Another Concrete Snake

One thing you normally don’t do to someone in the spirit of altruism is bring out a scythe and start scoring lines across his chest. Unfortunately, what we aren’t willing to do to an individual, we are willing to band together and execute upon a much larger scale, still in a distorted version of altruism. Upon, say, a city.

Glasgow has a motorway running through its heart, which is fairly odd for a European city, This is a phenomenon that is a natural occurrence in America, but is not much favoured here. Or not anymore, I should add. The thing snakes from the east of the city, navigates through the city centre, rubbing shoulders with the historic Mitchell Library and graceful mansion houses of Charing Cross before hurling over the River Clyde on what is almost universally accepted (Google it!) to be the busiest bridge in Europe – the ten-lane Kingston Bridge - and then snakes onwards through the western suburbs. Another motorway, the one from England, latches onto it in the eastern suburbs, and during my lifetime, two more motorways, one heading north-east, and one south-west, have been linked to it, winding their way through the inner city before breaking free into the countryside. Glasgow is utterly unique in Britain in being linked together in this way, but the ideas that brought this about do not belong to here alone. In the sixties, during that same gin-fuelled orgy that created our tower-block-streaked skylines, many cities, London and Newcastle among them, indulged in breath-taking schemes to plaster over all their slum-ridden areas with vast motorway networks, heralding an age when motorists in convertibles could speed California-style down the open highway, with the wind in their hair, and with only the slight drenching of rain otherwise detracting from their very own British Dream. London was going to have four concentric motorways among many others. The inner-most would have decimated some of the most culturally rich areas of the city such as Kilburn, Camden, Highbury, Hackney, Bow, Peckham, Brixton, Clapham, Battersea, Shepherds Bush and the like. One glance at the plans invites revulsion, and the ‘artist’s impressions’ of Utopian couples holding hands in apparently beautifully sculpted underpasses in the middle of places like Camden Town is laughable and sad at the same time. Have a look at the anticipated state of Kilburn afterwards, that tiny thin road running on stilts through the centre of the scene is all that is left of the busy shop-fronted High Road. Three very tiny portions got built, but the movement petered out before it ever got going, thankfully.

The difference with Glasgow is that we actually went through with it. Well that’s not quite accurate. The actual plans were mind-blowing, and possibly only a fifth of them actually got built. The swathes of concrete winding their way through this city today are a fraction of what was intended. The thinking, in the case of the main motorway running through the centre, the M8, was that to stop the dense street traffic travelling through the city detracting from the quality of life in the centre of the city, they would simply plunge a motorway through the middle. To anyone alive who was responsible for this decision, I would like to say that driving a motorway through the centre of a city to make it less appealing to traffic is like burning your house down to make it less appealing to burglars. Even Billy Connolly has remarked that only this city would attempt to a build a ring-road right through the centre of town. At the time, a delegation was even dispatched to the Eastern coast of the United States to study the freeway networks there before formulating their plans. The conspicuous lack of giant roundabouts and the proliferation of spaghetti-like slip roads feeding into city centre streets betray the American principles behind the designs. Not to mention those unnerving entrances and exits that enter and leave from the fast lane. The scheme was pushed through disguised as simple slum clearance even though many other areas of slums were simply bulldozed to form slightly more publicly-amenable parks.

I can just imagine the council meeting in the City Chambers to sell this marvel of infrastructure:

Lord Butcher of Dennistoun: I call this meeting to order. On today’s agenda, the matter of accommodating the motor vehicles of our city. On behalf of the Scottish Road-Builders and Future Ages Society, I call Lord Asphalt.

Lord Asphalt: Thank you, your grace. I stand before you here to plead our case. For hundreds of years, Glasgow has endured the shame of the horse and cart. Now, we have the automobile, and yet Glasgow, looking upon its post-industrial future, stands shamefully still. The only course of action is to embrace our American brethren, and build motorways of our own.

Lady Swampy of the Heath: How many trees will it destroy? And will my daughter in Kinning Park be forever safeguarded?
Breaks down into tears, blowing her nose in an incredibly unlady-like fashion on a silken handkerchief with a small pony in the corner.

Lord Asphalt: I assure you, m’lady. No harm will come to your daughter, though her house will be bulldozed.
Raises voice to be heard by all assembled.
I must stress, citizens, that this is in the name of progress! Soon, we will be able to put man on the Moon. Is it too much to ask that we can drive at 50 mph through the centre of this nation’s largest city? I think not. Those that would hinder us in this battle are heathens and Luddites. I suppose you would have me conduct my affairs on a penny farthing? You know who I mean!

