The following appeared in a letter to the editor of a local newspaper. Commuters complain that increased rush-hour traffic on Blue Highway between the suburbs and the city center has doubled their commuting time. The favored proposal of the motorists' lob

In the newspaper, the author argues that adding a bicycle lane to Blue Highway is an effective way of getting rid of traffic jam. At first glance, the argument sounds persuasive; however, the lack of evidence leads me to conclude that this argument is unsound on many grounds.

First of all, the author needs to provide specific evidence in that inherent conditions of Green Highway is equivalent to those of Blue Highway. It is possible that Green Highway is toward industrial fields so that a plethora of trucks pass through Green Highway. On the other side, Blue Highway just connect two small cities. In this case, the case of Green Highway cannot be generalized to Blue Highway and it is far fetched to argue that we cannot add an additional lane due to the failure of Green Highway.

Secondly, even if it is sound to compare those two highways, more concrete information is necessary to support the effect of the additional lane. What I mean is that, since the lane is added last year, we have not had enough time to assess the effectiveness. We need to watch for a long term. Moreover, even if addition of one lane was not effective, it is still likely that one lane of addition was not enough. If the number of cars on rush-hour was far more than the capacity of one lane, we cannot corroborate that adding additional lanes is not valuable and it is likely to ameliorate the traffic jam if they have added two or three more lanes. In this case, we can consider to add more lanes to Blue Highway.

Last but not least, the author needs to supplement his conclusion that adding a bicycle lane will be effective with more sound evidence. The fact that many area residents are keen bicyclists is not tantamount to the assumption that they are willing to ride a bicycle to their companies. Even if they truly love to ride a bicycle, the distance between their companies and their home can be long. For them, riding a bicycle to commute is impossible. In all likelihood, there can be more accidents between the bicyclists and cars and lead more traffic jams on the Highway. If the author does not provide evidence to support these possibilities, the conclusion cannot be sound.

In brief, the argument is illogical in many respects. In order to bolster the argument, the author needs to provide more information on the inherent conditions of Green Highway and Blue Highway, the result of an additional lane, and the effectiveness of an additional bicycle lane.