I hate this bridge, I’m sure most of you know of it. It’s an infamous bridge on a backroad between East Kilbride and Hamilton/Strathaven. It is incredibly narrow, making you thread the needle between two metal bollards that’ll rip the soul out your car, as well as your axles. the “Wee EK bridge”, It’s made many a Glasgow live article.
I think what’s worse though, is the cult of people (predominantly online) who see it as some sort of right of passage to driving rather than an absolute travesty of modern civic planning and an inability to let go of the old and redundant.
It has several FB groups dedicated to capturing the chaos on a daily basis, where posts are met with comments from wee bridge driving adjudicators rating the poor driving of the wee bridge’s latest victim.
Get this bridge tae fuck.
by Better_Carpenter5010
28 comments
i dont understand how people cant drive through it without crashing. ive driven my van over it many a time without incident
The bridge is fine, folk just need to stop treating backroads like they’re main roads.
There is nothing wrong with the bridge. All it’s doing is showing how many shit drivers there are on our roads
But the entertainment value provided by the related social pages provides joy to the masses!
Not me though, that thing is the stuff of nightmares, absolute horror, nerve shattering content. (Jk)
But as someone who’s navigated those monster bollards probably thousands of times without issue I can only presume the OP has probably hit it? And modern civil engineering? Is the bridge not rather old and being protected by these steel monstrosities?
Drive better?
The fact that there’s a guy on TikTok who films the bridge just to capture the bumps is too funny.
Of course it’s shit drivers but it probably wasn’t a problem back when cars were smaller but they’re getting bigger and more are SUV-sized these days. The bend into a tight road won’t help either.
Everyone saying that it’s shit drivers are correct. But infrastructure needs to be designed for shit drivers.
If your infrastructure is blocked by shit drivers frequently the your infrastructure is shit.
It’s a mix of shit drivers and outdated infrastructure
Unfortunately you’re always going to have shit drivers and in an ideal world the bridge would be modernised
>absolute travesty of modern civic planning and an inability to let go of the old and redundant.
Tbf its not like planners set out to have it like this. It’s an old bridge designed for the occassional horse drawn cart, not modern road traffic. And I doubt we’re keeping it out of stubborness, it probably just isn’t a priority. Bridges are expensive, this isn’t even an A Road, and for the most part the only damage is to the drivers, the Council just has to pay to repair the bollards. Councils are broke and this probably just isn’t enough of a problem to justify the expense of a new bridge.
Nah mate get these drivers tae fuck, this bridge exposes how many people aren’t fit to drive or are driving distracted.
Should be part of the driving test. If you can’t do it you probably shouldn’t be driving.
I had a Mexican stand off on this bridge one time I was coming back from Hamilton on my motorcycle, coming downhill I could see no one was coming or waiting so I slowed down and moved onto the bridge, as I did so a woman in a merc came screaming around the bend from EK and halfway onto it forcing me to stop and her to get out the car and start screaming at me to move back, a 10 minute argument ensued where she slung all sorts of insults my way while I calmly reiterated that I was riding a motorcycle, it has no reverse gear, and pushing it backwards uphill wasn’t a feasible proposition, she just wouldn’t accept this and kept telling me to move back, eventually the guy in the van behind me got out and started telling her to move back as I had no ability to reverse and she had jumped the give way when I was already on the approach, most of the other drivers that were now being held up, who all understood fine well that I couldn’t just reverse the bike back up the hill also started to join in all begging her to just reverse back, as she finally gave in and got back in her car she gave me an earful about how she was late now because of me and hoped I was happy with that fact, as she attempted to reverse back she clipped one of the railings and scraped her car, which she then got out to check, luckily she’d left enough space that I could now cross fully and I got out of there as the now furious drivers went into meltdown that she was holding traffic up again.
Skill issue
1.9m/6.0 foot on the sign, and barriers on the way to the bridge both giving visual reference to the width of the bridge. I would say the problem is between the steering wheel and the seat.
Me and my pals used to drink under this bridge . Good times
Just needs a sign beforehand ‘shite drivers take alternative route’ so they can avoid it.
If people learnt to read the signs they wouldn’t get stuck.
It doesn’t need demolished it just should have an alternate route and a literate population.
Take yer face for a shite man.
It stands as a symbol of the modern driver who canny drive in a straight line for a couple of metres.
Don’t see the issue, my cart and ponies fit quite comfortably through this.
That car has so much space to get through. That’s not “threading the needle”, that’s throwing a sausage down a hallway. If someone hits the bollards in a car that small, they’re just a bad driver.
If only there were other roads to Hamilton from East Kilbride
The bridge is fine, people need to stop being useless
I used to drive over it twice a day for years with zero incidents, I was also driving the same gen fiesta as the one in the picture , but I literally gotten a transit van over it without issue
People are just shit and can’t drive their car.
A lot of this is shit drivers. I was a new driver with a way too being car when I lived there and I never had an issue. I can see that some of these are people speeding, so fuck them and their problems. However, I agree with OP that infrastructure shouldn’t be a litmus test for driving skills, so I would suggest building new bridge so make it an easier experience overall. However!!! This is not a main road really, I only went that way when the GPS had ideas or something was blocking the other suitable routes. So, can we justify the spend? I think not, can we laugh and ask people to drive slower and take more care? Yes, yes, we can afford that as a society.
Bad drivers blame perfectly passable infrastructure
It’s a mix of newer cars getting bigger and bigger and fuckwits not paying attention or knowing how wide their car is. If your GPS screws you over, turn around and go another way.
Ive been over this plenty. If you manage to crash here, it’s entirely your own fault.
It’d be nice if it were widened, but it’s a shitey wee back road.
It’s usually quite entertaining if you arrive second and you get to watch someone try to navigate it first, i’ve seen some crackers. Also I once had a guy driving right up ma erse on the road towards it and as I took my time crossing it, I saw behind the wee thuggish bollards going to work on the wing of his car as he rushed it.
It’s a piece of piss to drive. If you can’t navigate that or find it ‘challenging ‘ then you shouldn’t be on the road.
This bridge and the cottages above it existed before the entire town of East Kilbride. They are from the late 1700’s, so you can’t just knock any of them down. Building a second bridge to the left would be a nightmare as it goes through a country park and a historic site.
If anything they should just completely close the bridge and widen the express way, those back roads are absolutely jam packed with terrible drivers, exasperated by the council approving a ton of new houses near by with no solution to all the issues that come with thousands of new people.
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