I must confess that, when I read the letter in the Surrey Comet about a car getting slightly damaged in the Waitrose car park in New Malden, I was not overcome with a great deal of sympathy, as I felt there are bigger issues to worry about.

I must admit my view rather changed when I got home that Friday evening to find that my own car, which had been parked in the street, had been driven into, resulting in hundreds of pounds of damage to the bodywork, wheels and steering.

My vehicle is an insurance write-off.

Both of these cases were hit-and-run incidents, where the perpetrators did not have the decency to own up to their own careless or reckless actions.

Despite my frustration at the inconvenience and cost of my car being damaged, I do see that it is insignificant compared to the hit-and-run case in West Wickham recently, where a pedestrian on a crossing was mown down and killed.

Last week, I read that there are on average 80 people injured or killed in hit-and-run collisions in London each week.

How a person can leave another for dead, I shall never know. The police must put the necessary resources into catching the driver responsible and the courts must issue a serious sentence that will be a deterrent to other dangerous drivers.

The poor standard of driving is, in my view, the greatest threat to safety and well-being in Kingston.

The council’s All in One survey has asked what the one thing is that we would like to change in the borough.

I say that civilised streets with lower traffic speed and drivers paying more attention is what I want to see.

Richard Longhurst wrote about decrying the effectiveness of 20mph speed limits in keeping drivers below 20 mph.

What I would like to say to him is that there would have been an awful lot more injuries and probably many more deaths in the borough if Kingston had not established 20mph limits back in the 1990s.

Unfortunately, many drivers do not keep to 20mph, but they do at least tend to drive slower than if the road was signed as a 30mph limit.

More 20mph zones will reduce the number and severity of injuries and make our roads safer.

STEVE COCHRAN

Kingston