John Nicholas's "view from a bus" (Letters, June 30) was one I certainly did not recognise.

As a regular bus user, I am frustrated that so many buses are so frequently held up at traffic lights.

There are regular delays near the Pavilion and at the bottom of North Road, both of which Brighton and Hove City Council has known about for years but still hasn't solved.

It's the same with the system, already widely used on the Continent, where buses approaching

traffic lights automatically turn them green. Only now is the council thinking of doing this and only then in a few instances.

Why is the council so slow to react to opportunities to improve bus services and provide better alternatives to cars?

Is it because these improvements aren't as eye-catching as park-and-ride and "rapid transport", which they seem to think are big, sexy projects?

Or is it because, if they speeded up the buses, it would show up the rapid transport plan for what it is?

But transport reforms shouldn't just be about buses. We already have a multi-million pound infrastructure, capable of transporting thousands of people an hour in and out of the city. It's called the railway.

Forget park-and-ride, this is far more efficient and you won't get stuck in traffic.

Yet what happens on a hot sunny summer Sunday when we need to move more people than usual? Train operators slash services and the railways go to sleep.

On Sundays, the rail service into Brighton is half that which runs on weekdays and Saturdays. Unreliable weekend rail services have turned too many people away.

Not before time, councillor Craig Turton is calling for a meeting with Southern but why has it taken so long to wake up to this?

It also needs to tackle Network Rail and other bodies to shake them out of the mindset railways are only for commuters. As a major tourist destination, Brighton and Hove needs better, not worse, transport services, especially at weekends.

The railways might be part-privatised but they still require large amounts of public money. As such, they should be serving the city's needs, not their own.

The council, along with its city partners and local MPs, needs to make a combined attack on those who run them and drag them into the 21st Century.

-Chris Todd, Friends of the Earth (Brighton, Hove and Mid-Sussex)