YEARS of talk about reducing Traffic levels have produced a consensus that something must be done.

However, congestion and pollution have continued to increase as actual action towards this goal has trailed way behind the debate.

But do we now at last see the breakthrough? Today, for the first time, the House of Commons discusses legislation to cut the volume of traffic on our roads.

And with this step, conveyed in a Private Member's Bill, comes a target for how much traffic must be cut - 10 per cent compared with 1990 levels by the year 2010.

How realistic this is remains to be seen, especially as the infrastructure for alternative transport to get people out of their cars and to switch more freight from road to rail - or even water - would have to be expanded at a rapid rate and at huge cost to bring about such a marked reduction inside a dozen years. And while the environmental and health gains may be clearly apparent in the Bill's targets, the effects on the economy, jobs and taxation may be adverse, with the loss of revenue that would ensue with a cut of a tenth of the country's traffic.

Yet, significantly, despite such doubts, the government is now supporting The Road Traffic Reduction Bill, introduced by Plaid Cymru MP Cynog Dafis and drafted by his party together with the Green Party and Friends of the Earth.

Whether this endorses the viability of the Bill's proposals or merely underlines the general principle of cutting traffic levels is not certain, but since the government's own wide-ranging and, by all accounts, radical White Paper on transport is to follow this spring, it could be that the step taken today is sidetracked on its way the the statute book by the forthcoming Grand Plan.

Nonetheless, the introduction of this Bill into the Commons is a departure - one that marks the watershed when the long debate on traffic began the shift towards action. Many will agree that it is long overdue.

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