| Comment | The motorway itself was designed with 1990s traffic levels in mind (as predicted in 1979s era modelling).
It's now dealing with 2020s traffic levels which have vastly surpassed design expectations. There are too many cars on the roads, but more specifically: too many people are making single-occupancy journeys by car. On the Glasgow motorway network, this issue is highly noticeable because of the history of its design and development.
The western flank of the inner ring road (what we know today as the M8 Kingston Bridge corridor) was never designed to be the national / regional route. This was supposed to be the job of a much heftier southern flank motorway, which eventually was built in the form of the M74. That's why the motorway at the Mitchell Library is so thin, only 3 lanes. It was intended and built to be 2 lanes in each direction, with a third being added post-hoc to deal with traffic volumes which the route was never designed to accommodate.
We are where we are, with the mad traffic levels and frustrating interweaving across lanes because of this astonishingly shortsighted approach to traffic management and transport planning, and the resulting car dependency it has created.
To put it bluntly, and in a way that I know is not what everyday drivers usually want to hear: Things will not improve trafficwise until fewer people drive. It's as simple as that. |
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