Who needs an off-roader to do the shopping?

SO, IT’S official. The RAC Foundation has spoken. There are now more “Chelsea Tractors” in towns than in the countryside.

Impelled by morbid curiosity I recently stood on a London street corner noting the passing vehicles and how many occupants were in each.

Trucks and vans apart, the vast majority were four-door cars and over 80 per cent had just one head. All that metal, all that petrol, all that road space and all that pollution to carry one single human being from A to B.

A lot were huge sports utility vehicles – SUVs. With four-wheel drive (never engaged) and full off-road capability (never used) they clog up the city’s roads both when moving and parked.

Personally I have long been a fan of the micro-car for inner-city use. They are tiny in dimension but serve almost every purpose a city-dweller could normally require. The stability of four wheels, weather protection, just enough room for two, plus one case, they sip petrol and shove out minimal pollution. They are small enough to be parked nose-to-kerb and extend no further into the street than a four-door saloon sideways-on.

If government created huge incentives to favour micro-cars they could liberate streets and avenues of the clogging masses of hardly-used steel that make city driving a crawling nightmare and finding a parking space even worse.

Air purity would be improved as well. At the moment, according to serious research, three quarters of all SUVs, with their gas-guzzling engines, are registered to urban homes. This is insane if we are serious about reducing pollution rather than going shopping in a two-ton truck.