A80 road

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The A80 is a trunk road in Scotland, linking Glasgow to Stirling. The road, which has been converted to motorway standard at its beginning and end sections, is one of Scotland's busiest, taking traffic in a north easterly direction from Glasgow, to the new town of Cumbernauld, and then onward to Stirling where it merges with the M9 which eventually becomes the A9 to the North.

The A80 has gained a reputation for being one of Scotland's worst traffic bottlenecks. The Stepps-Cumbernauld stretch, built in the 1960s is now seriously undercapacity in relation to the amount of traffic it carries. The lack of hard shoulders mean that a vehicle breakdown can cause massive jams which can stretch all the way back into the North East of Glasgow. Some of this was alleviated in 1992 by building the M80 Stepps bypass at the southern end of the route, but the problems now centre around the Crowwood roundabout near Moodiesburn on the outer periphery of Glasgow.

The troublesome Auchenkilns roundabout in Cumbernauld was finally replaced by a grade separated junction between the A80 and A73 which opened in November 2005, but the widely regarded long term solution to the A80's problems is to replace it entirely with a motorway which will bypass Cumbernauld completely. There was a scheme devised to do just that in the 1970s, which would have linked the part M80 that stretches from Glasgow to Stepps to that which begins at Haggs near Falkirk through what has become known as the Kelvin Valley Route. However the Scottish Executive appear to favour upgrading the A80 instead of this plan.

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