Motorway madness dead ahead
RI REMEMBER my reaction when I first heard about Highways England’s plans for so-called “smart motorways”, involving turning the hard shoulder into an extra, fourth lane. “Brilliant!” I thought. “That’ll clear all that congestion from the M25.”
It never crossed my mind that the converted hard shoulder wouldn’t be replaced by a new one, because... well... because that would be mad, wouldn’t it? Insane. Motorways without safety lanes? It’d be like driving without brakes.
A few months later the unbelievable truth emerged. There would be no replacement hard shoulders. Just the occasional pulling-in bay, spaced thousands of yards apart.
I don’t know if you’ve ever broken down on a motorway. I have, many times, especially in my younger days when I couldn’t afford a reliable car. In most cases, the breakdown occurred instantly. Tyre blowout (twice). Complete loss of power (twice). Drive belt snapping (once). Running out of fuel (twice).
You don’t have a few thousand yards to play with when that sort of thing happens.
You’re lucky if you’ve got a hundred.You limp to a halt in the sanctuary of the safety lane and call for help.
For years I regularly drove from broadcasting jobs in Carlisle, Leeds and Manchester to London and back to see my parents. Later, Judy and I commuted daily along the
M62 from Manchester to Liverpool to hostThis Morning.Add in regular trips to Cornwall, and I reckon I’ve probably driven well over a quarter of a million motorway miles.
So I’ve seen a lot of bad stuff over the last 40-odd years. Near misses. Accidents. Stupid driving.And if there’s one thing I know for certain, it’s that the hard shoulder is the lifeboat of the highway. It’s where you take refuge when the worst happens.
The Titanic didn’t have enough lifeboats.That’s why so many passengers and crew drowned. And just like the Titanic, smart motorways are death traps. A coroner said so this week.
Delivering a verdict of unlawful killing, David Urpeth ruled that the lack of a hard shoulder contributed to the deaths of two drivers on the
M1. He went further, warning that smart motorways present an “ongoing risk of future deaths”.
The reason is glaringly obvious to anyone but a simpleton. If you come to a dead stop in a live lane that was once the hard shoulder, there’s an immediate risk that someone will pile straight into the back of you.
It keeps happening. Thirty-eight people have been killed on smart motorways in five years. So-called smart technology – remote cameras linked to flashing gantry lights warning of a lane closure – is smart in the same way as the characters in Dumb And Dumber are.
All this was so utterly predictable I simply cannot believe it was ever allowed to happen.The new “fourth” lanes should be returned to their original hard-shoulder status – as of yesterday.