So Scottish motorways (and Special Roads with similar restrictions like the Edinburgh City Bypass) have 70mph signs because of differences between legislation between Scotland and England - originally motorways were unrestricted but in 1967 a 'temporary' 70mph limit was brought in. In England and Wales this was through a series of statutory instruments (the one currently in force is the excitingly named "70 miles per hour, 60 miles per hour and 50 miles per hour (Temporary Speed Limit) (Continuation) Order 1978" which extended the 1977 order indefintely) while in Scotland they simply used the rules allowing them to place a speed limit on roads to give all motorways a 70mph limit; hence the 70mph signs on motorways because technically the 'national speed limit' (of which no motorways on that exist in Scotland) is still unrestricted. This is also why non-motorway 'special roads' (the A1/A720 in Edinburgh and the A55 in north Wales; almost certainly others somewhere) have 70mph signs and not NSL signs - legally all of the orders providing for the national speed limit exclude non-motorway special roads because none existed or were planned in 1977; so rather than amending the legislation for a handful of roads the fudge is to stick 70mph signs up. Not the only difference in laws between Scotland and England on the motorways - the other noticible one is that Scottish motorways are numbered based on the A road they replaced (which is why there's no A7 as Edinburgh-Carlisle is not high demand enough as a route; and why the M872 is the M872 and not a shorter number) while England use a zonal system like the A road numbering system across the UK.
So I'm trying to wrap my head around it, but if there are NSL signs in Scotland, does that still mean "end of speed limits" or has it got the normal meaning it has in England and Wales?
@@qooqle An NSL sign on an all-purpose road is 60 or 70 limit even in Scotland, but motorways are Special roads so not covered. I am currently trying to find out if the A3290 near Reading is still a Special Road because if it is there is currently no speed limit on it due to it having NSL signs rather than 70 signs.
@@qooqle NSL signs mean 60/70 on all-purpose roads in Scotland; its just in Motorways that there's this fudge. It also might have been fixed at some point but that was always the reason why you have 70mph signs at motorway entrances in Scotland
Why did the UK parliament (the only one at the time) which was responsible for all legislation across the UK not treat all parts of the UK in the same way?
This is why you need to keep still when doing your patter, Jon. …. Trying to climb a slide at the same time means you called it the A786 at 46 seconds in instead of A876 😂
Ah shit. Yeah it turns out it's difficult to "do thing" at the same time as talking and recording. Ah well, don't tell anyone and I'm sure no one will notice.
All rather wonderful. Makes me proud to be Scottish- we're so hard we have pedestrian crossings on our motorways? No, it is an outdoor LabTest being run by the University of Kincardine Tulieallan , to prove Darwinism. They send the bizies in training on a field trip and who ever survives they train them up to be road traffic constables.
@@malcolmyoung7866 Alas yes. Still churning out the same standard of polis. Now it's even worse, as it's the HQ of the brains trust that is Police Scotland.
@@AutoShenanigans Was working at the golf club so from home to there the crossing was the easiest way - and I never knew I was making UK motorway uniqueness!!
The main reason for the upgrade of the A876 near Kincardine, and the resulting grade separation junction, replacing the roundabout, was because of the opening of the new Clackmannanshire bridge, which allows traffic to avoid going through Kincardine. The Kincardine bridge was thus given relief as a result, and a bypass round Kincardine was made as well, for traffic in Fife.
Back in te late sixties, I used to cycle from Larbert with my mates, across tte Kincardine bridge, and on to Culross just for a day's ride out. We were all around ten years-old at that time, (jumpers for goalposts!). There is no way anyone would let their kids do that now.
@@James-gf9jl Maybe not at ten years old, but the National Cycle Network route that goes over the Kincardine Bridge is actually pretty safe. I would have let my older kid do it with his friends from the age of about 14. Younger kid is a halfwit, alas...
@@James-gf9jl We used to do that , from Bo'ness , in the late 60s , covering the 'two bridges' in one direction or the other . Always particularly liked the Dutch style dual carriageway with separate cycle lanes which went north from about a mile beyond Skinflints to just short of Airth , where the 876 now crosses on the flyover . We used to stop at the milk bar in fife which was on the road out of Rosyth , and getting on for halfway , going anti clockwise , and then at the chippy in Dalgrain Rd Grangemouth on the way back . Happy days . Even as an adult I wouldn't cycle that route now .
I had Taylor relations in the farms Mydub and Cuthelton shown near the dual carriageway on the OS map at the beginning. Also in the outro , the coastal land Jon is standing on by the newish Forth crossing near Airth is probably next to land farmed by my great-great-grandfather Allan Carswell ( 1826-1902 ) , who was a schoolmaster as well as a farmer at North Greens. My mother remembered being taken for runs in the car on summer evenings in the 1930s by her grandfather to see progress on the building of the Kincardine Swing Bridge seen beyond the new bridge in the closing shots. Thanks , I really enjoyed this edition.
Here's a fun bit of trivia. Before the A80 was fully upgraded to the M80 (and renumbered the western end of the M876), its junction numbers on a map went 5, 1, 2, 8, 7, 3! Now it has two Junction 8s!!
