Smart motorways are a terrifyingly dumb idea
Says GUY WALTERS who had his own frightening brush with death on one of the roads with no hard shoulder that transport chiefs bafflingly insist are safer . . .
IT’S still not clear why Dev Naran’s grandfather stopped on the hard shoulder of the southbound M6 motorway on May 31 l ast year. What we do know is that it was just before 7.30pm, and in the back of the small red Toyota Yaris was eight-year-old Dev, while in the front was his grandfather, 70-year-old Bhanuchandra Lodhia, and Dev’s 20-year-old cousin, Ria Soni.
Tragically, what Mr Lodhia may not have realised was that the hard shoulder, near Birmingham’s spaghetti junction, was at the time being used not as an emergency lane but a live lane.
After just 45 seconds, a lorry driven by Paul Kiddy, 62, from Hampshire, ploughed into the back of the Toyota at 56mph, killing young Dev and hospitalising his grandfather and cousin.
By all accounts, Dev was a young boy with a great future. ‘He excelled at school and wanted to become a doctor,’ his parents said after the crash. ‘He looked after his brother Neel, who suffered brain damage at birth.
‘He was a big sports fan and loved Leicester City. Dev was the most perfect son in every way.’
The cause of this tragedy was that the section of the M6 had been designated a ‘ smart motorway’ – meaning that the hard shoulder could be used as an extra lane at busy times of the day.
In other words, as soon as Dev’s grandfather stopped, he and his family were in an extremely vulnerable place from which they had little hope of escape.
Last month, t he Government announced that it is reviewing the roll-out of smart motorways amid mounting concern about their safety. This is very welcome, for I know from personal experience the sheer horror they can induce.
Earlier this year, for some reason known only to its manufacturer, our car lost power completely, and I had to steer the car across four lanes of busy M25 until I c a me to a very involuntary halt in what should have been the hard shoulder, but was now lane one of a smart motorway.
Had it just been myself in the car, I would have been scared enough, but also on board were my wife and two children, as well as our two dogs. Terrified, I looked in the rear-view mirror, and approaching at what seemed like warp speed was a juggernaut – and there was nothing I could do apart from pray the driver wasn’t looking at his phone.
Mercifully, I saw his indicator lights turn on, and he pulled out into lane two – but we were only safe for the next few seconds until the next car or lorry came along.
I turned the engine off and on, and – joyously – the car roared into life. I was able to drive away, my heart thudding, and in desperate need of a stiff drink.
Clearly, we had been extremely lucky, but after some reflection, my overriding emotion was one of anger rather than relief. Why were we forced to sit helplessly on a live motorway lane and not on the relative safety of the hard shoulder?
Why had my family been put in a potentially lethal situation? The answer lies in the introduction of smart motorways, which were trialled on the M42 back in 2006, but have become increasingly widespread, with some 416 miles of Engl and’s motorway network now designated as ‘smart’.
Despite common sense indicating that forcing drivers to sit, broken down, on live motorway lanes with lorries and cars approaching at speed is anything but smart, Highways England insists that these roads are safe, saying that completed smart motorways have a casualty rate 28 per cent lower than nonsmart motorways.
‘ Evidence indicates that smart motorways are helping to improve safety,’ says Mike Wilson, Highways E n g l a n d ’s chief highway engineer. ‘ The first nine of the latest generation of smart motorways have reduced casualty rates by more than 25 per cent.
‘Smart motorways are good for drivers, adding vital extra lanes to some of our busiest motorways and making journeys safer and more reliable.’
You do not have to be a cynic – or indeed a driver or an occupant of one of the 19,316 vehicles that stopped in a live lane in 2017 and 2018 – to suspect that such figures and statements should be treated with a lot of scepticism.
In fact, it would be very tempting to suppose that the likes of poor Dev Naran and the others who have been ki l l ed and i njured while stranded on smart motorways are not so much the victims of those that collided with them, but rather victims of a computer algorithm.
In essence, there are three types of smart motorway, all of which have variable speed limits indicated on gantries.
On a ‘controlled motorway’, conditions are familiar to all, with three lanes and a hard shoulder.
