The Strategic Rail Authority (SRA)'s plan is a huge disappointment to rail passengers and road users alike.

As the Citizen has reported some train services are to be cut because of congestion on the network, also many of the upgrades necessary to get freight off the roads and onto the railway are being deferred. That means more traffic and more traffic jams. Exactly the opposite of what should be happening.

A much better solution to train congestion would be to increase track capacity, but funding isn't there. Labour has just cut £300million from the SRA's budget but pledged hundreds of millions of pounds on motorway widening. This is in spite of opinion polls that show nearly two thirds of the British Public want to stop road building. We know road building will not solve transport problems.

Decades of underfunding and privatisation has left the rail network in crisis, with high fares for an unreliable and overcrowded service and extra bureaucracy resulting from the privatisation and fragmentation. Labour have failed to sort it out. Indeed the state of the rail network has been made worse by the privatisation of its maintenance.

The answer is simple. Greens have sought to introduce a bill to take the railways back into public ownership and re-integrate the operation and maintenance of tracks and trains. This could be funded by scrapping the government's road building plans. Such a move is supported by 76 per cent of people in polls.

The profound lack of support from Labour members to this move was most interesting, given that their party was committed to a publicly-owned British Rail as recently as 1996.

Sooner or later, the former Labour faithful - the millions who have stopped voting - will put two and two together, abandon their forlorn hope that as long as they keep quiet Labour may come to its senses, and realise that the only way to get the railways renationalised is a large vote for the only major party which promotes this policy, namely the Greens.

Philip Booth, Gloucestershire Green Party.