The report Scandal Of The Empty Car Park Drivers Can’t Afford (December 15) regarding the empty Blata l-Bajda park and ride facility prompted George Debono to rightly suggest that car drivers could avoid such problems by using bicycles. This practical and positive suggestion produced the usual polemic of negative comments aimed at detracting from the bicycles’ advantages to the modern commuter.

To clarify, the traditional enemies of a bicycle’s efficiency are hills and wind. Both are surmountable and without wishing to hurt anyone’s sensibilities, so are all other perceived problems. It’s simply that people tend to give up too easily.

One commentator went on to state that cyclists are “soloists” who weave through rush hour traffic. This leads one to make three obvious conclusions. One, that rush hour traffic is often stationary. Two, that as any motorcyclist will tell you, traffic queues are never uniform rows. Thirdly, that we conveniently forget that the majority of rush hour traffic is also populated by single-occupancy car drivers, i.e. “soloists” who by sheer weight of numbers cause the jam in the first place.

Increasingly the humble bicycle is beating cars in rush hour traffic in cities the world over, amply demonstrated in the recent car-bike race from Lija to University in The Times’ own GadgetsMalta supplement. True, one has to be more on the ball but while some people will state that cycling is dangerous, the annual fatality rate in Malta is often zero, something that neither cars nor pedestrians can boast.

Every person you see on a bike is freeing up one more parking place for a car driver to use, a case in point for the car park in question. So rather than “park and ride” why not “ride and park”, something that even benefits other car drivers.