AS we emerge from the world in pandemic, we look forward to things getting back to normal but we must be concerned about the delays in travel time across BCP.

Before it is too late, we need to tackle the severe traffic and travel problems that surround the JP Morgan site, the Bournemouth University Hospital and the Bournemouth Law Courts. The route is available now.

If we really want Bournemouth Airport to serve the conurbation we need to embrace it into our travel network and take advantage of the car parking potential at this site which will, in due course, improve its links to the A338.

We can solve these issues and improve travel to and from the football stadium, the Littledown leisure centre, the Athletic Centre in Kings Park, the proposed Ice Rink there and the Indoor Bowling Club.

All these venues have limited car parking and few have enough to serve their potential. We can use all the parking available every day and save on wasted spaces only being used when an event is on.

We can provide a link to the main line railway by crossing from Kings Park into Pokesdown Station.

Before all the land is taken up for other uses we can build a monorail, a tourist attraction in its own right, or just a light railway linking the airport terminal, across the River Stour, to the law courts and the hospital, across Castle Lane to Littledown Centre, JP Morgan and up into Kings Park to the football and other stadia.

Initially we can build a link via a tubed walkway into the Pokesdown station from the Kings Park monorail terminus but with the success behind us we can look to extend this via Gloucester Road and Woodland Walk to the clifftop or develop the link to the Bournemouth travel terminal, but this would require a lot more planning and cash issues.

Such a rail scheme would need minimal staff and could be run from a single control room.

This project is worthy of some considerable investigation as the problems that it could solve are huge and the service to the public would be instant and easy to quantify. Removing the traffic would improve the lot of all the other travellers who had to use cars and buses and were unable to cut through all the problems by using this link.

It must be worth a proper and thorough analysis involving all the agencies and businesses that would benefit, doing nothing is not what brought us the Bournemouth we enjoy today!

The tourism advantage of linking the airport into the town and having an iconic monorail link for everyone to see and appreciate travelling down the A338 would give Bournemouth its own world recognisable identity like the Copenhagen Mermaid, the Eiffel Tower or the London Eye. It would be so easy to come up with a plan to cover Bournemouth, Poole and Christchurch with a monorail or light railway but this would get nowhere and would be too grand a plan.

We need to start small with a scheme and concept capable of expansion in the future but solving the burning issues of today. It needs to be done soon whilst the land is still available.

DAVID TRENCHARD

(former leader of Bournemouth Borough Council)

Wilfred Road, Bournemouth