Tonight Is The Night I Fell Asleep At The Wheel

Photo by epSos.de

The M74 extension opens today. It's a win for the motoring lobby and politicians with mindsets stuck in the 1950s. It's a loss for everyone else.

I've been unlucky enough to have been stuck on the Kingston Bridge in Glasgow during rush hour. It's only happened to me a couple of times, but it's something that gets burned into your memory. I thought at the time, and I think every time I hear a traffic report on Radio Scotland, 'why do people put themselves through that every day?'

The solution, of course, is not an extra lane that will be rapidly filled up, or an extension to a motorway that will only allow more cars to sit stuck in a jam. The solution is more public transport giving commuters more choice in how they get to their work and back.

I've watched in the last couple of years as the community around Polmadie train depot has been flattened to make way for the concrete edifice, with the views of Glasgow from the West Coast Main Line, which used to open out before you, now obscured by a road on concrete stilts. Welcome To Scotland.

Of course, as Friends of the Earth Scotland and the Scottish Greens point out, the road should never have been built in the first place. It's a failure in the joined-up thinking of politicians who overrode the public inquiry and allowed it to go ahead, and then claim that they're trying to make this country the greenest in the world.

And one last point: just because a Scot invented tarmac, doesn't mean we have to cover every square inch of the country in it!