What is it that makes me feel that the new regime for our motorways is not as smart as the Government suggests it is?

an article by Barry Kenward. President The AADI

MA. BA(Driver Ed). ROSPA(Rtd). ADI.

 What was/is the purpose of these adjustments? Building a new motorway costs around £29.9 million per mile of road, against only £10 million per additional lane per mile of road. Compare this to HS2 costs at £403 million per mile of track, on the face of it, just adding a new lane is good value? But what they actually did, was not add another lane, but to remove the hard shoulder and convert that into the new running lane. Crazy, or not?

In 2006, a trial on the M42 Birmingham Box area was undertaken,  subsequent to which a report was written and presented to the then Transport Minister, (now) Sir Mike Penning. How the road was supposed to work was that at congested times, the hard shoulder would be used as an additional running lane to reduce congestion where possible. They had technologies to recognise when traffic was slowing up due to accidents or break downs with hard shoulder safety areas at just 500 metres apart. So, in theory you would only be 250 metres from a safety area at the worst. The trial was during a summer school holiday period, with reduced traffic, which helped make the trial a success, hence Minister Penning signed it off, with the understanding that all other motorways that were to be changed would have the same level of technology and build attached to them.

As builds progressed, it was clear that money was not available to build to the same specifications as the M42 trial section, across many of the nominated motorways, especially with safe zones for vehicles to get off the motorway to. Mr Penning has been reported to have said that he was misled over the subsequent build standards, which have been different to the M42 standard. It is clear that many have lost their lives or been seriously injured over the past ten years or so. 

In 2016 Dame Louise Ellman, a previous Chair of the Parliamentary Select Committee for Transport hauled the government over the coals for 'Ignoring the safety issues.' In 2019, Mr Penning launched an enquiry into the safety of smart motorways as chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group, yet they still are being built! The Police Federation have also pitched in with their dissatisfaction as have the Chief Officers of Police, Fire and Ambulance services. The Road Recovery companies along with the Highways England own Traffic Officers Union have all expressed grave concerns about the extra time it takes to arrive on scene, and that in turn can cause issues with how some road users will fare within that Golden Hour where getting them to good quality medical treatment could be the difference between living and dying!

From 2015 - 2019 there have been 38 fatalities on smart motorways. What about the ones before and after those years? On the 30th December on my local smart motorway (M27 - under construction), another driver was killed after he hit the central reserve and tried to get to safety. As I write this, Highways England is being taken to court for Corporate Manslaughter for causing the death of another motorist. In a BBC Panorama program they discovered via FoI that stationary vehicles were waiting 17 minutes to be discovered and another 17 minutes just to be attended and then rescued. Were you aware the  statistics for near misses on a section of M25 before smart motorways were introduced was 72 - bad enough, but in the five years that followed introduction of smart motorways in that same section that figure rocketed to 1,485, 20 times more!

Grant Shapps, (current Transport Minister) says: smart motorways are as safe as ordinary motorways, but the chance of a crash involving a moving vehicle and a stationary vehicle is higher when the hard shoulder is removed. Well that’s not rocket science, is it?

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