Kingston Bridge, Glasgow
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The Kingston Bridge is a road bridge crossing the River Clyde in Glasgow, Scotland. The bridge carries the M8 motorway through the city centre. The Kingston Bridge is the busiest road bridge in Europe, carrying over 150,000 vehicles every day.
The bridge connects Anderston and the city centre at Junction 18/19 with Tradeston and the Gorbals at junction 20. The bridge is notionally five lanes each way, however, approaches to the bridge are not only littered with junctions of their own, including major city centre links and the M77, but are only two lanes wide.
When opened in 1969, the bridge was designed to handle only 20,000 vehicles a day. By 1990, the sheer volume and weight of traffic, combined with poor design, resulted in serious structural deterioration being discovered in the bridge. A decade-long repair and renovation programme was initiated to repair and strengthen the bridge. These repairs have involved raising the bridge, while still operational, to allow the construction of new supports, before lowering the bridge onto strengthened supports.
The ongoing works, combined with the design of the approach roads, causes traffic chaos at most times of day and is part of the reason the M8 has gained its reputation as one of the poorest designed motorways in the UK.
The long-term solution to the problem is the M74 completion project, to act as the southern flank of the unbuilt Glasgow Inner Ring Road. The existing "ski ramp" where the Inner Ring should have continued will remain unused; the M74 will meet the M8 a few hundred yards further south.
See also
External links
- Glasgow City Council page on Transport in Glasgow (http://www.glasgow.gov.uk/en/AboutGlasgow/History/Transport.htm)