Skag Boy, The Wonder Midget: Haw! Where yeez gonnae pit it but? If yer gawny save the centre?

Lord Asphalt: I’m glad you asked that, young boy. And may I compliment you on your esteemed midgetry.
Lord Asphalt, who, it should be explained, has a very severe twitch in his right arm, takes a pen that is handed to him by a servant boy averting his eyes and draws a jagged line roughly east-west across a wall-map of the city, only just missing Central Station.
This is the proposed route. As you can see, ladies and gentlemen, we can kill two birds with one stone. Not only can we accommodate all those who wish to drive to the centre at great speed by building this road, but by actually routing it through the centre, we also destroy the centre as a destination, thereby diminishing the traffic on our streets still further!

Bystander Who I Can’t Be Arsed Inventing A Name For: But, you mean that…?

Lord Asphalt: Yes, by removing the very streets that we are worried about and building in their place this rather large motorway, we can eliminate the problem of having to worry about the effect of automobiles on those same streets, for they will no longer exist. For this reason, I propose that some of our most historic streets be eliminated, or at the very least, severed.
Rapturous applause from the crowd.

Lord Asphalt: To those of you who are yet to be convinced, and for the sake of brevity I shall deem those people, “Communists”, let me show you some exhibits to illustrate the point.
Pulls out one of the aforementioned ‘artist’s impressions’.
Here, we have a drawing of the city with the motorway built and as you can see, the people in the picture are tastefully clothed, and smiling, for the sun as out. This will be a more common occurrence as the smog caused by the lack of motorway will have been forever lifted, giving Glasgow a more cosmopolitan, Floridaesque feeling. On the motorway overpass, which will be coated in rose petals, you can see that swings made of ivy have been attached, and children who have been lifted out of poverty by the demolishing and non-replacement of their homes are swinging on it laughing with that giddy innocent laughter of youth. Ahh, look at them there. Such warmth! On the top is a car driver, whooping with excitement and throwing bouquets of flowers to the people emerging from the underpass below. And in the tunnel further back down the underpass, we see a Rangers and a Celtic fan locked in a conciliatory embrace.
The crowd break down and weep joyfully, while a small carefully-installed orphan-boy in the back of the room starts singing ‘Hallelujah’ in the style of the not-yet-born Jeff Buckley.

Lord Butcher: Bravo, bravo!

Lord Asphalt: Suddenly lowers his voice and issues a more threatening tone.
Now. Here is an image of Glasgow in a mere five years time if we do not build the motorway.
A projection of a black and white photograph showing the aftermath of a bloody battle in the Korean War is flashed briefly onto the scene.
Look at the carnage, you see, there really is no contest.
The crowd once again break down into wails of joy.

Lord Asphalt: AND, might I add, we wish to build seven more motorways through the city just like it!
All round fainting with admiration, while the ‘Communists’, mute with shock throughout the proceedings are dragged out the back and set upon by the Secret Police.

A fairly accurate representation of a council planning meeting I’m sure you’ll agree. See, I could have done government.

The sacrifice that Glasgow unwillingly made was, in the event, a God-send for towns and cities up and down the country. On surveying the brutality of the destruction of elegant townhouses, Victorian mansions and untold square miles of historic tenements, central government in Westminster declared that such vandalism would not be visited on any other city. Urban highway schemes up and down the land had the plug pulled. Stubs of some of those extra motorways were lengthened throughout the nineties in the name of ‘completion’, but it remained a curiously local glitch of the, “Well, we’ve come so far” variety. The new motorway to the south-west justifiably sold itself on safety grounds – it replaced the most dangerous road in Scotland - but it also sacrificed areas of one of Glasgow’s most beautiful parks, Pollok Park, by doing so. Then, by the time of the New Labour cull on new road schemes, it seemed that at last the simmering longing to plunge more motorways through the city had cooled to a rippled calm.

