ALEXANDRA Parade, the Glasgow Herald writer William Hunter observed on May 31, 1975, was called Glasgow’s “Tobacco Road” because of its cigarette factories.

“It was blue last night”, he continued, “but not with smoke. Drivers, fuming with frustration, caused the smog. Their way into town was an one-hour crawl, bumper to bumper.

“It improved tempers not at all that what had turned the Parade into a tortoise crawl was the opening earlier in the day of the Monkland motorway.”

The motorway, he said, had been designed to remove the bottleneck at the Townhead junction at the Glasgow end of the Parade. “What the motorway managed to achieve on the ground was to stick a £7m cork right into the bottleneck. Sometimes for as long as four minutes no traffic moved out of it”.

On that first day at least, motorists had ignored the new motorway and struck to familiar territory. Come the evening, it was almost deserted.

The AA blamed much of the continuing chaos on lack of knowledge of the entry and exit points on the new motorway.

Surveying the scene on the Parade was one of the engineers who had built the new road. “There’s nothing the matter with the motorway”, he said, plaintively. “It’s the motorists who are not using it properly. They are not reading our new signs”.

His eyes, Hunter added, “looked sad”.