Have you ever had to stop your car on a motorway without a hard shoulder? I had to do so last month, and it is one of the most terrifying experiences any motorist can face, made worse by the fact that my wife, children and two dogs were on board.
Our unplanned halt took place on a stretch of the M25 which is designated as a piece of ‘smart motorway’ — a section that uses various traffic management strategies to reduce congestion and increase capacity. In this case, that meant using the hard shoulder as another lane.
But after what happened to us, I can only ever regard smart motorways as being very, very dumb indeed.
The reason I had to stop was because some computer gremlin had caused the car to lose engine power completely, and the best I could do was to nurse it, with hazard lights flashing, across all four lanes before coming to an involuntary halt in the slow lane — which on a normal, ‘non-smart’ motorway would have been the hard shoulder.
Have you ever had to stop your car on a motorway without a hard shoulder? (stock image)
Hard shoulders are dangerous enough places, but they are havens of security compared to the feeling of sitting motionless on an active motorway lane with a car full of loved ones, while in your rear-view mirror you see a juggernaut approaching at speed.
There was no way we could have all got out in time. We just had to pray the lorry driver was concentrating, otherwise we would have been pulverised.
Mercifully, I saw his indicator lights come on and the lorry pulled out. But there were still more cars approaching, and I knew it would take just one dopey driver to send us all to hospital — or the morgue. It was terrifying.
In desperation, I turned off the ignition, counted to ten and then restarted it. The engine roared gratifyingly to life. I thanked God, accelerated hard and continued the rest of our journey without mishap — although boy, did I need a drink when we finally arrived.
My family was lucky, but others haven’t been.
Take the 62-year-old woman who was killed on a ‘smart’ stretch of the northbound M1, north of Woodall Services near Sheffield, last September after she broke down in the slow lane.
Or how about Duncan and Ellie Montgomery and their three daughters, who were extremely fortunate to survive their broken-down car being slammed into by a lorry travelling at 50 to 60 mph on a ‘smart’ stretch of the M6?
Three of them were knocked unconscious, and Mrs Montgomery ended up in a neck brace. I could list more examples, but what should be abundantly clear is that breaking down in an active motorway lane is incredibly dangerous.
And because of the fatalities and near-misses, more and more people are questioning the wisdom of these supposedly ‘smart’ motorways.
Among them is Tracey Crouch, the Conservative MP for Chatham and Aylesford, who is part of an all-party group of MPs which is backing campaigners who maintain that the absence of a hard shoulder puts motorists and recovery workers at risk.
Ellie Montgomery ended up in a neck brace after her broken-down car was slammed into by a lorry travelling at 50 to 60 mph on a ‘smart’ stretch of the M6
Ms Crouch wants a halt to the introduction of smart motorways without hard shoulders.
‘We need the Government to pause and reflect on whether we’re getting this right … until we have a better understanding about how we can protect those who have broken down and the recovery workers that come to assist them,’ she said in a recent interview.
Ms Crouch is not the only respected voice who has such misgivings. Joining her is Dave Blundell of the Police Federation, who said last week that such motorways are making it hard for police patrols to do their jobs properly.
Smart motorways are ‘difficult for the police to operate on’, he said. ‘There’s no hard shoulder, so where do we safely stop another motorist if they have committed an offence or we want to give them some advice?’
‘The answer is that we can’t. We have to wait miles and miles and miles until there is a hard shoulder and we are able to do that. There are lots of questions that need to be asked.’
Indeed there are. And here are just a few for starters.
What exactly is a smart motorway? What are they for? What do they cost? How many miles of smart motorway are there? Are they not just revenue-raisers? And finally, just how smart are they?
There are essentially three different types of ‘smart’ motorway, but what is common to all is that they have variable speed limits, indicated by overhead gantries. According to the Highways Agency, having variable speed limits helps traffic flow more smoothly, thereby enabling quicker journey times.
The differences between the three types of smart motorway revolves around the hard shoulder.
On a ‘controlled motorway’, there are three or more lanes and a permanent hard shoulder — just as there is on a normal motorway.