And that should be the end of the story. But it is not.
Something a little perplexing is happening now, taken in the context of what central government wishes to achieve, and in terms of the prevailing mood. Mention the M74 to anyone in the south-east of the city, and you are likely to illicit a fairly violent reaction one way or the other. Indeed, they are building another motorway through the urban landscape. Construction begins later in the year. Already old warehouses and businesses have been flattened. Venture down Cathcart Road or Polmadie Road or around the strange grid-of-streets-without-used-buildings that is Tradeston, and you will see that large signs have appeared proclaiming archaeological digs and preparation works. These are in the middle of heavily urbanised areas. I might stick some photos up when it gets dry enough to actually leave the flat. Plunging motorways through built-up areas being a universal sin in developed countries these days, this one anomaly does give a fascinating insight into the amount of destruction required.

In a master-stroke of branding, the project is called the “M74 Completion”, not, as campaigners will contend, The M74 Extension. A plethora of studies have been undertaken to justify this road, and they have lent towards the imperative for completion lest the West of Scotland fall behind (did they mean ‘fall further behind?’) the rest of the UK. A staggering viewpoint when put in the context of Edinburgh, a hellishly successful city despite having a pisspoor road network that consists of little more than narrow surface streets. A Geography teacher of mine once made the point that, “If you want to make poor people richer, give them the money. Don’t spend it on building roads around them. People without cars don’t need motorways.” A fair point. Glaswegians have among the lowest car-ownership levels in Europe. There are surely more direct ways to help the local economy.

One of the strangest things about the arguments for this road, though it is absolutely futile to discuss it now that all argument is at an end and the spades and diggers are even now churning the soil, is the amount of inconsistency and contradiction involved. This seems to have wormed its way into the arguments of erstwhile intelligent and well-informed people by means of an avenue of desperation. There is the argument that the congestion on the ‘old motorway’ (that which I described in the first-half of this entry) will be relieved, and thus help the economy of Glasgow. True, the Kingston Bridge will almost certainly lose its mantle as busiest bridge in Europe once the motorway is completed. The M8 is one of the most congested roads in the UK, rivalling the M25 and the M6 (not that you would know it from the national media). The bottleneck not only paralyses the trunk road network, but jams up the slip roads and into every city centre street and various other parts of the city. Trying to get out of the city at peak times is often an exercise in bypassing the ‘bypass’. But, this is contrasted with the argument that increasing road provision drags more drivers onto the roads. Ultimately, this gunges up the city as it was before, only now there are more vehicles causing the chaos, and thus more problems when they slip off the motorway onto the surface streets. I love it when people contradict this argument. There are a finite number of people and vehicles, so it goes, and therefore you can build your way out of congestion. Build enough roads, and you will finally satisfy demand.

But the real situation is more like this:
You live several miles from the city, out in the leafy periphery. You have a nice house with its own driveway. You have a privet hedge. Your wife can look at her neighbours and indulge in the sordid horse-play of one-up-man-ship. You daughter’s life is so utterly banal and driven by the cosmetic needs and materialistic nature of everyday life that she has descended to hell and become a goth (by the way they are generally really nice people actually from experience), wearing black lipstick to shock you into actually saying something to her, into betraying that you are actually a feeling, sentient being. You are – in a word – suburban. But, there is one real thorn in your side. Gosh, the commute down that motorway every day is hell. It takes you nearly an hour to get into town, and then another hour to get back, and by that time you are in a foul mood and you come crashing through the door giving the cat a huge kick out the way causing yet more of its hair is shed from its arse – I mean Christ, it already looks like some kind of snarling bald-arsed baboon. You eat your dinner in silence and don’t give a fuck about your equally mute daughter. You head upstairs dejected and don’t even bother getting through seven minutes of the Tantric Sex Manual by Sting that you bought your wife as a “Sorry I forgot our fucking anniversary” present because in your head is just the seething memory of stop-start vegetable-driving behind a thousand other pricks in their metal boxes with their CD players and their fragrant trees spinning from the rear-view mirror. You just wish they would widen that motorway and then you would get to work and back faster.

And then one day, Lord Asphalt, now a stately 105 years of age, presents his widening proposal to The Board, and the gap-toothed ubermuppets who run the city grin and nod in approval and then five years later it is finished, coming in at a parsimonious £1000 per inch, and hey presto, your commute takes 35 minutes. For a year, it is wonderful. Your daughter enrols at a prestigious college. You come home early and help your wife with the cooking, eagerly promoting Oyster Thursday when you gulp down the aphrodisiac and then settle down for the evening and then all through the night, with “Fields of Gold” in the background, you make earth-moving motions, having committed the Tantric book to memory in all your spare time. Great! Then, one day, while you are bending over putting away the dried plates into the bottom drawer, you hear subtle shaking. The surface of your coffee ever so slightly ripples. What is this? Some kind of velociraptor unleashed from a prehistoric theme park?

