One of Alexander McCall Smith’s favourite anecdotes is of eavesdropping on two women walking along Morningside Road. One says indignantly, “Would you look at the pavement?”, indicating how treacherously cracked and uneven it is. “Just like the state of the world,” tuts her friend.

Where I live – and no doubt where you do too – the pavements might, like Venus flytraps, lie in wait for the unwary, but they are as nothing to the state of the roads. Main roads and minor roads alike have become obstacle courses of fissures and craters, some of them so deep they could have been made by meteorites. Avoiding them reminds me of fairground dodgems, the sudden swerve required to avoid collision and untold damage to the car’s suspension almost as hazardous as the pothole itself.

Like McCall Smith’s Morningside ladies, you might be tempted to read something more profound into our dilapidated highways. You could see them as a metaphor for wider global problems: the collapse of democracy and the rule of law, perhaps, or the pitfalls of the stock market in interesting times. For me, the proliferation of potholes – which sounds like the title of a new McCall Smith novel – is symptomatic of one of the most fundamental and aggravating features of modern life: the excessive volume of cars and heavy vehicles.

Read more Rosemary Goring

Even the humblest bicycle, given time, will wear down the road. How much more damaging, then, are cars so big they blot out the sun? I’m with the campaign group Clean Cities, which is suggesting that owners of heavier than average cars – SUVs in other words – which have a disproportionately........

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