Plan was needed for closure

Every morning I travel from my home in Newton Farm to my work in Govan.

I travel through Westburn Village, past the Cambuslang golf course, over the bridge near Morrisons, through the investment park and join the M74 at Tollcross.

Sometimes there is a build up of traffic and I’ve even known the queue to stretch back as far as the road past the golf course.

This morning (February 20), however, due to the cut of off access to the M74 just past Lidl at Rutherglen, the queue began at the entrance to the Newton Farm.

The traffic was completely ridiculous and would have meant that I would have been more than 30 minutes late for work regardless of the fact that I purposefully left the house 15 minutes earlier than usual.

The whole queue was just inching forward a few feet at a time in total gridlock.

Thankfully I was able to turn around at a side street and head up the back farm roads to join the motorway near Uddingston.

Once on, the motorway was freeflowing with fairly light traffic, which, just highlighted to me that the problem as stemming from the bottleneck created in Cambuslang by a massively increased volume of traffic trying to all head for the one on-ramp.

I completely understand that the work to the bridge needs to be done, and that will require the closure of part of the road.

I would, however, have hoped that given their advanced knowledge that this would cause problems, the council would have worked out a suitable diversion or other such measure to ensure that local motorists weren’t just left to sit in a completely unacceptable level of gridlock.

The entire town ground to a halt when it just didn’t have to if someone had the foresight to facilitate this better.

Perhaps offering a number of alternative routes to the motorway, or indeed routes that don’t use the motorway, so that the traffic would have been more evenly spread out.

Encouraging more local drivers to go by train where possible, or anything other than just a sign saying this will be closed for three months, tough luck.

I hope that something can be put in place and that this won’t be the state of affairs for the next three months. Roslyn Scholarios via email