No, you run to the window, and that leafy tree-covered hill behind your house is being rampaged upon by a bulldozer. You read in the press the advertisements for a new development called Heavenly Rise, now within easy commuting distance of the city. A few months later, some horrendous Gingerbread cottage development of identical clone-houses built by a multi-national company has festooned the slopes with cheap brick-imitation prefabricated piles of wafer-thin-walled twat-housing and they have other families in them with other children. But God, don’t they look just like you? Just like your family? Yes, they are just like you. And those parents work in the city too. And guess what? They’re going to use your motorway. And then it all clogs up again, except now there is one more lane of blinking lights to gaze at while you chew your own tongue in frustration, and it is back to the hour long commute, only now when you get to the city, you are competing with even more traffic for those city streets, and those parking places, and trying to beat that amber light, or sitting stewing in your own flatulence while pedestrians cross between the bonnet of your car and the boot of the one in front, and Oh Christ what is the fucking point, I might as well get this car back into my garage and run the engine with a hosepipe from the exhaust coming straight into the car until I croak. Hmm, if only they would just widen the motorway again…

So that is one contradiction. The other is that they are falling over each other and pulling each other’s knickers down about the actual purpose of the motorway. It is variously seen as a way of helping Glasgow, or of helping bypass Glasgow. If it is the former, then why have they taken great pains to omit local junctions that would allow local traffic to get around the city more easily. And also why have they barred people from connecting from the new motorway to the Kingston Bridge and into the city and the western districts, which was part of the original plan in Day One? Whatever the ideology behind the construction, people will end up rat-running around surface streets to get between the new motorway and the bridge of the old motorway to get into the city centre, and wasn’t the point of all this to reduce surface traffic? And if it is to bypass Glasgow, then why the hell build it through Glasgow? That was the mistake they made with the old motorway. This one will pass half a mile from the city centre, albeit on the other side of the river from it. It will pass through inner city areas that do not benefit from it (due to lack of access), like Govanhill and The Gorbals.

The final contradiction can be found in two competing sources of official information. One document, on the M74 Completion website – head to the last frequently-asked question here holds that there will be a decrease in traffic everywhere, but perhaps a very small increase in traffic on the existing motorway network where the new motorway joins back in. The official site claims a tootling increase of 0.2% in ‘the study area’. This kind of traffic prediction is such an imperfect, black art though, based as it is on notoriously whimsical human behaviour, that the margin of error is probably several times this figure. I cannot claim that the figure is wrong, but I can contrast it with the findings below, from a source so indelibly linked to the first that you wonder how the chasm was leaped.

This other document, from the Scottish Government itself who are trying to promote the project, paints a very different picture. It forecasts queues, even on the new motorway, and it forecasts large increases in traffic on the existing motorway network west of the joining point. It even details the case for widening the existing motorways in these areas. This is being done. The hard shoulders, usually for stopping in emergencies, will become running lanes deep into the south-west of the city on two different motorways. It also makes a lacklustre attempt to argue its way out of the blunder of not connecting to the bridge, using deeply contradictory arguments. The main objectioner, a retired traffic engineer called George Baillie, was rail-roaded over by self-conflicting nonsense – from paragraph 4.23 onwards here, though I admit this will be of purely very local interest.

And one final, if overlapping, contradiction. The motorway project is hailed as a harbinger of regeneration to the run-down and derelict areas along its proposed route. Take a look on Google maps here and you will see a swathe of abandonment and ridiculously low-quality land uses such as warehouses (bear in mind that you are only a mile or two from the centre of a large city, the centre lies just to the north) with more dense areas of buildings to the south, further from the city centre. Many of the factories in the south-east and north-west of the picture have been demolished in the last year. It is no coincidence that this corridor of blight exists. It was cleared and largely prevented from being put to higher-quality uses by the very fact that this project has hanged in the air for decades. To say that building a road will be good at removing a blight that has been caused by speculation that a road will be built there is a circuitous feedback argument that should be deafeningly pointless to anyone. And I won’t even go into the contradiction behind the right-hand forwarding a new motorway as a transport option when left-hand (presumably using shadow puppetry) is rightly ranting about the benefits of dragging people out their cars and onto public transport.

