You coast onto the hard shoulder and run away from the car as quickly as possible, then you hope they see you on the cameras and change the signage. They are changing the M27 here to smart motorway, 4 lane running with no hard shoulder only refuge points at set distances so tough luck if you have a problem away from a refuge area.
Smart Motorways
- Thread starter Orionaut
- Start date
You coast onto the hard shoulder and run away from the car as quickly as possible, then you hope they see you on the cameras and change the signage. They are changing the M27 here to smart motorway, 4 lane running with no hard shoulder only refuge points at set distances so tough luck if you have a problem away from a refuge area.
Associate
Just can't get my head around why anybody would think not having a hard shoulder is sensible :/
If you don't care about safety, if all you are concerned with is increasing traffic flow while spending the least amount of money, then it makes perfect sense.
I have seriously suspected for some time that the people who design roads, junctions, and gyratory systems may well be professional engineers, but nevertheless have little in the way of actual driving experience.
And of course the Politicians who take the final decisions on these matters base their decisions on the advice given by such people!
Think about it for a moment. If they are full time professional engineers, they will spend most of their time being professional engineers not being professional drivers. What is more, if they work in a city, they may not even drive to and from work! so it is quite possible that their practical driving experience might be very limited indeed.
Possibly even none-at-all (I do not expect there will be many in this position. But it would not surprise me at all if it turned out that there are highway planners out there who do not even own or drive a car!)
The highway design process should really IMO include people who have substantial professional driving experience.
IE Teams designing roads and schemes should include a selection of "Professionals" such as HGV drivers, Cabbies, Commercial travellers and White Van Men.
And no, I am not joking!
I think it's more likely that they were tasked and incentivised to increase traffic flow at minimal cost, and smart motorways is what they came up with. I'm sure the politicians were told there were increased dangers, but here are some mitigations to lessen that. Then those systems (such as lack of radar, camera not working, systems that can't spot broken down vehicles or only queues), are run on a separate budget (also at a minimum), and someone decided it was "good enough" and the extra deaths and thousands of near misses were acceptable, with numbers massaged to the project's benefit.
An extra death every million journeys sounds okay until it's you, or your family member that dies, and until you're told how many millions of journeys happen every day.
It's never a good idea to remove safety systems, and they did it to save money first and foremost, and they would have known exactly what they were doing.
![[TW]Fox](/data/man-of-honor/2009.png){kind=avatar}
Because we have thousands and thousands of miles of roads already that have never had them? Are we going to shut all the dual carriageways?
What about NSL A roads? Wow there isn't even a barrier on those let alone hard shoulders.
Associate
Yes but they often don't carry as much traffic. On big roads like the M27 that often have big crashes, breakdowns etc it's just plain stupid.
I had a blowout a few years back at 70mph in the outside lane, luckily managed to get across two lanes of traffic and onto the hard shoulder where I could change to a space saver. If that happens now, I have nowhere to put the car, just have to peg it and hope that the monkey watching the CCTV see's me and closes my lane in time - Meanwhile hoping that everyone currently in the lane I end up in has paid attention and swerved out my way in time - Also causing potential accidents....
Smart motorways are dumb, they create more problems than they solve.
Soldato
Here's an idea - have Traffic Police on the motorway network. They can pull people over for breaking the law and driving like numpties. That'll help fix driving standards.
Sometimes they do sometimes they don't - in some areas they are the main arterial routes, IE the A1.
now, you have 60s
Man of Honour
It's dumb people that cause problems, not smart motorways. If people could manage to read the road far enough ahead of them to be aware of a hazard it'd be a non-issue
Always remember, The average IQ is only 100, and 50% of people are dumber than this!
And while it isnt an absolute given, Forsight and the ability to look into the future does seem to be one of the things that correlates with the ability to perform well in IQ tests.
(Also, remember that ~1:6 of the population will have an IQ score of less than 85!)
Well, quite apart from the fact that for many reasons, Motorways are a different experience to other road types.
There is the factor of being comfortable with what we are familiar with.
Historically Motorways have been very, very, safe roads. The presence of a permanent hard shoulder is a major factor in this. Not just as a refuge, but also to provide access for emergency vehicles if there is an accident.
The government has made a decision that has undoubtedly made them rather more dangerous.
Justifying this on the grounds that its Ok because other roads are dangerous too is, with all due respect, utterly bizarre logic.
Man of Honour
Nothing worse than having to play the what speed should I be doing now or did that last sign say 50 or 60 
game.
game.Agree with that, having a limiter on the car doesn't half free up your attention when your not concentrating on doing the speed limit.
How are you going to fix the issue of people being dumb? Historically, if you give them something complex, dumb people are dumb. You can't design systems like smart motorways on the assumption that people are perfect and not dumb. That is not the real world smart motorways have to live in.
When someone is killed because their car broke down and a dumb person drives into the back of it, saying "it was the dumb person, not the system that put high speed traffic in the same place as it puts broken down cars" is of very little help to the family left behind. That family might be yours.
You can't even rely on smart people not to be dumb either.
All that happens is that Smart people find ingenious and imaginative ways of being dumb that the system designers couldn't possibly have anticipated in a million years!