• IN your May 13 editorial Comment you wrote: “Most people in Camden use cars or take cabs because they need to…” which can be read to imply “most people use cars”, which is wrong, (Giving up cars will need less stick and more carrot, Comment).

Some 69 per cent of people in Camden do not own a car.

But in the more charitable reading, there’s a lot of difference between using a cab (immediate cost) than “using” versus “owning” a car – if you’ve sunk a lot of capital, and annual insurance, MoT test, road tax, parking fees, then you might be tempted to use the car rather than hop on your bike, until you encounter possible congestion charge and (from October) emissions charge for using the car at all – the sticks.

So it starts to look like a taxi is a better option, until you think bike. With better facilities, the carrot is that you get to cycle safely and in cleaner air.

With home shopping of all kinds getting more and more popular and plenty of handy delivery slots, there isn’t even the need for the big shopping trip (which might entail “using a car or taxi”).

Electric vehicles are not unaffordable any more. A second-hand Nissan Leaf for £5k is usable around town and cuts your fuel costs by x4.

Even brand new, a comparable mini-SUV is £35k whereas a Hyundai Kona, with 300-mile range on one charge, is around £30k new, (and no tax or parking or congestion charge); and the charging networks are spreading more widely all the time. And the carrots are there, with no tax or parking or congestion charge.

Still, even on a decent finance deal, that new clean car would cost each month, as would its petrol equivalent, about the same as a pretty decent new bike. Every month.

So you’d really have to have a need to have a pretty strong reason to own one. Do 30 per cent of people in Camden all really have strong reasons?

JON CROWCROFT
Address supplied