UK Smart motorway, at least 79 people killed.

Well, the problem at present is people thinking their speedo is correct . Says 70 but you are only doing 63 in the fast lane. 

I normally flash the misguided driver who usually indicates left and moves over.  As a last resort I may overtake him on the middle or even slow lane as he obviously is unaware that there is any other traffic on the motorway apart from his selfish self.

One way to ease congestion would be to prosecute anyone hogging the middle lane when the inside lane is clear and those who overtake whilst travelling at 0.5mph faster than the vehicle they're overtaking. I don't think the death penalty is too draconian in either case!

It doesn't seem that long ago we were worrying about the safety of hard shoulders - too many cases slightly tired HGV drivers seeing a vehicle ahead of them in the lane to the left subconsciously thinking they must be in lane 2 and so moving left ... and crunch. So the advise if you did stop on the hard shoulder was to get out, climb any barrier and onto the grass verge a.s.a.p..

  - Andy.

I had a near miss on the M6. Driving along in Lane 1 (old hard shoulder) at 60 towing a caravan. The car some distance in front of me pulls into emergency area. A couple of seconds later they pull out and in again. Another couple of seconds they pull out again as if to drive off, but they stop in the No. 1 lane and start reversing back into the emergency area. It is now too late for me to stop without hitting them, fortunately the number 2 lane was empty so I swerved into it and went past wihtout time to even blow my horn. There was a car parked in the middle of the emergency area which appears to have caused some confusion o the driver of the car I nearly hit. 

I have since noticed how short the emergency areas are and wonder what happens if a long vehicle, even a car towing a long caravan, is parked in one where the recovery vehicle parks? As the telephone is located in the middle of the area it is natural to stop by it leaving two very short areas either side. 

I have noticed that on the M25 a red X over a lane is an excuse for everyone to ignore it to get to the head of the queue. 

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.

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! 

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.

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

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.

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.