Letters: Play before cars

While the comments regarding residents' concerns re the proposed bus/car plans are true, by their brevity, you omit some very real issues and concerns of the practical day-to-day operation of these plans. As they stand, I believe they do nothing to improve the safety of students or pedestrians as the county council and Richmond School suggest.

The loss of another Richmond green playing field would be detrimental for the children living on the east of Richmond, which is easily accessible to all. As a play area, (unlike other playing fields behind the Richmond School), children can play safely and be seen by parents if required.

The playing field is also extensively used by the youth club on evenings in the summer months, and Richmond School students during the daytime throughout all the year.

I make no apology to Richmond School or the county council, to preferring to hear the sound of children playing, rather than cars and buses making noise and creating pollution near to my house. Would you?

On behalf of residents, I would like to thank Richmond Town Council for getting the county council to carry out this traffic study, as local residents have been asking for several months.

Hopefully the county council will now sensibly consider, as residents have also been asking all along, other traffic and parking alternative solutions for all the schools for all the residents living along or near to Darlington Road, right up to the Cross-Lanes area.

Perhaps also, as part of this process, Richmond School management will actually take some responsibility for the traffic problems that they are partly responsible for. Their quest for performing arts status; together with their allowing students to come and go in cars, and ignoring the county council's own stated traffic policies of promoting pedestrian modes of transport rather than vehicular, cannot have helped the traffic situation.

Is joined-up thinking and a strategic approach too much to ask?

P LEAHY

The Avenue,

Richmond.

Plastic posers

Sir, - Firstly, may I correct an error made in my previous entry regarding biodegradable refuse sacks.

Further research has informed me that they are degradable not biodegradable, the difference being that degradable bags break down without being dependent on certain biological factors so they do have environmental merit.

I would also like to comment on John Sale's remarks such as "most of the harmful brands contain 75pc of recycled or recovered material - this is not possible with biodegradable material, which cannot be recycled".

A reliable source has informed me that degradable sacks can use recycled material and can be recycled. In addition, the "harmful brands" contain nowhere near 75pc recycled material.

I am not trying to change the opinion of those working in the plastics industry, for they will not change unless they profit from doing so.

I simply do not want the reader to be misled as to the benefits of degradable plastics, and the damage that our disposable way of life is doing to the environment.

Littering is sadly an increasing part of everyday life, but imagine if all the plastic waste in the world was degradable. What a cleaner world that would be.

STEPHEN KERSHAW

Askrigg.

Headline news

Sir, - I was looking through the local paper the other day and wondering to myself why I do not see articles like, Milkman Delivers Milk or Postman Delivers Post. With lots of praise from their bosses. I say this because I have seen two self-congratulating articles about the police actually arresting criminals and cracking down on vandalism and anti-social behaviour.

That's odd, and I am sure that someone will correct me if I am wrong but that was what I always thought the police were overpaid to do in the first place.

I am very surprised that they allow such people as criminals, louts, vandals and drunks to disrupt their important operational priorities like "Whose turn is it to make the tea?" or the really vital "Who is doing the chippy run tonight?" Woe betide any criminal that gets in the way of the chippy run.

I believe that there was a poll conducted some months ago to find out what the people of North Yorkshire wanted the police to do and, surprise surprise they wanted to see bobbies on the beat to try to prevent crime in the first place, so where are they?

For those people who did not understand my last letter about aliens and Buzz Lightyear I was trying to get across the point that you have more chance of seeing little green men from Mars in Thirsk than you do police officers patrolling a beat.

P Weaver

The Maltings,

Sowerby.

Distant health

Sir, - The residents of Bainbridge and Marsett (and other villages in Wensleydale, I believe) have received by post an NHS leaflet entitled A Quick Guide to your Local Health Services, whose aim is to "promote easier access to the right services"

It offers the following hospitals: Bradford, Airedale, Morecambe Bay, Skipton, Ripon and Harrogate. They promise to "strive to provide services as close to home as clinically possible". I only hope that their treatments are better than their geography.

I have always thought that my local hospital was at Northallerton. Is there something they are trying to tell me? Or is this another example of bureaucratic money-wasting?

SYLVIA CROOKES

Bainside,

Bainbridge