NEXT time you’re stuck on the M8 doing 5mph through Glasgow, or going stop-start, stop-start over the Kingston Bridge, ask yourself this: was it worth it? Was it worth all the buildings that were pulled down? Is it worth all the noise and the fumes and the ugly slip-roads and concrete underpasses? Some people say no. Some people are saying: let’s just scrap the whole damned lot.

You may have seen the campaign. There’s a Twitter account called Replace the M8 which is attracting attention with its argument that the road is no longer fit for purpose and we need something better. There was also a motion the other day by the Glasgow councillor Christy Mearns saying something similar: the cost of maintaining the M8 is so great, she said, that alternatives should be investigated, including replacement. Her motion also formally asked the Scottish Government for funding to research where we go from here.

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Of course no one is properly suggesting we could scrap the M8 right this minute. No matter how ugly and slow and destructive it is, hundreds of thousands of cars use it every year and any precipitate action to phase out or scrap the road would just mean all those cars having to go somewhere else, with grim consequences for the streets and communities around it. It would make the problem worse.

But in its proper context, and longer term, the idea of replacing the M8 really has something going for it and a little delve into history can help us see why. Check out the picture that goes with this article. It’s from an old edition of The Herald and it’s not hard, is it, to work out when it was taken. Look at the cars (Ford Cortina there at the front) and the hair (long, over the ears). It was the 1970s. February 1972 to be precise.

I first spotted the picture the other day when I was looking into this subject and the protesters' placards have stayed in my mind. The small group of architecture students from the Glasgow School of Art had gathered to object to the opening of the Charing Cross stretch of the M8 and the slogans say it all really: “people not cars”, “the car is a luxury not a necessity” and most striking of all: “this scar will never heal!”

It occurred to me straight away that some of these guys would still be around 50 years on and sure enough I tracked down one of them: Hunter Reid. He’s the one to the left of the “scar will never heal!” placard and he was 25 at the time and is 76 now. In his long and notable career as an architect in Glasgow, one of the projects he is best known for was the splendid renovation of Maryhill Burgh Halls.

I asked Mr Reid what he recalled about his day of protest and he said he remembered marching down from the art school with his friends and going on to the bridge and there being a couple of policemen there who weren’t terribly happy with them. I also asked him what his motivation was and he said it was partly his anger at the prioritisation of cars and partly the destruction of buildings, but basically he and his colleagues were making the point that it’s impossible to design a motorway through the heart of a Victorian city without paying a very heavy price.

Reading The Herald news story that went with the picture, it seems clear Hunter and his friends were minority voices in 1972. While opening the road, the Scottish Secretary Gordon Campbell said it was a bold project that would help rejuvenate the city and ease congestion. But then again, I’m pleased to say the editorial that this newspaper published on the day accurately laid out the dangers. The Charing Cross section of the M8, it said, had massacred one of the most attractive parts of Glasgow, but it also said the new generation of roads would be “the fathers of the next” and far from solving congestion, make it worse. The article also called for public transport to be encouraged and even suggested what would eventually become known as park and ride. It was a pretty prescient piece of journalism.

Fifty years on, I’d like to praise my anonymous colleague from the past who wrote that piece, as well as Hunter Reid and the others who attended the protest, because they’ve been proved right haven’t they? The policy of prioritising cars hasn’t worked. The congestion hasn’t eased – it’s got worse. And 50 years later, the great welt of concrete through the middle of Glasgow is as grotesque as ever. The scar has never healed.

The question is what to do next. Hunter Reid recognises replacing the M8 can only ever be a pretty long-term goal but he’s very supportive of measures to reduce and mitigate the impact it continues to have. The day I called him, he’d just driven on the M8 on his way to Ayrshire and he told me that, as he did, he was imagining what it would be like to have a roof over the Charing Cross section reconnecting it to Sauchiehall Street. It really could work, he said.

It’s ideas like that – covering the M8 or mitigating it where we can – that we should be working towards right now. Peter Kelly, the man behind the Replace the M8 campaign, makes the point that it’s now costing huge amounts of money to maintain and repair the M8’s ageing concrete structure; should we still be paying those bills without question or should we be investing in measures to mitigate and eventually replace the road? Perhaps we could start with the land under and immediately adjacent to the road which is still a kind of brutal no-man’s-land.

The potential benefits are clear. The Labour MSP Paul Sweeney, who’s been a strong voice on this subject, makes the point that phasing out the M8 and replacing it with homes, offices, public buildings and green spaces could encourage people to move into the city and thereby increase the tax base. In other words, there could be an economic incentive to this.

But the other reason is just as important for the people who live in Glasgow and certainly those who still remember how it used to be. Hunter Reid and his colleagues went on to that bridge in February 1972 to make a point about the prioritisation of cars and the destruction of Glasgow’s architecture. But it’s still happening in 2023. The scar will never heal, they said. So couldn’t we start to try and repair it?