For those of you who missed my live webcast Elevenses yesterday and haven’t yet caught up, the big news is that on Monday the government confirmed that no new SMART motorways will built. They must have listened to my midweek show when I talked about a coroner’s report into another fatal crash who concluded that the deaths wouldn’t have happened had the stopped vehicle been able to get fully clear of the live lane and onto a hard should.
So what’s happened? The fourteen planned SMART motorways which are shown in red on the map – including eleven which were paused mid-construction and three earmarked for conversion – will no longer be built.
The cancellation of these remaining schemes is said to be due to financial pressures – they would have cost more than £1 billion – and the lack of public trust in the road system.
A cynic might say it’s a popular vote-winning move for the Tory party and Rishi Sunak in particular, who’s clearly happy to accept personal responsibility for the cancellation. Liz Truss had vowed to scrap every SMART motorway, but right now the government says that won’t happen – it’s only those that are part-converted or planned that will go.
The first all lane running motorway – where the hard shoulder was removed and converted to a live lane – was introduced as a trial on the M42 in 2006. The idea was to create added capacity without the usual land grab necessary to widen the road.
The trial was seen as a success, and all lane running was extended on key parts the road network, but with the new roads there were significant – and largely unannounced – downgrades from the original trial specification. For example, the essential refuges for stopped vehicles were not regularly spaced and ended up twice, even three times as far apart as on the original scheme.
And the new roads have proved highly controversial ever since. With the removal of the normal hard shoulder – the lane on the nearside of most motorways that is normally restricted to emergency use – vehicles that come to a halt and can’t reach a refuge are stopped in a live running lane.
Just before I flew out to New Zealand I reported that I’d personally encountered two stopped vehicles – an HGV and a car – in a live lane with no red X warning signs ahead of the incident to warn me. Fortunately, traffic was relatively light and I was able to see them and move clear in plenty of time, which incidentally also allowed the driver behind me to see the obstacles.
The combination of the lack of a hard shoulder and the repeated failure of the warning systems to operate in time has been blamed for causing the deaths of motorists who run into difficulties.
The government initially claimed that all lane running motorways were designed to operate safely without the need for ‘stopped vehicle detection’ systems – SVD – but during an earlier review of the safety of the road, it was decided to retro-fit SVD to all stretches of SMART motorways that weren’t already so equipped.
Meanwhile, National Highways has continued to insist that SMART motorways are safer than conventional motorways with a hard shoulder but the claim is somewhat disingenous since they include minor crashes in the data, and with the extra line, traffic is a little more freer flowing at peak hours and this contributes to fewer low speed bumps.
Although National Highways say that with stopped vehicle technology it takes an average of one minute to close the lane, audits of actual performance have shown much longer times before approaching motorists are warned – up to ten minutes or more in some cases.
That’s if the technology works, of course.
Back in February, National Highways the Dynac SVD stopped working on much of the UK’s SMART motorway network – only the east and south east remained functional – for over two hours.
I also highlighted a BBC report from a journalist who’d gone undercover into a SMART motorway control room and found non-functioning safety systems, misaligned CCTVs that weren’t pointed at the roads, and staffing issues.
Because of growing concerns, back in January 2022 the Government paused the expansion of motorways where the hard shoulder is used as a permanent live traffic lane in order that five years of data could be assessed to decide whether they were safe.
To my knowledge the results of that study are not yet available but campaigners say that 75 lives have been lost on SMART motorways, and the Transport Select Committee said after their own in-depth study that they had serious worries about the risks they pose.
Several coroners have also requested a review of the policy and only ten days ago, a coroner I mentioned at the top of the article said during an inquest that a crash which left two pensioners dead would not have happened if there had been a hard shoulder, no doubt placing further pressure on the Department for Transport.
Arguably, construction should have been halted much longer ago to properly study the data but at least we’re almost certainly seeing the end of the experiment. However, construction of two stretches of SMART motorway at junctions six to eight of the M56 and 21a to 26 of the M6 will continue as they are already more than three quarters complete, the department confirmed.
Meanwhile, the existing stretches of SMART motorway which make up 10% of England’s motorway network but will undergo a safety refit which will add 150 emergency stopping places across the network. You have to ask, why is this essential safety element – as well as the belated installation of stopped vehicle detection systems on all SMART motorway stretches – happening now, long after the first schemes were completed?
On stretches where conversion to all lane running had begun but hadn’t progressed far, the original hard shoulder will be reinstated and the works will be removed.
The AA, as well as campaigners who’ve lost loved ones to crashes on these roads have welcomed the move, but both all the SMART motorways should be rolled back to the original hard shoulder format.
The budget saving will be significant at a time when costs will only escalate due to inflation. Whether the cash saved will be ringfenced and used for road repairs elsewhere on the network hasn’t been stated – somehow I doubt it.
Another question that has to be asked is just how much more cash will have to be spent to improve safety on the existing SMART motorways, and how much has already been spent over and above the original budget upgrading them by putting in the stopped vehicle detection and CCTV safety systems that should have been part of the original design.
I suspect an audit of the true costs will show a very significant overrun.
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