceas. It was noticed that the road intended to be relived by building a bypass soon became full again, by Leslie Burgin, Minister of Transport, 1938.

During the two decades since the government publication ‘Roads to Prosperity,’ England has attained the dubious distinction of becoming the most densely populated country in Europe.

Surely this is another factor to bear in mind when considering efficient land use for as Mark Twain said, ‘the trouble with land is they don’t make it anymore.’ Doubtless the roads lobby would welcome the triggering of a tarmac tsunami again in Wyre Forest.

Are the proposals anything other than a perpetuation of the thinking which facilitates such crazy practices as lorries from Manchester conveying food to Worcester Hospital which opened in 2002 equipped with its own kitchens.

GILES ANGELL Franchise Street, Kidderminster