Junction 1, the Denny dip Where the M876 joins M9 is the Kinaird interchange. And the wee bridge near the end is the poo bridge which is on the back road called the poo road that takes you out at the roundabout for the bridges. When it was an A road approach to Kincardine bridge, and high winds shut the Forth road bridge, it would back up for miles and miles, so people would short cut down the poo road to jump the queue lol
Rab C Nesbitt - class. I didn't realise when I made my comment the other day that this would indeed be your next offering Jon. I won't say 'great minds think alike' because 'fools seldom differ'😂
Wickedsweetawesome... as usual. The little annoyances (for you) makes these videos for me, it's real life. If they were contrived it would spoil it all, don't become 'slick' stay "oh bugger it" in nature please. Huge fun to watch.😀😀😀😀😀
Junction 1 at 1:30 is horrific. I used to miss the turn onto it coming from Bonnybridge quite often, especially in the dark. Then when you get onto it you've got low visibility of oncoming traffic and a short slip road to merge into fast traffic. Try doing that in a Citroën C1. Thankfully the person I used to visit in Bonnybridge moved after a year, so I've never needed to use it again.
There have been a number of accidents there over the years where they went straight on over the triangle and through the crash barrier. The slip road now has Slow painted on the road. The on slip isn't long enough to allow a decent increase in speed to merge. The same can be said for M80 J7 north.
@3:55 The two motorways using the same road used to give Google Maps a heart attack. When I was a young driver and first travelling up the M9 unsure of myself the satnav guided me down the M876. I got the feeling something wasn't right, even before it told me to go right round the roundabout, double-back and continue on down the M9 like it hadn't just wasted 20 minutes of my day. No idea if it's any better these days.
The reason Google has problems with it is that it is an American company, in America the distance between parallel roads of the same type is usually at least a state. But this situation isn't unique, I know at least two cases here in the Netherlands of motorways (Dutch: snelwegen) joining and diverging again: A2/A9 just south of Amsterdam and A15/A16 just south of Rotterdam.
We have a multiplex here in Aus too. At the end of the M1 Pacific Motorway at Newcastle, the A1 travels along John Renshaw Drive for about 1km before combining with the A43 New England Highway for about 3 - 5Km to the Hunter River crossing at Hexham.
And the end music, for those who don't know, is the theme tune to 'Rab C. Nesbitt'. Composed by David McNiven, who also wrote themes for Naked Video and Kick Up The 80s. Would of course be more relevant to any of the Glasgow motorways🙂
I'm not from or in the UK and i really have no intresst in roads. Still I watch every video you make because YOU are so damn good at making content. Thank you for the entertainment.
That part where the two join is the worst part about living here here. It always backs up going towards Glasgow as most people want to go on the m876 but only one of the lanes go that way
Awesome, there's a pedesrian crossing at the bottom of the West bound exit at J24 of the M62....... sadly though it's too far away from the main carriageway to be any "GREAT FUN". However lovely video.
Because of that shared M9/M876 section, and also quite a lot of inattention on my part, I once inadvertently turned off the westbound M9 onto the northbound M876, instead of continuing onto the next sliproad for the southbound M876. As it was late at night, needless to say the 270° sweeper came as a bit of a shock.
@@alistairthow1384 Yup, in the wet, when you have a couple of milliseconds to decide whether to break, accelerate or grip the steeringwheel like your life depended on it.
The reason for the (70) signs on the motorway is: The Scottish Government doesn't have the legal powers to set a national speed limit for motorways. The Westminster Government hasn't set any national speed limit for motorways in Scotland. So all motorways in Scotland have been individually assigned with local speed limits.
Another "exciting episode" of Secrets of the Motorway", even if you say so yourself. Good one, John. And to find the pedestrian crossing! What a job. Here's rooting for the next 5.9K to join and break that 100K barrier. Well done.
The A55 in north wales has 70 MPH signs too, though in that case they're used on the sections of the dual carriageway that are under motorway regulations (as an NSL sign would be confusing to vehicles which are normally limited to 60 on an A class dual carriageway).
The M876 is a royal pain in the derrière. My employer often requires me to go to Larbert, and I used to leave the motorway at J1. But, if you enter the slip road at J1 at 70mph, you will undoubtedly fly through the chevron signs, across the on slip and into a field. If you are lucky, you’ll be upright for all of this. So, you ideally need to be doing less than 40mph as you exit the motorway. But try doing this when a 44t truck is brokebacking your bumper. For this reason, you’d have noticed that on the approach to J1 heading east there is an unusual sign. It implies that the left hand lane is a filter purely for leaving the motorway. This is to encourage through traffic to merge to the right, stopping the inevitable rear ender when someone weighs anchor as they notice the off slip is shorter than a double decker bus. However, it doesn’t work. People still sit in the left lane, tailing people with their left hand indicators on, and there is still the screeching of brakes and the wail of horns, and the incomprehensible Falkirk accented swearing. It’s not so much the tight turnout, it’s the lack of deceleration and acceleration lanes. Probably wouldn’t cost that much in the grand scheme to lengthen those lanes out a bit. But as it seems that the Green tail wags the Yellow dog up here now, it’s unlikely to be improved.
