Driving my dad's (small, comfy, electric) car around Glasgow yesterday I realised how much of a joke urban motorways are, even for drivers. Most of my life I've been a pedestrian, car passenger or user of public transport, so I've seen these huge roads mostly as an obstacle to cross, or a thing to passively tolerate while someone else drives along them.

And I've heard and read all the stories of them destroying communities in the heart of Glasgow (and many other cities) by breaking areas of the city in two. Of course they also reduce the air quality and destroy the peace and quiet.

But: driving one, especially one half-finished where not all the roads join together properly, even on a quiet Sunday in the in-between-days, is a nightmare. You have to cross four lanes of traffic in a few hundred metres, or come off and do a U-turn to go the right way. Or perhaps (because junctions have been shoehorned into spaces where they shouldn't exist) the slip road you're joining from will just stop abruptly.

In other words, they're awful.

Similarly in Helsinki I avoid driving along kehä I for the same reasons, but it is not quite as terrible...

[Image: M8 Glasgow Charing Cross interchange, CC-BY-SA MSeses, from Wikimedia Commons]

#UrbanMotorways #CarsSuck

Unter der #brudermuhlbrucke in #munchen im Mai 2025
#fotografie #schwarzweissfotografie #bayern #stadtlandschaft #viereckkiel #stadtfotografie #fahrradbubble #fahrradtour

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Under the bridge of the #urbanmotorways #munich #bavaria in May 2025
#photography #blackandwhitephotography #bnw #urbanphotography #cityscape #cycling

Some city planner decided he was Scotland's Robert Moses, and so Glasgow ended up with a motorway smashing through its centre.

#Glasgow #motorways #UrbanMotorways #MotorwayCity

The Box – a 1960s urban horror story

"Even when the route was first sketched out, knowledge of it remained confined to the roads department. The first the LCC’s municipal architects heard about it was when they unveiled plans for a housing estate in Clapham Junction, south London, and had to be quietly taken aside and told that one part might need to be moved so it did not sit in the middle of an eight-lane highway."

#London #UrbanMotorways #Marples #LCC #JaneJacobs

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/dec/13/londons-lost-mega-motorway-the-eight-lane-ring-road-that-would-have-destroyed-much-of-the-city