Because the 'driver lobby' thinks that saving a few minutes off their journey is more important than other people's lives

I'm not aware of any driver lobby asking for more smart motorways.  Most people want to get rid of them.

But the road planners appear stuck in the belief that you can solve all the congestion problems on motorways by turning the hard shoulder into another lane.

But the conversion process causes months of disruption and costs a lot of money.  And in the end, it fails to solve the problem.

As usual with safety, it's not as simple as that, the important metric is whether there has been a net improvement in safety, even if there are residual fatalities or other losses. 

National Highways (cautious) view of the evidence is that smart motorways are safer than their predecessors, here:

https://nationalhighways.co.uk/media/m0hjg0j0/before-vs-after-safety-analysis-for-all-smart-motorways-final.pdf

As ever, there are lobbies both ways, I'd slightly disagree with Jim in that many motoring organisations actively campaign against smart motorways, and equally construction companies would much rather the emphasis was on widening them or building relief roads. My instinct (which may be wrong) is that more people are campaigning against them than for them, however the Government don't (as they see it) have enough money to do anything else to relieve congestion at the moment. Obviously working in the rail industry personally I'd like them to work harder to solve the problem by moving more people onto public transport, but then I'm biased there!

Would I instinctively feel confident if I broke down on the inside lane of a smart motorway compared to the same on the hard shoulder of a conventional motorway? Absolutely not. But that doesn't necessarily mean that factually I would be at greater risk. To determine that needs greater insight into the statistics than just counting the casualties. 

And of course if we do assume that National Highways are correct, and that the introduction of smart motorways have reduced fatality rates, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to find more to do to reduce them still further.

I am so glad I don't get involved with highways safety, whatever you do you're going to annoy someone. And whatever you do they're ridiculously dangerous places to be.

Thanks,

Andy

There are ways to improve the motorways Smart or standard.

They need to view the safety tech on the motorways as safety critical which currently they are not.

The infrastructure that is currently in place is poorly maintained/repaired and monitored

The documentary clearly states that the information they acquired had to be obtained by the Freedom Of Information Act

It states that on many occasions in many location the safety equipment was not working, this is backed up by the whistleblowers.  Days at a time.

Some suggestions of my own.
Local battery backup on all systems with a 12 hours run time if power failure or outage or Brownout.  There would also be an annual Inspection and Testing carried out

All camera to be pointing at the road/motorway rather than in the air/floor or at cows in a field.

Sufficient staff to work all the safety equipment 24 hours day 365 1/4 days a year.

Now I do understand that kit fails or in some case suffer damage from impact.  Max SLA for swap out/repair/replacement should be set at 8 hours max in a few years this I would suggest lowered to 4hr SLA.  If this is sub-contracted out then a penalty clauses needs to be introduced for failed repairs.

If it was up to me, motorways without a hard shoulder would be illegal,

As a side note, I would also make it a legal requirement that UK vehicles and vehicle entering from abroad  carry hi-viz reflective vests for the max occupancy of the vehicle.  This would be checked annually on the MOT for UK vehicles.  Hi Viz would need to rated to BS EN 471 class 1 as a minimum.  Commercial vehicles would need BSEN471 Class 2 as a minimum

I agree with Andy - you've always got to be careful about half-a-story headlines - it could equally have read something like 'Smart Motorways reduces death rate from 109 to 79' (or whatever the numbers happen to be) and painted quite a different picture.

No reason why we can't do better though.

There do seem to be a very high rate of "power failures" though - higher than I would have expected from say a normal grid supply, with reasonably modern cabling (unlike the rotting PILC we have feeding houses around here) - so maybe there's more going on that the journalists explain? PSUs going phut? Poor procedures meaning someone's pulling the wrong fuse or flicking the wrong MCB and it's going unnoticed? Or is it more of a software problem that's been lumped together with other things in the reporting system?

Sometimes I think that if we were to design from scratch a transport system, using the technology we have available today, we wouldn't come up with anything like what we actually have.

    - Andy.

As a headline figure in a country where alcohol kills 10,000 plus , and cigarettes 70,000 per annum, we could probably make a dispassionate argument that we should be divert some money away from motorway safety - as that is already pretty good, towards something where far more lives could be extended  per pound invested, kill one  driver but rescue ten drinkers, that sort of thing... Of course there is a puritanical view that smokers and drinkers do not deserve help as they are responsible for correcting their own weakness of character, and any case most are over 50, but I'm not sure that is a humane way to run a society either.

Risk is a funny thing - the figures tell us that the really dangerous roads in the UK are not the motorways, either in terms of total accidents or accidents per mile. However, they are the ones that feel dangerous as you hammer along at full legal and then get overtaken by someone weaving in and out. As a driver, I don't like smart motorways either, but I'm yet to have an accident on one, and I suspect most of us are the same.

My comment above is slightly tongue in cheek, but we need to be very careful what we wish for as there is scope for mis-directing to much time and effort away from things that need it more.

There may also be more effective low-cost measures, like actually teaching drivers how to drive safely at speed on a motorway, which currently we don't really.

I agree more generally that relying on clever automatic systems as the sole means to make things safe for a broken down car, really  needs a level of engineering rather better than is described in terms of reliability. The fact it is not well known and needs to be extracted by FOI is worrying and suggests a bit of a cover up.

The really  good thing about a hard shoulder that we can all see, is that it does not stop working due to a  loss of network connection.

Mike.

Of course if the government doesn't have enough money to do anything else to relieve congestion, increasing fuel duty would both bring in more money and probably reduce the congestion as no-one would be able to afford to drive......

Just playing devil's advocate here as I don't really want this to happen.

I would agree with Andy on the feeling of safety breaking down on a smart motorway. I have been on the hard shoulder of the M25 (as section that may now be smart but wasn't then) and I did feel safe. If it had been a smart motorway at the time I would certainly not have felt the same. Mind you, the fact that it was about 05.30 am did help.

What worries me is the fact that unlike other industries, they don't seem to have built in an arrangement that it fails to a safe state so that if there is a fault they automatically set the inside lane as a hard shoulder. A simple risk assessment and appropriate mitigations would seem to lead you down that route.

Alasdair

I've had a near miss on a "smart" section of the M25.  It was probably on one of the sections where the Highways Agency hadn't installed any of the safety features that were promised when they started rolling out smart motorways.

I was pootling along in lane 2, about to overtake a car in lane 1.  Suddenly the car in lane 1 swerved across right in front of me.  I only had a split second to check my mirrors before swerving across in front of the car in lane 3.

There was a car broken down in lane 1.  There were no warning signs.  No red "X" over lane 1.  Nothing at all to indicate there was a hazard ahead.

I’ve had a similar experience Simon (see my comment on this E+T article) Not something I’d want to repeat in a hurry! 

Yes, what needs to happen is MOT to watch google traffic and within minutes of an accident flash up the warning  ACCICENT AHEAD SLOW DOWN NO TAILGATEING. 

No speed restriction is needed only increase the distance between you and the car ahead.   There is usually a sign on M4  saying 50mph deer spotted on the road or something similar.  The speed limit is nonsense but it does make drivers increase their distance to the vehicle in front which is great.

Another possibility is to limit the speed on the breakdown lane to say 50 mph only with speed cameras to ensure it is kept to.  Outer lanes 70, 80, 90 maximum BUT 6 point penalties for any tailgateing photographed on the speed cameras.