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M90 motorway
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The M90 is a motorway in Scotland. It runs from Inverkeithing, at the north end of the Forth Road Bridge, to Perth, passing Dunfermline, Cowdenbeath and Kinross on the way. It is Scotland's – and the United Kingdom's – most northerly motorway, the northernmost point on its spur into the western suburbs of Perth at Broxden.
The M90's arguably most substantial engineering feature is the Friarton Bridge in Perth, a tall concrete pillared structure which traverses the River Tay.
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Encyclopedia
The M90 is a motorway in Scotland. It runs from Inverkeithing, at the north end of the Forth Road Bridge, to Perth, passing Dunfermline, Cowdenbeath and Kinross on the way. It is Scotland's – and the United Kingdom's – most northerly motorway, the northernmost point on its spur into the western suburbs of Perth at Broxden.
The M90's arguably most substantial engineering feature is the Friarton Bridge in Perth, a tall concrete pillared structure which traverses the River Tay. The bridge carries eastbound traffic from Broxden towards Dundee and along the Firth of Tay.
The road constitutes most of the southerly part of the crucial A90 corridor from Edinburgh, through Perth, Dundee and Aberdeen to Fraserburgh along Scotland's North Sea coast.
The M90 is considered one of the UK's most sub-standard motorways of significant distance. Junctions 1 and 2 share a tiny common sliproad, forcing a conflict between entering and leaving traffic at the junction with the A823(M). It lacks hard shoulders for an eight-mile section. In this section there are emergency lay-bys at quarter-mile intervals instead. The M90 also has the tightest corner on the UK motorway network, for which most traffic is forced to slow down. The corner cuts through the northern side of the Ochil Hills and has a curve radius of 694.5m (2,278ft) (a minimum of 914m (3,000ft) was standard practice at the time of construction). This corner also corresponds with the steepest section of the motorway for which north-bound Heavy Goods Vehicles (HGVs) are sign-posted to stay in a low gear and often brake continuously through the turn. South-bound HGVs are normally substantially reduced in speed as they make the incline.
A large part of the northern section of the motorway follows the route of the former railway line linking Perth to Glenfarg, Kinross then onwards to the Forth Bridge. It is not obvious when first driving along the road but close inspection of the 1:25,000 scale Ordnance Survey maps of the route illustrates this.
Near to its northern terminus, the motorway splits into two branches. The construction of this three-way interchange required the removal of about 900,000 cubic metres (31,783,000 cubic feet) of material. One branch forms part of the western bypass of Perth, and meets the A9 at its end. The other branch heads in a north-easterly direction, flowing into the A90 at its end. The easternmost branch was formerly the M85 motorway, until the A85 was renumbered as A90.
The M90 forms part of the Euroroute E15 which runs from Inverness to Algeciras, but is not signposted within Scotland.
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