To the editor:

Your Aug. 10 paper had a small article about the highway death rate and injuries dropping in 2003. On the same date, USA Today published a news article dealing with the number of highway deaths.

While both newspapers told us there were 42,643 people killed on our highways in 2003, USA Today said that number was higher than it had been in almost every year since 1990. However, the number of miles driven has been steadily rising each year, which has helped push down the death rate.

Those figures tell me that the more miles we drive, the lower the fatality rate becomes. At the same time, our cars on city streets become bumper to bumper, causing us to breathe more carbon monoxide from the cars’ exhaust pipes, which adds to the number of cancer deaths each year. These news articles seem to ignore this threat to our lives.

How can we help solve this problem? I believe the first step is to encourage more use of bicycles. This can be accomplished by building more bike paths on our city streets. This would encourage more people to walk for better health.

The Journal-World also carried an article Aug. 10 by Joel Mathis dealing with U.S. Army Corps of Engineers asking for help from City Hall to build a bike route from the SLT to Clinton Lake. It’s good to hear the plan is spreading beyond city limits.

Lester C. Marsh,

Lawrence