ACEI Excellence Award Win for M8/M73/M74 Motorway Improvements Project

The M8/M73/M74 Motorway Improvements Project in Scotland has won the ACEI Design Excellence Award 2018 for Overseas Projects (Large). The award was presented at the ACEI Awards Dinner in Dublin on Friday last.

This £500 million project upgrades the core of Scotland’s motorway network. By improving connection times between Glasgow and Edinburgh, it will boost Scotland’s economy, as well as reducing emissions and improving road safety. The project comprises a new three-lane motorway between Baillieston and Newhouse to complete the M8, upgrades to the M73 and M74, and the upgrading of one of Scotland’s busiest junctions – the Raith Interchange.

RPS acted as the contractor’s designer (to Ferrovial-Lagan) on behalf of Transport Scotland for this major DBFO project. RPS undertook detailed design of highways, bridges, other highway structures, geotechnical and lighting. Our design team faced a unique engineering challenge at Raith Interchange, which required upgrading within a very confined footprint, under live traffic conditions with over 100,000 vehicle movements per day. We designed a new elevated free-flow rotary above the existing roundabout and an underpass beneath it – all in a flood plain, adjacent to an area of environmental sensitivity, coupled with massive artesian pressures and variable ground conditions. As parts of the project are located within a flood plain, detailed drainage design included a Sustainable Urban Drainage System (SUDS), with ponds designed to cater for the 1 in 100-year storm plus climate change.

RPS also pioneered the use of building information modelling (BIM) technology on this project, achieving the first largescale implementation of Level 2 BIM on an infrastructural project in Ireland or the UK.

“This design team of civil, structural and traffic management engineers, hydrogeologists and environmental scientists have worked collaboratively to achieve the optimum solution on this complex project – for the client, the local communities and the environment.” said Christy O’ Sullivan, RPS Project Manager.

The M8 / M73 / M74 project was completed on time and within budget. Some key project figures include:

• 25KM of carriageway built and upgraded
• 418,000 trees and shrubs re-planted
• 16KM of footways/cycleways
• 43 new structures
• 95% of on-site materials were recycled