Express and admirable
Sir: J. W. M. Thompson's comments (Spectator's notebook', I November) on the 150 mph train in relation to new airport sites raises the whole question of the lack of coordination between the various authori- ties which, to a large extent, now control our environment in Britain.
At the local authority level the same stretch of road is dug up to lay a gas main one month, filled in and then dug up again in the following month to place a telephone cable and similar absurdities are repeated at every level of planning.
In California, the cities of Los Angeles and Las Vegas both need a jumbo jet air- field at the optimum distance from each urban area and both cities also need a rapid surface link. The solution will probably be a 300 mph train linking the cities via a new airfield on the edge of the 300-mile desert which separates them and somewhat nearer to Los Angeles than Las Vegas as befits what will be the largest city in the world by the 1970s.
The fact that private enterprise in the formidable form of Mr Howard Hughes is behind the Californian project, whereas faceless bureaucrats are the arbiters of our destiny, probably explains California's more dynamic approach to problems of a com- parable scale to ours in Britain.
John Crookshank Cavalry Club, 127 Piccadilly, London wl
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