Inappropriate

MR W. Sulke suggests (South China Morning Post, March 11) that I deliberately misunderstood his proposal for the ''banning of certain types of vehicles during the rush hour''.

Well, even supposing I do suffer from all the shortcomings that Mr Sulke diagnoses, it would have been most difficult to misunderstand the proposal in his original letter, that there be ''a ban on the use of school buses from 8 am until 10 am and from 4 pm until 7 pm''.

Some rush hour! In a city where many children have lengthy journeys by school bus to and from school, where school buses are used to transport kids to sports facilities and on special trips to museums and other educational facilities, and where many schools operate morning and afternoon shifts, the banning of school buses for five of the precious daylight hours would be wholly inappropriate, to say the very least.

As for Mr Sulke's belief that such restrictions are justified because the traffic flows better during school holidays and Chinese New Year, I suggest that he visits Kai Tak or Kowloon Station at the start of a popular holiday period, and discovers that amongst the crowds of people queueing to leave on their vacations there are more than a few drivers of most types of vehicle encountered on our roads.

Furthermore, an early-morning visit to one or two of the more prominent schools would establish that the surrounding roads are far more likely to be clogged with cars, each delivering one or two children, than with school buses transporting 15 or more.

M. J. STOKOE Jardine's Lookout