JOHN Prescott's plans for getting the motorist out of his car and on to public transport won't work.

For one thing, a large proportion of motorists are too lazy to walk a hundred yards if they can go in the car. I have seen a driver come out of a shop, jump in his car, drive four car lengths down the street and go into another shop. Ridiculous, I know, but perfectly true.

But the main objection to using public transport is that the fares are far too high, particularly on the railways. There are far too many operating companies, all with separate fare structures.

The ideal would be for the railways to revert to the pre-1948 system of four large companies, with Scotland having a separate fifth company.

The Tory scheme of track, locomotive, rolling stock, and maintenance all being owned by separate companies which rent them from each other is a complete nonsense. As regards buses, to get the maximum use by the public means bringing fares down to an absolute minimum - for the sake of argument, say five pence per mile with a minimum charge of 10 pence.

But this could only be achieved by massive subsidies from either local authorities or central government, or both, which I fear they would not countenance.

This was clearly shown by Sheffied in the pre-1986 period, which, until Maggie Thatcher introduced de-regulation, had the cheapest public travel in the country by far, and their buses were always well patronised.

It was a well thought-out co-ordination plan, and the envy of many other operators, but it had to go by the board under the Tory government.

I cannot understand why, when a service is not paying, the usual remedy is to increase fares, which only makes things worse. Why can they not try reducing fares instead, and thus attracting more passengers?

Taxing company car parks won't work either - it will only result in the company cars being parked on the open streets instead, thus adding to the congestion.

ROBERT RUSH, Hodder Street, Accrington.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.