That is somewhat a simplification but when you mix that with a system which only needs one thing to go wrong to have fatal consequences it is just pants on head stupid to persist with it in the UK.
I just hope I'm never at the mercy of it.
Smart Motorways
- Thread starter Orionaut
- Start date
That is somewhat a simplification but when you mix that with a system which only needs one thing to go wrong to have fatal consequences it is just pants on head stupid to persist with it in the UK.
I just hope I'm never at the mercy of it.
Personally I think the problem has arisen from choosing the word "smart motorway" and people associate that with it requiring less attention to drive on/significantly safer.
On a normal motorway he may have been able to get across to the hard shoulder, but as others have said, if this was a dual carriageway A road then the outcome will very likely have been the same.
It's about time the public and the media start blaming the driver for lack of awareness/attention to driving than blaming the road/infrastructure. The only caveat to this would be sudden extreme weather, but in this case people would reduce speed anyway and the smart motorway should pick that up and also drop the speed accordingly.
They tried to add capacity on the cheap.
I'm not sure "cheap" can be used here. Have you seen the costs of these projects?
Just looked, the M6 north had two smart motorway projects j13-15 and 16-19 at a cost of almost 464mil combined which covers a total distance of 33.3 miles. Which works out as a cost of nearly £9 grand per meter of road.
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You can blame whoever you like, but when you have millions of people driving on motorways every day, you make a change that makes things 1% more complicated for everyone, you end up with a bunch more dead people.
They should just stick with the variable speed limits, which pretty much make traffic flow quite well. Put average speed checks in to stop the morons that speed between cameras. Get rid of the hard-shoulder-as-lane nonsense.
Yet people don't wet themselves with fear every time they go near a 70mph multi lane A road, which have no hard shoulder, minimal refuge areas, no stopped vehicle detection radars, no visual cctv monitoring, no lane closure system, no/minimal reactive warning system etc. etc. and are essentially a 'smart motorway' with all the safety systems removed. I'd be just as worried breaking down on a decent stretch of the A303 as I would the smart section of the M27, if not more so, as at least the M27 will have some system to warn people.
I would be interested to see year by year, motorway by motorway statistics for accident rates too, as more often than not you see broad comparisons of 'smart motorway' vs 'normal motorway' that tend to ignore whether the converted motorways already had higher accident frequencies due to traffic loading anyway (hence being selected for conversion)
I don't disagree - but I live just off the A303 and there are serious accidents so frequent it is scary - so when there is a chance to avoid that kind of situation not doing so makes no sense to me.
Even just the bit of the A303 within visual range of me (I can see a roughly 5 mile stretch of it from one window) it is almost a regular occurrence to see blue flashing lights and HLE10 flying over from Henstridge to the incident :s
EDIT: Something I'd also say - most multi-lane A roads have a decent bit of verge, mostly, while many motorways, especially these areas they've changed to smart one often don't - though that is a gross generalisation.
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start blaming the driver for lack of awareness/attention to driving than blaming the road/infrastructure.
could also say the smart motorway design didn't accomodate the modern reduced attention/reaction people have with likes of automatic cruise control, or ? in car infotainment
(.... reaction+peak braking time increases with those ACC on, drivers - earlier linked study - 751->944ms )
could also say the smart motorway design didn't accomodate the modern reduced attention/reaction people have with likes of automatic cruise control, or ? in car infotainment
(.... reaction+peak braking time increases with those ACC on, drivers - earlier linked study - 751->944ms )
There was a fatal accident awhile back with a guy who delivered cars for a living - it seems he was driving the previous vehicle relying on adaptive cruise control/forward collision systems, then picked up another vehicle with lesser feature level and being tired probably didn't appreciate it and while driving tired and seemingly relying on it ploughed into the back of stationary traffic.
I don't even know what goes through the minds of people like that - but that is the reality of who we are dealing with on the roads and that isn't going to change any time soon.
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We may as well go a few steps further and specifically license drivers for motorway use. Or physically limit motorway capacity? - based on the number of drivers on motorways during rush hour times, it's pretty clear that we've exhausted capacity with 3 lane motorways. Imagine having to join a queue at a junction to be let onto the motorway?
We may as well go a few steps further and specifically license drivers for motorway use. Or physically limit motorway capacity? - based on the number of drivers on motorways during rush hour times, it's pretty clear that we've exhausted capacity with 3 lane motorways. Imagine having to join a queue at a junction to be let onto the motorway?
Part of the problem I think is other routes not being attractive as well - the roads in this country are a mess.
the reality is even if they wanted to widen these roads to add a hard shoulder, they can’t in many cases because there simply isn’t the land to do it without re-routing the entire road. M25 being case and point.
You are left with the option of hard shoulder removal to add capacity in the existing foot print or let the roads become overwhelmed.
If you propose building a new road, a literal army of well funded environmentalists and lawyers descend on your project with the pure aim of stopping it and tie it up with years of litigation even if they can’t.
They don’t even like public transport, they are kicking off near me because they are trying to build a new guided bus way to link up a local town/village to Cambridge and in its path are a few apple trees.
