The obsession with ‘smart’ motorways is not just dumb but deadly

Is there any greater misnomer than a “smart motorway”? It is a typical piece of Whitehall Orwell-speak, dressing up an obviously dumb idea with a word that invites us to think there must be some terribly clever piece of counter-intuitive modelling behind it. If you have never come across a smart motorway, it simply involves turning the hard shoulder into an ordinary running lane. That and installing overhead gantries with variable speed limit signs – a thinly veiled excuse to sneak in extra speed cameras.

Your first reaction may well be to ask: what are motorists supposed to do if their car starts spluttering and there is no hard shoulder on which to shelter? That is what Highways Agency officials are still trying to answer, 13 years and several billion pounds of taxpayers’ money later. A report from the organisation has found that motorists are three times more likely to be stranded in an active running lane after breaking down on a smart motorway than on one with a hard shoulder – often, sadly, with predictable results. Two motorists have been killed on the M1 in the past year alone as they struggled to get clear of other traffic.

Smart motorways do have emergency refuges – which, if you can get to one, are safer than a hard shoulder, as you are less likely to be struck by a drifting lorry. Cameras are also supposed to be able to spot broken-down vehicles and close a lane before a collision occurs. But none of these innovations work. On many stretches the refuges are at mile-anda-half intervals, while CCTV operators have been found to take an average of 20 minutes to spot broken-down vehicles. Promised radar systems to do the job automatically have been installed on only a very few stretches.

The whole concept derives from a practice that has dogged our motorway system from the beginning: an obsession with providing as much capacity in the least possible time for the least possible cost. Smart motorways are really just a way of gaining an extra running lane without having to buy extra land or carry out earth-moving. This is fundamentally flawed, in that the hard shoulder was never as wide as other lanes. The result is that four lanes end up having to be squeezed into the space of about three and three-quarters, making them all unpleasantly narrow.

A smart motorway might save money, but it still isn’t exactly cheap. A project to turn 20 miles of the M25, from the A3 to the M40, into a smart motorway has been priced at between £200million and £400million – and it will cause three years’ worth of roadworks and tailbacks. That ignores the inevitable cost of going back in a few years and doing the job properly – just as the Highways Agency has had to do in the case of dual carriageways built with dangerous non gradeseparated junctions. The smarter decision would have been to leave the motorways as they were.