EMISSIONS: We are all concerned about the exponential growth of traffic on our city streets. It's spreading, amoeba-like, to cover every inch of tarmac in this great land.
Traffic jam, gridlock, hold-up, bottleneck, logjam, tailback...we've had to invent a whole new language just to begin to attempt to describe it.
But despite the efforts of some of our greatest minds (and wallets) to solve the crisis, the cancer at its very core has gone unrecognised. Until now.
Emissions lays the blame squarely on the People Carrier.
Noxious selfishness personified. How one person (for it habitually is one person) can feel so self-important they can justify taking up so much space at one go is a mystery.
Morning rush hour, they're there in their dozens. Whole lumbering herds of them, one kid - maybe two - per vehicle, clogging the city's very arteries. Evening, same thing. Weekends, ditto.
It's like a mobile nation of single-occupant mansions in a country starved of housing. So much for teaching children the virtues of sharing. And people will complain when this country is solely populated by self-serving money-grabbers in 20 years?
"Ah, Mr Salesman, I'm interested in buying that 20-foot-long misnomer in the window for transporting my foot-long child around in."
"An excellent choice Madam. I take it you realise they have an ergonomically designed ciabatta holder in the dashboard?"
"Don't try to patronise me, you horrible little weasel, just hand over my keys!"Tut, tut, you may say, these people have rights too.
Okay, perhaps, but answer this: ever had to swerve to avoid pulverisation by a "car" (and we use that term in the broadest sense) that was obviously designed by the Libyan army for transporting dozens of heavily-armed troops and their camels across the Sahara, as it lurches blindly out of a suburban shopping centre?
The middle-class housewife at the wheel may or may not have a small bag of shopping or a schoolchild hidden deep in the behemoth's deepest recesses to justify her vehicle's very existence, it's impossible to tell. As if it matters. And to those owners planning to retort with the "I'm only thinking of the children's safety" line, we are miles ahead of you. Buy a "Baby on Board" sticker. Everyone knows they make you invincible.
As for those inconsiderate motorists who insist on asserting their manhood (or womanhood) by driving around cities in four-wheel-drive monsters that haven't seen a splash of mud since the last time they were parked in the RDS car park during the Horse Show. Ah, but that particular diatribe must hold for another day...