Let me begin by reminding everyone that our AGM takes place at Dobbies before the Group meeting on Tuesday May 7th – start time 7.30pm prompt. Afterwards we look forward to hearing from the trio of speakers from St Helens Group – see page 8.
I think there is a bit of irony when I looked back at Chairman’s Chatter in the May 2023 newsletter. On April 15th 2023 Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that “all future Smart motorways will be cancelled in recognition of the current lack of public confidence felt by drivers and cost pressures”. Looking back over those 12 months, have things improved? Are we more confident that National Highways are ‘on the ball’?
If you watched BBC1 Panorama on Monday 22nd April you would have learned that in some areas, very little, if anything, has changed. As expected, national Highways have published a lengthy response which you can read if you follow the link below;
https://nationalhighways.co.uk/article/bbc-panorama-on-smart-motorway-technology/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR3SO7H1drYhDRL5mV56DoFg5kI5VwjJcoDCbMy z0WpzaZaD7H63wRkJ6hw_aem_AWJfIJDT1kZo9Ej- KtrONSwE9O8qXgoabbxGOq5y9TU_qg6GkmhP3tqNymX4GkjvYcFJYxvi_sfalRsXswiolW83
The Panorama program highlighted power failures sometimes lasting days and equipment failures of the Stopped Vehicle Detection technology. A ‘whistleblower’ appeared anonymously on the programme – now that one has come forward, will there be more to outline that National Highways perhaps have their ‘own version of the truth’? NH haven’t even referred to the lack of access for Emergency services to reach broken down or crashed vehicles – and any deaths caused by delays.
One thing is certain, despite all National Highways efforts, public perception that Smart Motorways are dangerous places has changed very little. The AA and RAC are still campaigning for the hard shoulders to be restored. Personally I still maintain that there is a practical ‘half way house’ whereby the conversion of ‘all lane running’ stretches to be 'dynamic hard shoulder' configuration, where the hard shoulder is open and closed depending on the levels of traffic – BUT only open when the speed limit is set to 40mph to give that extra capacity to cope with heavy congestion. At that speed any broken down vehicle can be more easily avoided. I still travel a lot on the M6 in particular, and for most of the day and night three lanes are still more than adequate to cope with the volume of traffic.
Last May I said “Although the technology might be installed, it needs to be kept in working order and have sufficient motorway control room staff on duty to be able to check the incident on camera, set the red X lane closure and dispatch a National Highways traffic officer to attend to the stopped vehicle. It is claimed that the first two can be done within 20 seconds of the stopped vehicle alert, but that really is not acceptable. In 20 seconds a following vehicle travelling at 70mph has covered a third of a mile and then needs to react to the Red X”. In the NH response they state “Our national average attendance time remains under the 10-minute target. This is comparable to response times for highest priority calls to the emergency services”. Mmmm – but who set the 10 minute target – they did!! They don’t say “we could do better”!
This still has a long way to run before the public believe that Smart Motorways are safe – in fact I don’t think it will ever happen.
Roy Sammons