Smart motorways are safe, say experts

All-lane running highways are responsible for a tiny proportion of road deaths, says government operator

DRIVERS are twice as likely to be killed if they stop on a smart motorway after a crash than on motorways with a hard shoulder, new figures suggest – but statistics prove that the high-tech highways are the UK’S safest roads, overall.

Government-owned National Highways revealed eight people were killed on motorways without a permanent hard shoulder in 2020 – 0.64 per cent of the 1,246 fatalities on England’s roads.

Concerns have been raised about incidents when stationary vehicles were hit from behind on smart motorways but National Highways said such crashes represented 5.26 per cent of the total on all-lane-running (ALR) roads.

There are three main categories of smart motorway: ALR (with no hard shoulder), dynamic hard shoulder running (hard shoulder is opened to traffic during busy periods) and controlled (with a permanent hard shoulder).

An annual average of nine people were killed or seriously injured in crashes involving stationary vehicles on ALR motorway between 2016 and 2020, giving a rate of 0.19 victims per hundred million vehicle miles. On conventional motorways, the rate was 0.09.

Nick Harris, National Highways chief executive, said: “Safety is a huge priority” and urged people to “look at it in the round” when assessing the data.

The KSI (killed or seriously injured) rate for collisions is lower on ALR smart motorways than on traditional motorways. But a recent RAC poll of 2,652 UK drivers suggested that 62 per cent believe hard shoulders should be reintroduced on the motorway network.

Grant Shapps, the Transport Secretary, published a smart motorways evidence and action plan in March 2020 that included 18 measures to boost safety and confidence in the roads.

National Highways said it will upgrade 95 cameras to automatically detect vehicles ignoring lane-closure signals by the end of September, giving police the ability to fines offenders £100 without catching them in the act, which they were previously obliged to do, and will increase the number of signs that inform drivers of the distance to the next emergency refuge area.

It also says it will complete the rollout of radar technology to improve the detection of stationary vehicles in live lanes on more than 200 miles of smart motorways by the end of September.

Edmund King, president of the AA, said: “These motorways should never have been rolled out without these measures in place to start with.”