The substandard layout of this junction predates the SNP / Green coalition by almost half a century so I'd wager the lack of improvements is more a case of "there's hardly any traffic using this so lets do sod all to fix it" rather than any political ideology. Best we can hope for is a major housing development being built near the junction which would hopefully include junction improvements paid for by the developer as part of the planning consent.
Love the physical comedy! That was both the funniest and strangest video for a while. (Strange in the sense that the motorway itself is peculiar.) 94,000 and counting. Thanks, Jon. 🙂
Production values are so refined and professional, and you just keep getting better every week.. Another fun trip across the countryside and the coolest pedestrian crossing anywhere. Thanks John, best episode yet!
We had a aimiliar situation on USR 35 east, between Dayton & Xenia, Ohio, where the traffic flow was stopped by smaller side roads. One intersection has been redesigned as a flyover while the second is being reconstructed as a "superstreet". They are taking the design from the west side of Columbus, Ohio, where USR 40 (W. Broad Street) was transformed into such.
This is my favourite RU-vid channel. Hands down. During Lockdown, when it was en vogue to make Powerpoint quizzes for Zoom meetings you didn't want to attend with your work colleagues, as a substitute for real life social events you didn't want to attend with your work colleagues, I knocked together a quick round about UK motorways. Because while my colleagues probably wouldn't think so, I thought it would be interesting. Shame these videos of yours hadn't come out then... I'd have been able to spice them up even more!
England's motorways have their own quirks but Scotland's motorways are even more quirky! Multiplexing motorways, LILO sliproads, repurposed A roads and pedestrian crossings! I love 'em!
The interesting thing about the bridge in the background at the end! The Clackmannanshire bridge was used in the film "Cloud atlas" when halle Berry crashes, think it appears in the film a couple of times but it was used for filming before the bridge opened to the public
You're at South Alloa by the Clackmannanshire and Kincardine Bridges in the end sequence. I thought I recognised the mud! That part of the Forth is tidal- in fact it's tidal all the way to Stirling Bridge- and as the land is low and flat so the tide exposes it an awful lot of evil mud.
Welcome to the nearest motorway to me! Cool to see the details of the M876, I remember when they upgraded the last bit near the Kincardine bridge, seemed to last forever!
I actually drove past the start of that motorway today and had never heard of it... was just hoping we would get a video about it at some point. First video that popped up on my feed. Excellent :)!
Finally talking about this one! Stupid number, weird split, pedestrian crossing, but it is a local one so how can I hate? Glad to see it finally got the treatment it deserved.
@@AutoShenanigans Most motorways are though, I think my worst runs here are better than my worse runs on stuff like the M6. Hope you get to some of the other's nearby soon, a video on the M9 would have plenty facts and a lot of fun sights to talk about
As for two routea sharing pavement, those are common here in America. Our interstates will form concurrencies(sections where there are two or more routes on a roadway) where it is economically advantageous. Some examples include river crossings, larger cities where space is limited, ect. ect. We only really build them when two routes are going the same general direction, and they can span from less than a mile to over 100-200 miles.
very jolly outro tune, no viaduct but a very nice stone bridge . Talk about future proofing .. M876 .... somebody needs to build a fk load of motorways to catch up with that number.
Hi John that's the second motorway to have a multiplex this one M876-M9-M876 the other is M62-M60-M62 around Manchester as usual a fantastic video take care mate
I hadn't considered that co-routing for segments was unusual elsewhere. In the US it happens fairly often, sometimes rather pointlessly, like that the westernmost nearly 20 miles of US Route 264 in North Carolina are the same road as US 64, while others are for practical matters of cost and terrain, such as Interstate highway 77 and 81 running sharing a ten mile stretch of pavement in Virginia which was about location of gaps in the mountain ridges for I-77 to pass through rather than undertake extra, expensive tunneling or excavation. For more fun when this happens we occasionally get situations with opposite directions signed, e.g. northbound I-77 runs along southbound I-81 and vice versa.
The US is very different in this respect as you say. Sometimes you get several routes using the same stretch of physical road (or pavement as you like to say, let's not get started on that one). Over here, if two routes follow the same stretch of road, the more prominent one usually prevails.
Maybe it's not that strange and I just think it is. If it were me, I'd have ended the M876 at the M9 and had an M9 spur (M91 maybe?) for the remaining little bit.
Another example of shared routing is to the north of Manchester, which has an orbital motorway named the M60 all the way round. If you travel from Leeds to Liverpool (or vice versa) along the M62, it merges with the M60 for about seven miles, before the two separate out again. The shared stretch is called the M60 which is ironic as the M62 pre-dates the M60 by nearly 25 years and that merged stretch used to be part of the M62 and was labelled as such.
The M876 does something weird to the M9 not in a Jimmy Saville sort of way. You're a bad man John a bad man.. but, that bloody killed me in this video. Keep up the good work...
@@miriistina Humour is subjective. What Saville did was disgusting don't get me wrong. But, people and comedians make jokes and references to him in their shows all the time.
