Smart motorways
Taken (with permission to share) from the RAC newletter - dated 5.5.21
So-called ‘smart’ motorways could soon be due a name change after the Transport Secretary branded the roads a misnomer.
During an announcement in which he brought forward the deadline for new Stopped Vehicle Detection (SVD) technology, Grant Shapps shared his frustrations with the expansion scheme.
He said: “I don't want to carry on with what we've seen of smart motorways, the system I've inherited... I wouldn't have gone about it like this, and I don't approve of the fact that emergency areas were being spaced way too far apart.
“I've said they have to be ideally three-quarters of a mile apart, no more than a mile, and I've ordered Highways England to get on with it.”
Despite the Transport Secretary’s request, nine projects with refuge areas between 1.04 and 1.39 miles apart were confirmed in November last year.
44 people have died on smart motorways over the last five years, and calls to reverse their construction are growing.
Meera Naran, who has campaigned for safer smart motorways described the projects as ‘‘absolutely unacceptable’’.
The senior lecturer lost her eight-year-old son Dev when an HGV collided with his grandfather’s car, which was stopped on a hard shoulder that was being used as a live lane on the M6 near Solihull.
Reports show that there was a two-and-a-half-mile gap between emergency refuge areas at the scene of the accident.
Mr Shapps told MPs that reversing work on smart motorways would mean acquiring land the equivalent of 700 Wembley stadium-sized football pitches, destroying swathes of Green Belt and buying up people's homes.
So-called ‘smart’ motorways could soon be due a name change after the Transport Secretary branded the roads a misnomer.
During an announcement in which he brought forward the deadline for new Stopped Vehicle Detection (SVD) technology, Grant Shapps shared his frustrations with the expansion scheme.
He said: “I don't want to carry on with what we've seen of smart motorways, the system I've inherited... I wouldn't have gone about it like this, and I don't approve of the fact that emergency areas were being spaced way too far apart.
“I've said they have to be ideally three-quarters of a mile apart, no more than a mile, and I've ordered Highways England to get on with it.”
Despite the Transport Secretary’s request, nine projects with refuge areas between 1.04 and 1.39 miles apart were confirmed in November last year.
44 people have died on smart motorways over the last five years, and calls to reverse their construction are growing.
Meera Naran, who has campaigned for safer smart motorways described the projects as ‘‘absolutely unacceptable’’.
The senior lecturer lost her eight-year-old son Dev when an HGV collided with his grandfather’s car, which was stopped on a hard shoulder that was being used as a live lane on the M6 near Solihull.
Reports show that there was a two-and-a-half-mile gap between emergency refuge areas at the scene of the accident.
Mr Shapps told MPs that reversing work on smart motorways would mean acquiring land the equivalent of 700 Wembley stadium-sized football pitches, destroying swathes of Green Belt and buying up people's homes.
