GENERAL NEWS

SMART MOTORWAY ROLL OUT SCRAPPED!

THE GOVERNMENT HAS PUT THE BRAKES ON ALL NEW ALR ROADS

BY Lucy England ON 17 April 2023

Life is a highway - the enjoyment you get depends on the lane you choose.* But is there a hard shoulder?

We have covered the roll out of smart motorways before - Not So Smart Motorways and Smart Motorways, The Troubles Rumble On and have always had a very strong response from our readers who, almost unanimously, see smart motorways as dangerous.

Finally, after pausing the smart motorway programme to investigate safety, the government has announced that it is stopping the roll-out due to costs and public road safety concerns.

This means that the 14 planned new motorways, including 11 which are currently paused and three which have been given the go ahead previously and are ready for construction, will not now be built.

Smart motorways work by using cameras to observe the traffic and regulate it, via messages to motorway traffic on the overhead motorway gantries, according to what they see. Some smart motorways, All Lane Running (ALR) ones use the hard shoulder as an extra running lane on motorways and Dynamic ones can open the hard shoulder to relieve traffic pressure, if required. These are the issues which the public are most concerned about, as the lack of a hard shoulder appears not to give riders and drivers anywhere safe to go in the event of a motorway breakdown or accident.

Of the 14 smart motorway projects which were due to be built, seven were going to be ALR roads with no hard shoulder just periodic refuges along the route. Instead these will now be dynamic motorways where the hard shoulder can be opened as a running lane if traffic pressure requires it.

The existing smart motorways which have already been built, currently 10% of the motorway network, will remain but will be refitted with more emergency stopping refuges and improved technology.

With a huge groundswell of negative public opinion and both the RAC and the AA concerned about road safety on smart motorways, the government has, it seems, bowed to pressure and suspended the programme.

The AA president Edmund King has said that he welcomes the decision and sees it as a "victory for common sense" also requesting that the hard shoulder is reinstated on the smart motorways which have already been built.
The RAC said it was a "watershed announcement".

Claire Mercer, who has campaigned tirelessly against smart motorways since her husband and another driver were killed after being hit by a lorry on the inside lane of a smart motorway (M1), says she will carry on campaigning until the hard shoulder is reinstated on every smart motorway.

Any thoughts on this new development? Let us know at: [email protected] or on Facebook.

*Joel Fuhrman