Plan in the wrong lane.

We have seen no evidence yet of anyone turning cartwheels of delight at today's news that West Yorkshire is to get Britain's first car-sharing lane.

The pounds 2.5m, one-mile lane, feeding off the M606 into the M62 at Chain Bar is expected to cut rush-hour journeys between Bradford and Leeds by about eight minutes.

At the moment statistics show that 84% of the drivers on that stretch of road have no passengers with them and it is hoped that this measure will encourage more to share journeys.

Well, anything is worth trying to ease the current congestion but we have to say we are not sure where this particular initiative is going.

Even though it is practically on our doorstep will it encourage a single Huddersfield driver to make car-sharing arrangements? We rather doubt it.

No, such schemes can only work cumulatively, when there are such a lot of them in operation that they would make an appreciable difference to people travelling daily to other nearby towns.

In the meantime, one driver's precedence is another driver's longer wait and do we really want to infuriate other drivers and add to freight times and costs so that the result can be passed on to us as the consumer?

It seems to us that in the long run we are not going to like the measures that will have to be taken to change driving habits. This medicine is going to have to be very nasty to work.

`Sleaze' row

FULL marks to the Lord Chancellor for proposing to make it illegal for political loans to remain secret.

Labour may insist that it has done nothing wrong in the current "loans for peerages" row but it has certainly helped reduce Tony Blair's standing to an all-time low and the party which once declared war on sleaze now has a distinctly grubby look about it.

At the very least many of the "loans" would have been gifts but for the need to circumvent the rules that donations have to be acknowledged.

It may be significant that Tory leader David Cameron now sees a case for more state funding of parties, which could be at least a partial solution.

Liberal Democrat chief Sir Menzies Campbell has to be careful in his criticism because it was Liberal leader Lloyd George who definitely did sell peerages but he is surely right in asserting that the key word here is transparency.