So shall I end by hugging a tree then? Well, no. Amazingly, given the above, I am not actually utterly against this project. I have not yet made up my mind. For all the errors and bumbling in the presented arguments which would require a thick-spectacled corporate lawyer to even attempt to make sense of, there are undoubtedly advantages to going through with it. It may damage the city, but it will help the region. Areas west and east of the city, such as Renfrewshire, Inverclyde and Lanarkshire will be helped by the direct linking. The entire west of Scotland is still trying to find its feet in a lingering and destructive post-Industrial present. Any potential for lift needs to be seized upon. The problem for councillors is that they have to sell the project to the city that it partially demolishes. There is no problem in selling it to the districts listed above which are outside the city, which will feel more direct benefit, and with the added bonus that they lose nothing (a small part of Rutherglen in South Lanarkshire aside). Glasgow, which takes the damage, also sees scant benefit relative to these areas. It has long been a paradox that the infrastructure of this city seems generous for its size, but that it is gridlocked because it is used by folk from wealthy surrounding suburbs and satellite towns that contribute nothing to the city’s upkeep due to the cynical gerrymandering of the nineties that tightly bound the boundaries of the city, effectively shutting out commuters' tax money. This is another big issue that is an abomination of political manipulation and which I will need to deal with more fully sometime.

The fact that I feel it easier to argue against it probably stems from a lingering despair about our lack of ability to change of our way of thinking. A few years ago, Private Eye observed that Glasgow is still locked in the car-crazy 1950’s, and much of that is in evidence. It also is to do with the fact that it's easier to pick a fight with those that have laid their feelings and arguments bare, able to be picked off by conversational vultures like myself whenever we choose. It would be nice for the councillors to bury their heads in books by Jane Jacobs, of the excellent (if viciously flawed by attempting to compare Venice and Los Angeles) book, Car Free Cities by JH Crawford. The campaigners have mainly wailed about the horror of motorways and cars in general, or about the need to preserve communities in Oatlands, Govanhill and the like, or about other such things that it is difficult to argue against. Perhaps the root of being objective about something is about appreciating the sum of all others’ subjective opinions. In that case, I would have to put myself in the shoes of someone whose business was being knocked down, or whose view from their window will be blighted by another concrete snake, or whose son’s primary school will now be subjected to the constant cacophony of roaring traffic. Or perhaps I should put myself in the shoes of the delivery company owner who loses thousands of pounds a day from traffic congestion and that factory-worker whose wages are squeezed because the boss’s costs sky-rocket every time a consignment of raw materials is delayed as it moves at walking pace through countless underpasses, or maybe just into the shoes of that man in Motherwell who really just wants to get home in time to squeeze in some tantric action with his wife in before CSI:Miami starts.

In the end, we are stuck with the outcome we have. And if it can be done here, it can be done anywhere. In Britain, a supposed bastion of the new environmental movement, we are sending the message that we still allow such things to happen. The most shameful thing is the cynical and condescending way that it is being sold by the powers of government and by other interested parties. It may be that the project, looked at as a whole, may turn out to be a marginally more good than bad thing, though I would guess not. I do not claim to have an authoritative answer on this - nobody can - but it has been such a fuck-up of public-relations, such a sham of a public consultation and general standard white-wash of a case, that any actual benefits that could be claimed were long ago lost in a fog of oratory bollocks. Everyone has rightly stopped listening. It will take decades to find out whether the new road will have brought about the benefits it is supposed to bring, or to see whether the old and new motorways pack up to the legendary levels of gridlock that the former faces now. Is it really the case, that up here in this sometimes narrow-minded city, the terrible lessons of urban-planning-gone-wrong will have to be taught anew by actual implementation to each new generation, even while the monuments to the last generation's still stand?

What will be seen more quickly though, is the effect of the great swinging scythe on our city. Glasgow's ruinous past makes it the ideal tapestry for generation after generation of politicians and city planners to place their stamp upon it. This is not a historic-looking 'finished' city like Edinburgh or Paris. Its dereliction and its poverty make it an ideal guinea-pig for people bent on erasing the mistakes of the past with single-minded plans that in turn produce more mistakes, all in the name of misguided altruism. The effect of that scythe that has again broken free after decades of restraint will shortly become all too clear.