"I would ask people to support it", said Councillor Oliver Pearson, talking about Kendal's pedestrian priority scheme on the front cover of last week's Gazette (February 11, Back on the buses bid to ease traffic').

It's great that people are trying to improve conditions for pedestrians in Kendal, so I do support it but with some provisos.

First, it's a bit much asking people to support an experiment that hasn't even started yet.

Second, because it is just an experiment, many of the benefits to us won't be realised until the experiment is over. No new seats, no wider pavements, no new signs or plants or improved crossings. In fact, until the experiment is over, things might be worse for pedestrians, with temporary barriers all over the place and angry motorists trying to get their heads round new traffic patterns.

And third, I'm not totally convinced that the changes aren't rather missing the point. Although wider pavements and less traffic in the centre of Kendal will be good for pedestrians, things are already not bad for us in the middle of town. Kendal's pedestrians have much bigger problems getting to the town centre in the first place.

Have you tried crossing the road at Romney Bridge, or Nether Bridge, or Miller Bridge recently? Have you tried crossing Lowther Street by the Town Hall? What about at the other end of Stricklandgate, at Sandes Avenue? All these dangerously unpleasant crossing points are either not addressed by the scheme - or are set to get even worse.

Many other towns in the UK have focused too much attention on pedestrianising their town centres, and have ended up making things even more difficult for people trying to get there on foot. Traffic encircling the centre increases, and crossings are prioritised for drivers, to compensate' them for their loss of access to the centre. As a result, car use can increase, not decrease, as people are deterred from walking in to town because of the surrounding traffic.

Too often we spend our time looking at the problem (our over-dependence on private cars, even for the shortest journeys) rather than the solutions. A significant number of Kendal's residents could and would walk to town, if the journey was easy, pleasant and safe. And if some of us choose to walk rather than drive in, we make life easier for those who have no choice but to drive.

There are literally hundreds of ways to make walking journeys into Kendal town centre better, without appreciably impacting on car journey times at all.

Here's just one example. The bottom of Gillinggate is fast, wide and dangerous to cross. If this junction was narrowed with build-outs (extensions to the pavement on either side), and a speed table installed, it might take a few microseconds off motorists' overall journey times. But it would make it much safer and less stressful to cross here, and wheelchair users would have a much smoother journey.

So let's not pretend this is a pedestrian scheme. It's not; it's a traffic scheme. We need to recognise that, for millions of UK residents, a ten-minute journey through their town centre would be amazingly quick, not traffic chaos'. We need to accept that, whatever we do to our roads, the era of free-flowing, uninterrupted car journeys through any town centre in the UK is long gone.

And it's about time, too.

Paul Holdsworth, Kendal