IN his or her excellent letter, V MacKinlay makes it quite clear that a priority in urban transport planning must be to persuade motorists to reduce the use of their cars and that the only means of public transport that can do so is the modern tram (Letters, June 18).

Readers may be interested to learn how this can be translated into practice, and to do so we need not look any further than France, which replaced its trams with buses in the years before and after the Second World War. By 1970 only three cities still operated trams, and that on a total of only four lines.

READ MORE: Letters, June 18

The oil crisis of 1973 then gave the country a nasty shock and, encouraged by central government, local authorities began to consider the modern electric tram not only as a better means of carrying passengers but also a useful tool in the general improvement of the urban environment and in particular in reducing the use of the private car in cities. The revolution was led by Nantes in 1985 and Grenoble in 1987.

Today there are trams in urban service in 29 cities and these will very shortly be joined by Avignon. Apart from its city system, Lyon is served by a high-quality express tramway to Saint-Exupéry airport.

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It is not only city centres that are devastated by indiscriminate car use. Popular beauty spots can suffer the same fate and the problem became acute in the case of Puy de Dôme in the Massif Central. Now there are ample car parks at the foot of this attraction and visitors can reach the summit by a modern tramway, with great benefit to the environment.

In almost every case, the arrival of the modern tram has brought about the changes required and in so doing has greatly increased the use of all public transport.

Montpellier, the university city in Provence, is an excellent example of this. In 1999, when the population numbered 222,200, the well-run bus service carried 28 million passengers. By 2016, when the population had reached 282,000, four tram lines were in operation, with construction just beginning on a fifth and an extension to the first. The total number of passengers carried on all public transport had grown to 83.2 million annually, of which 67.1million were carried by trams and 16.2 million by buses. This represents an overall increase of almost three times for an increase in population of 27%. The success of the modern tram is clear.

It should be stressed that four of these cities also operate a metro, while three (Marseille, Bordeaux and Lyon) have river boat services and three have funiculars. Brest has gone one further with an aerial cableway, and two others will soon follow suit. All cities have also introduced fleets of modern buses, often with associated priority measures on busy roads. In every case, the fare structure is such that all tickets are valid on all forms of transport, apart from the Lyon airport line.

In France trams do not require to have a separate organisation from buses or the other forms of transport and there has been no suggestion that introducing trams must inevitably be to the detriment of the others. That separation has plagued transport in Britain since the 1980s and seems to govern thinking within Transport Scotland. In the case of Edinburgh, it has caused concern to the drivers who operate Lothian Buses, mainly because this nonsense has been eagerly spread by those who oppose trams and/or an integrated system of urban transport.

Of course, a change will require a complete break with the Thatcher/Ridley legislation of the 1980s that still governs Scottish transport and the current proposals by the Scottish Government are only a feeble attempt to make that break. However, pending the essential radical change suggested by V MacKinlay, our local authorities could make a beginning in thinking of transport as a united whole and not as separate buses and trams, or even, in the case of Glasgow, the subway.

Brian Patton

Foulden, Berwickshire