If anything involves cutting down one tree that could easily be replaced, a large contingent of people seem to lose their mind at the moment ‘but think of the children’ style and it’s getting out of hand.
You are left with the option of hard shoulder removal to add capacity in the existing foot print or let the roads become overwhelmed.
If you propose building a new road, a literal army of well funded environmentalists and lawyers descend on your project with the pure aim of stopping it and tie it up with years of litigation even if they can’t.
They don’t even like public transport, they are kicking off near me because they are trying to build a new guided bus way to link up a local town/village to Cambridge and in its path are a few apple trees.
If anything involves cutting down one tree that could easily be replaced, a large contingent of people seem to lose their mind at the moment ‘but think of the children’ style and it’s getting out of hand.
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This does seem increasingly the case
they were wanting to change the layout of a road on my commute to work for years and were running into issues like that over some simple changes which would have immensely helped traffic flow - eventually due to a vehicle colliding with a wall they had an excuse to push it through.A group was kicking off due to the trees on the left at any suggestion of a change, same people first to moan when traffic turns to chaos in the town as well...
I'd been critical of the cycle lane implementation for awhile but I've found out more recently it is because of similar reasons they put it there rather than through on the left as well - now it is being moved to the left by the wall which makes far more sense than squeezing bikes along the inside of a narrow lane around a narrow bend frequented by large vehicles...
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I think the problem is that you cannot have people using a smart motorway correctly because as soon as you have a lane that is sometimes a driving lane, and sometimes a hard shoulder, you introduce a moving goalpost that relies on people paying attention to how the function of those lanes change. It's effectively a context sensitive motorway that changes as and when traffic and conditions change. A broken down vehicle is now placed in the same lane as high speed traffic instead of separated by the traditional hard shoulder.
Combined with the lack of required stopping places, the inability of Highways Agency to run these motorways (eg 20 minutes to notice a broken down vehicle and change the lane signing, if those cameras are working at all), this makes smart motorways fatal accidents waiting to happen.
Your hypothetical driver might have the same issue on an A road without a hard shoulder, but there's a reason motorways were built with hard shoulders. The expectation of what you might find on the inside lane of a motorway is different from what you might find on an A road, and speeds and flow of traffic are different. I regularly drive up the A1/A1(M), and going through towns, junctions and roundabouts are quite different from the three or four lane motorway parts, even if sometimes the speeds are somewhat similar.
While you can try to blame all accidents on drivers, making the infrastructure more challenging to navigate instead of easier to navigate will inevitably cause more accidents. If we care about reducing road deaths, we should be making driving more safely easier, not harder. A good example is the roundabout. While it does govern the flow of traffic itself, it's main benefit is safety. Instead of having a crossroads or traffic junction, a roundabout forces a driver to slow and navigate a self-governing junction, and reduces accidents by some 70-80 percent compared to a crossroads. Drivers manage to deal with what would seem to be a more difficult junction, because that infrastructure itself is designed to help keep the driver safe. Smart motorways on the other hand were designed to prevent the government spending on building new infrastructure, with little thought given to the danger that has been increased for users of the motorway.
While it would be great for every driver to have a very high standard of ability, the reality is that isn't the case, and infrastructure has to be built to take that into account, ie be pragmatic and realistic, instead of designing to a standard that will never be reached. Smart motorways are building something assuming that no one will ever make mistakes, and everyone will react perfectly all the time, and that will simply never, ever be the case.
To be fair, I’ve witnessed - indeed nearly got caught up with - plenty of collisions on both of the roads you mention, hard shoulders are quite literally life savers and when a vehicle breaks down and stops in a live lane it’s just plain luck that disaster doesn’t quickly happen soon thereafter, the A14 and A1 have motorway levels of traffic - I try my best to avoid the A1 especially for this reason, the A14 has little alternative tbh, unfortunately both roads are way over capacity and have been for a long time.
The vast majority of collision incidents on either road I’d argue are down to nowhere for a breaking down vehicle to get to, namely a hard shoulder.
Highways Agency last year admitted that the system had either failed to detect within the target time frame ( <20 seconds ) or failed completely on numerous occasions
The hard shoulder as a lane works fine when it is only used during heavy traffic conditions when the speed limit has already been reduced. The thing that I really don’t understand about smart motorways is they did the M42 as a trial which has been very successful and then instead of using that as a model they did something entirely different ie they massively reduced the number of safe refuge points meaning the gaps between them are too long and then they did this permanent running nonsense in the hard shoulder. If they would just go back to the original spec and have the system radar controlled so it almost instantly detects stopped vehicles the risks would be massively reduced. Now there is talk of scrapping smart motorways which would be plain stupid as the original
model on the m42 works great from my (extensive) experience!
The hard shoulder thing needs to just go. When it's active most people just don't use it because of the risk of camera jobsworth not noticing someone broken down in it.
The whole thing is dumb. Its a big distraction we didnt need on a fast and busy road.
The whole thing is dumb. Its a big distraction we didnt need on a fast and busy road.
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It is cheap in relative terms. The cost to add a lane in addition to an emergency lane would far eclipse half a billion.