David Pendery's letter raises very good issues, but misses my point (Letters, Nov. 9, page 8). I was responding only to the specific points raised in a previous article ("Reaction to motorbike rule mixed," Nov. 4, page 2) about heavy motorcycles being allowed on the highways, not trying to address bigger social problems. Simply deploying more scooters was not advocated as the solution to traffic congestion.
To use Pendery's figures, however, if you remove tens of thousands of cars and replace them with motorbikes, the roads would in fact be less congested. If more drivers of either type of vehicle were to use public transportation, naturally there would be even less congestion.
Please tell me where I advocated illegal or dangerous driving. It's the irresponsible driver that causes the problem -- not the type of vehicle they drive. I wrote that drivers of cars and drivers of motorbikes have equal claim to the streets, not the sidewalks.
Police should crack down on both drivers of cars and scooters that run red lights. They should also get scooters off the park paths, but when I asked an officer in Xindian, he said he wasn't even sure it was illegal.
As for the noise question, my letter simply addressed someone's complaint of the noise made by heavy motorcycles on the highway, not scooters on city streets. Pollution wasn't part of the article either. This is a debate Pendery and I would likely be on the same side of. Scooters pumping out blue smoke should be taken off the streets altogether. I believe a properly maintained, recent model motorbike, however, doesn't contribute to pollution any more than a car does. Since it uses less fuel, it may even pollute less than a car. An overall campaign to get people to use more public transportation or bicycles would also be laudable.
Craig Dodge
XINDIAN, TAIPEI COUNTY
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