From Richard Ferraro FRIBA FRSA, Bonchurch:

I REFER to the investment of £26 million from the public purse to ‘save’ Island Line on the IW.

That represents an investment of £180 per inhabitant of the Island, with its population of 145,000.

If you take the cost of Crossrail 1 in London as £18 billion, and spread it across the nine million population of Greater London, that’s £2,000 per inhabitant for that project alone.

And Crossrail 1 represents only one of many transport projects serving London.

For example, there have been, and continue to be, numerous upgrades of underground and overground lines — extensions are underway on the underground, overground lines and the DLR — the construction of HS2 and a massive investment in buses.

That aside, if you spent £2,000 per head on the IW, which equates to £290 million, you could install a new light railway system linking Sandown to Newport and Cowes.

If you doubled that figure, you could also build a new light rail line from Newport to Yarmouth and Freshwater.

You could extend the Island Line from Shanklin to Wroxall and Ventnor and, at a stretch, create a new system of small buses to collect and deliver residents to and from light rail stations.

This level of investment is small change compared to the absurdly high cost of, say, building a twin-bore road tunnel from Gosport to the IW, with no other improvements.

A road tunnel is an outdated high-cost transport concept, and the increased traffic emerging from it would immediately cause gridlock across the Island’s road network.

I propose an investment from central government funds of £600 to £800 million over ten years for rail and bus related infrastructure projects across the IW.

That level of investment is ‘fair and equitable’ from a national perspective, compared to investment elsewhere.

The effect would be to transform the Island’s economy and accessibility for residents, visitors and holidaymakers, without clogging the roads with cars.