LETTERS: Invest in answering the bigger questions

Lower speed limits, such as 50mph on single and dual carriageways, are one cheap and swift way of improving both safety and traffic flow.

Traffic lights with a pedestrian phase in at least three key junctions, Welburn, Barton Hill, and Stockton Lane (maybe also Sand Hutton) are absolutely essential as a matter of urgency for safety reasons.

Incentives such as restricting the outside lane of existing dual carriageways to vehicles with more than one occupant could encourage car sharing, and help reduce the number of vehicles on the road.

Ensuring new house building is closer to places of work would also help.

What I would not like to see is vast sums of public money being poured into a white elephant dual carriageway when driverless technology means most of us won’t be needing our own cars in the future; the driverless taxi and smart technology will ensure most journeys use nearly full up vehicles in busy areas, drive in close convoy on main roads, and render congestion obsolete. The really big questions are food security, climate change, and how we create an inclusive happy society.

Those are the areas we need to invest our time, money and energy, not more Tarmac on our beautiful countryside.

Ian Conlan, Malton

Disgust over birds

I WOULD like to express my disgust and anger over the dumping of hundreds of dead pheasants as reported in the Gazette & Herald.

These birds are bred in their tens of thousands to be released into the countryside, where they are either run over on the roads or driven out of the undergrowth to be shot out of the air for pleasure.

It now seems obvious to me that this breeding in such large numbers has got way out of control and some measures need to be taken to remedy the situation.

If people must go shooting might I suggest clay pigeons instead.

Christine Marshall, Pickering

Headline grabber

RECENTLY, Martin Brampton of the Greens voiced yet another flawed study which uses children and babies to grab the headlines.

Perhaps if Mr Brampton and his friends in the green and anti-fracking movements bothered to read the whole of these oft quoted studies they would get to the part where the authors admit the limitations of their own work, because it is always there, in a disclaimer at the end.

The study claimed that expectant mothers who live within a half-mile of a fracking site are 25 per cent more likely to give birth to low-birth-weight infants.

The largest flaw of the study, though, is one that contradicts the report’s purpose.

The authors claim that the closer a mother lives to a well site, the more likely the infant’s birth weight will be low.

However, the study shows birth weights at three kilometres away are more likely to be affected than those at two kilometres.

One of the lead authors of the study, Michael Greenstone even admits “A limitation of our study is that given the nature of the available data, we are constrained to focus on potential exposure to pollution (which is determined by the mother’s residential location) rather than actual exposure that could be measured with personal monitoring devices”.

Note the words potential and actual. They didn’t even bother using measuring instruments for air quality. They just guessed how much pollution.

Finally, they made this statement “the pathway of exposure was not a subject of our study and is not known with certainty”.

The reason you do not get hundreds of doctors condemning hydraulic fracturing for shale gas in the UK is because an astute and wise doctor knows that correlation does not mean causation and that there has to be a pathway.

The study proved nothing and was just another headline grabbing stunt by activists.

Lorraine Allanson, Allerston

Get rid of fracking

IT does not make sense. We’ve produce the greenest power in 2017, yet they still want to use poison gas for power too. That’s to frack.

We can’t have it both ways. Get rid of fracking now for the cleaner alternative green power which has proven itself to have worked.

Jarvis Browning, Fadmoor