By John Hale

Dear Editor

At the April meeting of the Van Vorst Park Association, Mayor Schundler told us that his proposed new automobile expressway through the Bergen Arches would improve air quality. That claim is plain bogus.

We all agree that the existing depressed highway is 100 percent used during the rush hours and even Mayor Schundler agrees that the new expressway would also be 100 percent used ("if you build it, they will come"); from this simple logic we can clearly see that building the new expressway would double the car and truck emissions in any given period of time.

If you have a continuous, single-file string of people smoking cigars passing through your home for an hour, there is a specific amount of noxious smoke left behind for you to breathe. If you have a continuous double-file string of cigar smokers passing through your living room, the amount of nicotine you are forced to breathe is doubled.

It doesn't matter how fast they pass through; every time a smoker leaves, another one enters. You always have smoke 100 percent of the time from each of the two strings of cigars. To say the proposed Schundler Expressway will cause anything less than double the pollution is plain bogus.

John Hale