On a ‘ dynamic hard shoulder motorway’, such as the section where Dev Naran’s grandfather stopped,
A juggernaut came up at warp speed…I prayed the driver wasn’t on his phone
the hard shoulder is used as a lane when conditions are busy.
Finally, on the ‘all lane running motorway’, or ALR – like the stretch of M25 where I stopped – there is no hard shoulder at all, only ‘ occasional refuge areas’ placed one-and-a-half miles apart.
The aim of ‘smart motorways’ is sensible enough – a reduction in congestion, which is estimated to cost the economy some £2 billion per year.
Highways England claims smart motorways have improved ‘journey reliability’ ( whatever that means) by 22 per cent, reduced personal injury accidents by half, a n d , wh e r e accidents have occurred, the severity has been much lower overall.
Despite these statistics, motorway users aren’t convinced.
A recent AA survey of more than 15,000 motorists revealed that 71 per cent believed that ALR motorways were less safe than those with a hard shoulder, with over half saying they should be scrapped.
These drivers have some influential champions, who are similarly convinced that smart motorways are very unwise.
Among them is Tracey Crouch, the MP for Chatham and Aylesford, whose constituency contains a section of the M20 earmarked to become ‘smart’.
‘ I don’t see smart motorways reducing congestion,’ she says. ‘I have to use the M25 on a regular basis and it’s no less busy with five lanes than it is with three lanes. I’m a confident driver, and have been driving since I was 17. I’m now 44 – and the one thing that terrifies me is breaking down on a smart motorway, especially now that I’ve got a small child as well.’
Ms Crouch has been working hard to get the Government to think again about smart motorways, and with the announcement of the new review, she and her fellow campaigners have scored a big victory.
Tr a n s p o r t S e c r e t a r y Grant Shapps admitted to the House of Commons that ‘some of the statistics have been difficult to understand’. He said. ‘We know people are dying on smart motorways, and we know that 70 to 80 people die every year on full motorways.’
Understanding whether they are safe, less safe or safer turns out not to be as straightforward as MPs might imagine. Mr Shapps added: ‘I want all of those facts and I want recommendations that can be put into place to ensure that all of our motorways are as safe as they possibly can be.’
The obvious question that arises is that if even the Secretary of State for Transport cannot be confident about the relative safety of s mart motorways without a review, then how can the average motorist?
The AA has long been concerned. ‘We hope the review will stop a further rollout unless more Emergency Refuge Areas are planned and retro-fitted,’ says AA president Edmund King.
‘We know there are real situations where lives would have been saved if drivers on smart motorways had somewhere safe to stop. We owe it to all drivers to give them a safe harbour to stop if their vehicle develops problems.’
Mr King says that the analysis and statistics are partial and misleading and he is absolutely right, because Highways England has always known that stopping in live lanes is dangerous.
However it has balanced a potentially greater risk of casualties against what it supposes is a reduction of the risk, brought about by improved traffic flow. In a 68-page Highways England document from August 2015, there is a section which states that the approach to the introduction of smart motorways ‘ includes the concept of “trade-off”, whereby an increase in the safety risk from one hazard can be balanced by a commensurate decrease in the safety risk of another hazard’.
This then, is the key to the whole issue, and shows that Highways England have long accepted that deaths will occur, but have sought to mitigate these deaths by blithely claiming that the motorways will be safer ‘overall’.
What makes matters worse is that the protection systems established to swiftly close down a lane in case of a breakdown are hopelessly unfit for purpose. A Highways England report unearthed by the AA shows that it takes an average of 17 minutes to spot a broken-down vehicle in a live lane. Compare that to the 45 seconds it took Dev Naran to be killed, and it is apparent that the system is utterly inadequate.
Ultimately, it is hard to find anyone who defends smart motorways apart from Highways England. Even the coroner at the inquest into the death of Dev Naran expressed concerns about the ‘risk to life from the loss of the hard shoulder’.
Now that the AA, MPs and even t he Transport Secretary a r e worried about them, it hopefully cannot be long before smart motorways are consigned to history as a very dumb idea indeed.