Meanwhile, on a ‘dynamic hard shoulder’ motorway, the hard shoulder is semi-permanent and used as a lane during busy times of the day.
Finally, there is the ‘all lane running’ option, in which there is no hard shoulder at all. Instead, there are occasional ‘refuge areas’. In total, there are some 100 miles of ‘all lane running’ smart motorway — known as ALR for short — and a further 225 miles are planned by 2025.
Overall costs are hard to establish, but the most reliable estimates run to about £6 billion spent so far, with the final estimated total being £20 billion, perhaps more.
And what are we getting for our money? Well, we get lots of people in control rooms all over the country watching the traffic and then deciding whether to activate the variable speed limits or to ‘turn’ the hard shoulder on or off. But is this making the traffic run more quickly, and — vitally — more safely? According to the Highways Agency, it does.
Tracey Crouch is part of an all-party group of MPs backing campaigners who maintain that the absence of a hard shoulder puts motorists and recovery workers at risk
Journey ‘reliability’, it is claimed, is improved by 22 per cent, personal injury accidents are reduced by more than half, and where accidents do occur, severity has been much lower overall.
Furthermore, as the Agency estimates that congestion on the motorway and major road network in England costs the UK economy £2 billion every year, with 25 per cent of this resulting from various incidents, the smart motorways could end up saving more money than they cost.
Impressive, yes. But what these figures don’t factor in are the absurd number of delays and the huge congestion caused by converting normal motorways into ‘smart motorways’.
As someone who regularly uses the M3, I am well aware of how many hours I’ve wasted in traffic jams caused by years and years of roadworks that appear to have done very little apart from turn a hard shoulder into an extra lane.
In addition, like many other motorists, I’m not convinced that the variable speed limits improve my journey times. Too often there is no apparent logic to their use. Frequently, I find myself being told to crawl along a near-empty motorway at 40 mph.
According to campaigners, this is what happens when controllers are slaves to computer modelling and algorithms, rather than allowing the common sense of most drivers to find their own appropriate speeds.
Of course, the temptation to break an unnecessary speed limit is immense, and herein lies another problem: I can get fined for travelling at 45 mph on a nearly empty motorway.
This has prompted critics to question whether smart motorways are, in fact, just another cunning form of revenue-raiser rather than genuine traffic management solutions.
In the four years from 2013 to 2017, 210,538 motorists were caught by cameras enforcing variable speed limits on smart motorways, and fined a total of £21 million.
Although that figure is a drop in the ocean of the billions spent on smart motorways, being fined for travelling below the normal motorway speed limit because an algorithm orders you to do so must really stick in the craw.
Finally, do smart motorways really make traffic run faster overall? Some think not. One 16-mile ‘smart’ ALR section of the M25, for example, recorded journey times that were, in fact, eight per cent longer during peak periods than before.
And there is a dearth of statistics to support the notion that journeys on smart motorways are any quicker; being, merely just 22 per cent more ‘reliable’, whatever that means.
There are some who argue that motorways will not truly be smart until roads are embedded with wi-fi-enabled sensors and cables that can communicate with cars and control centres, and immediately warn drivers directly or via gantries if there has been an accident, tailbacks or other incidents, and alert them to lane closures via ‘glow-in-the dark’ road markings.
Vehicle-to-vehicle communication, in which all our — possibly driverless — cars effectively ‘talk’ to each other is another way in which our roads could be made a lot more smart, as vehicles will be able to warn those travelling far behind that there has been a problem.
But while some countries — the U.S. and the Netherlands — are already introducing some of these innovations, they remain decades away and will doubtless be cripplingly expensive and involve more disruption and tailbacks in order to install them.
Highways England are, of course, defensive of their smart motorways and claim they’re performing better than conventional ones.
‘Evidence proves they are as safe as traditional motorways, which are already among the safest roads in the world,’ a Highways England spokesman said yesterday.
I am not convinced. With fears about safety and doubts about supposed improvements, it really does look as though the roll-out of smart motorways should be stopped.
Smart motorways, it seems, are actually just a bit thick.