Each year, hundreds of old cars drive through Brighton and Hove and, each year, the media respond positively.

In a age when asthma, cancer and respiratory diseases are among the fastest-growing and biggest killers of our species and the principle cause is the motor car, why do we insist on celebrating and worshipping these machines?

The petrol we consume each year took nature a million years to create.

We squander a resource at such incredible speeds that future generations will despise us for our greed and for the polluted desert we leave behind.

Every car I see on the streets fills me with hatred and disgust - single drivers poisoning the air I breathe, lazy parents giving their children asthma as they drop them off at school, fat people driving to the shop a few hundred yards from their door.

We should be working towards a car-free city - somewhere you can cross the road without risking your life, where there are safe spots to lock up a bike, where the air is clean and where silence and peace reign instead of the eternal rumble of distant traffic.

-Jonathan Chowns, Mafeking Road, Brighton