WITH reference to your headline in the Times last week about the ?huge? benefit Mr Cornish says that the cycle track will bring to Tavistock, Peter Tavy and other villages. Just who is he kidding? How can spending tens of thousands of pounds be justified on pushing another part of an already underused cycle way through small villages and what benefit do they get from being turned into a race track for the handful of lycra-clad speedsters that do us it? When Mr Cornish visited Peter Tavy a few years ago in an attempt to address the concerns that villagers had about turning the tiny footpath between Peter and Mary Tavy into part of the cycle way, it was pointed out to him that although some on the Devon County Council think that cycling is the last word in ?green? transport for the area, in reality, all that happens is that people still arrive by car with their bikes strapped on the back, so any ?green? properties of cycling have already been lost. It was also pointed out that if the Devon County Council really wanted to do something useful about transport that would benefit the majority of this part of Devon, they could reclaim the underused cycle way that runs from Okehampton and reinstate the railway through to Bere Alston, thus providing a second link to and from the West Country. This still applies. Paul Mercer Ivy Cottage Peter Tavy
