You are certainly correct that the city of Indianapolis isn’t doing enough to clean up our air quality (Cover, “Toxic City,” June 27-July 4). One place that they could easily improve is the matter of traffic light timing. My work requires that I travel city streets during the evening and night, and it is absolutely disgusting that nearly all the traffic lights on 82nd and 86th streets are still working in their complex pattern long after there is any significant volume of traffic.

We are required to unnecessarily stop at empty intersections and let our cars idle, and over the time it takes to traverse those streets, there is much unnecessary pollution put into our air. All those lights should be set to go to a yellow flash one way and red flash the other way, so as to let traffic flow unimpeded after rush hour traffic has stopped.

The idea of mass transit is one of those “pie in the sky” ideas that liberals love; the idea sounds good, but it is totally unworkable. Every attempt to build a useful mass traffic system in recent years has been a failure. Detroit spent multimillions of dollars on a system that was plagued with technical difficulties and enormous cost overruns, and they finally had to halt construction before the system was really workable. It was much money down the drain. In Portland, Ore., they built a tram system at considerable taxpayer expense, and no local people use it. That system is similar to that in Detroit in that the only people who use it are tourists.