Transport Scotland has yet to decide on the M8 Woodside viaducts, one of Glasgow's most consequential infrastructure decisions in a generation.
Many Glasgow Chamber members don't recognise that name, so they haven't grasped what the three published options would mean. The evidence needed for a decision this size doesn't yet exist, and the options need far more analysis. This is too important to get wrong.
Under one option (the one for which Glasgow City Council has already expressed a public preference) a substantial section of the M8 would simply be removed, severing one of the most important national transport arteries as it passes through the city’s centre. Deciding now risks getting ahead of evidence that just isn't ready yet.
The viaducts, built in 1971 between Craighall and Charing Cross, now carry roughly 150,000 vehicles a day, albeit at a rather slow pace. They have been propped up since March 2021 at a cost to the public purse of more than £150 million in temporary repairs.
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Transport Scotland has consulted on three initial approaches: repair, replace or remove. Glasgow City Council’s preferred option, remove, is pitched as a once-in-a generation chance to reclaim land and reconnect neighbourhoods split apart since the 1970s.
I understand the appeal. Cities from Seoul to Portland to San Francisco have shown that on occasion, removing urban motorways can deliver real benefit, and the Chamber’s own evidence review has explored those examples. There can be significant localised city regeneration results – but every city is different and the wider impacts on the economy and industry need equal consideration.
We must also remember that this is not only a city-centre question. The M8/M74 corridor connects Glasgow’s manufacturing base – 3,000 firms and 55,000 jobs generating £3.8 billion in output – to Glasgow Airport, Greenock Ocean Terminal and the Glasgow-Edinburgh corridor.
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Scotland moves around 148 million tonnes of freight by road each year and the M8/M74 carries the bulk of it. This is an industrial strategy decision as much as it is an urban design one and our members in logistics and manufacturing deserve to be heard as loudly as those making the case for city-centre placemaking.
On the evidence published so far, the case for M8 removal in its current form hasn’t been fully tested, let alone proven.
The Chamber’s governing council of directors examined that evidence and reached a clear view that amounts to severe scepticism. Removal is a valid option worth understanding but it can’t be supported on the existing information and we’re concerned that a decision is being pushed well ahead of the analysis a change of this size demands. As one member put it, this would be the equivalent in the east of Scotland of suggesting that the Forth Road Bridge should simply have been closed without providing a replacement.
Whatever is decided has to reflect the region’s economy, its freight needs and its passenger connectivity, not city-centre regeneration alone.
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Here’s why. On April 30, the Scottish Government released information under Environmental Information Regulations that goes to the heart of this. It confirms that the traffic modelling behind the consultation tested removal as a straight closure of the M8 between junctions 16 and 17, with no compensating public transport and no local network upgrades, since none has been currently committed.
It also confirms there is no completed technical report on the modelling. Frankly, the public was consulted before the technical work needed to compare the options properly had been finished. Transport Scotland’s own commentary acknowledges “major detrimental impacts on traffic flows, connectivity, network resilience and journey time reliability” under removal. That isn’t a Chamber line. It is what has been published.
If the case for removal rests on pairing it with investment in an alternative boulevard as has been suggested, then that scenario also needs to be fully modelled. The current removal option does not assume any alternative.
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The gaps in evidence do not stop there. The remove option assumes displaced through-traffic will move onto the M74, which would be the logical route, but the M74’s headroom to absorb that traffic has never been quantified in public.
Independent commentary in 2011 warned that its congestion-relief benefit would erode as demand grew. We have not seen any published evidence to address that view.
What also would happen to the Kingston Bridge, sitting just south of the viaducts? It is the other 1970s structure carrying this city’s traffic and already running 25-30% above its original design capacity.
What we need, and do not appear to have, is an integrated 25-year plan for the whole M8. When our members met with Transport Scotland on June 2, the strongest reaction in the room was not to any single scenario, but to the risk of a break in the strategic motorway network, with knock-on implications for Glasgow Airport, Eurocentral and beyond.
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These are not abstract worries. They sit behind ten specific questions our council of directors agreed need to be answered before the Chamber takes a final position: what evidence underpins the support for removal, whether “remove plus investment” has been fully modelled; whether the M74 can absorb displaced traffic at peak times; the knock-on effect on the Kingston Bridge; the impact on freight and on airport access; how city-centre circulation will be managed; what modal shift is realistically achievable and by when; the full economic impact on businesses; how construction disruption will be mitigated; and what is the long-term plan for the full M8 corridor.
None of that is hostile. It is what any city should want answered before an irreversible change to its main artery.
The Chamber isn't backing any one of the three options. Our ask is straightforward. Publish the completed modelling. Model the remove option alongside the investment some supporters suggest could make it work. Set the industrial case alongside the regeneration case.
Answer the ten questions and complete the evidence, and then Glasgow City and its surrounding region can make the right call with confidence.
Stuart Patrick is chief executive of Glasgow Chambers of Commerce.
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