As a Nottinghamian spending 25 per cent of my time in Brighton and Hove and using public transport to get there, I recommend you be circumspect over a tramway.

The Nottingham one (NET) is too rigid. It runs along streets, parallels existing bus and train routes and its construction has disrupted city traffic far too long.

The only visible benefit has been to the hotels putting up the construction gangs - hardly a permanent way to increase visitors - and it is not the sort of boost Brighton and Hove needs.

Brighton and Hove's shape is such that it cannot repair a clock tower or gas main without complete chaos and its motorists so selfish that getting access to trams will be impossible should they be allowed to move at all.

Forget putting yet another form of vehicle on the streets and consider the old very local railway lines you lost. Build a railway, not a tram.

Improve your buses without spending millions over ten years.

Motorists, who control our cities, hate trams and will bring them down as easily as the sea has done the West Pier.

Even motorists are known to use trains. They bump into trams.

I don't expect the NET to outlast either the first electric system (1900-36) or the trolleybuses (1925-70). You, too, had trams and trolleybuses. Where are they now?

-Ralph Gee, Mansfield Road, Nottingham