Smart motorways should never have even been attempted; the hundreds of lives they have ruined was never worth the saving of a few minutes on a regular journey.
And when has there ever a regular journey on a motorway?
Hundreds of miles of motorway, with hundreds of thousands of vehicles all travelling at high speeds, there is no such thing as a regular journey. And now when something does go wrong the removal of the hard shoulder means there is nowhere for you to go to reduce the risk to yourself, other road users and allow emergency services to get past.
Then there’s the delays. The constant upgrades and “retro fitting” of more safety features because smart motorways are proving so dangerous, these road works take months and years and even then when there is an incident the lack of hard shoulder makes the delays 100 times worse, so the ten minutes you saved last week suddenly turn into stuck in traffic for hours on end.
And can mean that someone else doesn’t get to go home every again
The government advice on what anyone should do if they come to a stop in a live lane on a smart motorway is: get out the vehicle quickly through the PASSENGER side door, get over the crash barrier and as far away from the motorway as possible.
Most mobile people would struggle to get out through the centre of a vehicle quickly, but add to that you have only seconds on a busy motorway, until the vehicle behind you reaches the space you are in and you have an obvious recipe for disaster.
And what are you meant to do if you or someone in your vehicle has mobility issues? children, pets, its dark, raining, etc.
Or even a coach full of school kids.
Smart Motorways Kill was created to highlight the dangers associated with this untried and unproven technology. We believe that the only way in which motorways can provide a safe environment for road users is when motorways have a hard shoulder.
Yet, successive Government’s have removed this vital safety feature.
A Highways England report revealed that it takes CCTV operators an average of 20 minutes to spot stranded vehicles before closing the lane. This is despite the same report finding that drivers were three times more likely to break down in a live lane when the hard shoulder had been removed.
As for the Motorway Incident Detection and Automatic Signalling system (Midas) monitors, which supposedly constitute the “smart” element of these death traps, these exist in only one-fifth of existing Smart Motorways.