It's the Easter Weekend, a time of the year that's always important on the roads because it seems that most of the population of the UK decides to get in the car and go somewhere, with the collective result that most of us end up going nowhere in a traffic jam.
This year it has particular relevance, though. Easter is celebrated by Christians as the festival of the resurrection, and it coincides with festivals held by Pagans and many other cultures to welcome the arrival of Spring, and with it new life. So it's fitting that, this Easter, we're looking at a resurrection and a new birth of our own — though both are motorways, and unfortunately neither are made of chocolate.
Head over to the Motorway Database where there are big things happening in Scotland. The tired old A8 between Newhouse and Baillieston has been the site of huge construction works for a couple of years now, and in just a week's time will rise from the ashes as the new, final section of M8 — completing a motorway that has had an obvious gap for decades now.
Part of the works to build the new motorway have involved changes at Baillieston Interchange that created a new motorway spur and it's unusually been given its own number, so you can now also peel the foil off the Database's newest arrival, the A8(M). It's the first entirely new motorway since 2003 and it's more than a little bit quirky, being by far the UK's shortest motorway.
Sightings of the Easter Bunny on either of those two new motorways are unconfirmed, but we'll keep you posted.
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Picture credits
- Aerial photo of the M8 under construction is courtesy Transport Scotland, taken from this video and used under the Open Government licence.
