HEREFORD needs a sustainable travel plan. Cardiff city council has just agreed to spend £28 million on a sustainable travel plan.

This will include free bicycle hire, free bus travel within the city centre and more routes for cyclists and pedestrians. In addition to encouraging more people to travel by sustainable means, Welsh transport minister Ieuan Wyn Jones noted the potential this scheme has to get us all more active and healthy.

A Hereford bypass will cost at least £130 million – money we can ill afford. For a fraction of the cost, a sustainable travel policy is certainly achievable for Hereford.

What’s more, unlike a bypass which will increase road capacity and therefore generate more traffic, a sustainable plan will actually help us to reduce traffic levels.

A bypass will increase the average journey length, a sustainable plan will reduce journey lengths. A bypass will increase pollution and CO2 levels. A sustainable plan will reduce them.

The business generated by building a bypass will be of a temporary nature and mostly go to large contractors out of Hereford.

A sustainable travel plan will generate long-term employment opportunities for local people and stimulate the local economy.

A bypass will destroy the countryside on which so much of our income, through farming and tourism, depends. A sustainable travel plan would protect it.

Teresa Villiers, Conservative transport spokesperson, was right to say recently that she thought the way government transport funding was assessed was biased towards road transport.

Local people have the right to know what evidence the out-of-step Tories on our own council have that a bypass is the best solution for Hereford’s traffic issues as opposed to other less expensive, more sustainable and more effective solutions to our traffic problems.

They could start by visiting Cardiff (by train!) and talking to those behind that scheme.

Let’s base our future policy on evidence that it will actually work in the long term, rather than simplistic knee-jerk reactions to problems that will cost us all dear.

And let’s adapt to the new situation we are in. Species that don’t adapt become extinct.

ROB HATTERSLEY, Park Street, Hereford .