National Highways had to compile a Equality Impact Assessment on smart motorways to comply with the law, unfortunately the law didn’t say the assessment had to be conducted by a neutral party, so this report literally opens with this following statement:
from there is goes on to summarising what it is meant to be independently assessing
This report is 43 pages long and written from a point of view that actually claims there might be positive discrimination against the ‘protected groups’ before it admits there are some dangers too!
‘
I have not finished reading and digesting this report myself yet, but I’ve been asked a few times about what type of investigating NH would have had to do on this topic, so I’m sharing this now (it is in the public realm you just have to know about it to ask for it)
I feel this is a very important document, and many others have told me time and time again that just based on the added risk to people with mobility issues alone, by law the hard shoulder should be returned immediately, yet I’m still struggling with the police interpretation of untested grounds, having to have legal representation to highlight when laws are being ignored!! being up against a very large company that is also a department of the government and therefore most people’s boss (or funding source)
Without money/lawyers/friends in the right places we have to resort to the court of ‘going viral’ to get this sorted, either build enough pressure that the soon-to-be-in-an-election ministers actually take notice, or bring this to the attention of someone who can/will/is willing to help get this enforced.
As usual I have retired Traffic Sergeant Mike Rawson helping me and he has repeatedly made the following statement on the claim that smart motorways are safer than conventional motorways.
“As I have said many times the Killed Seriously Injured (KSI) statistics provided by NH are misleading and fail to tell the whole and accurate story –
There should be TWO categories of KSI statistics –
(a) KSI collisions in which the absence of a hard shoulder plays no part (high speed shunt in foggy conditions is one example)
(b) KSI collisions in which the absence of a hard shoulder was the major contributory cause (stopped vehicle in a live lane)
I do feel the figures produced by NH and Dfts should be legally challenged on this basis – the public have a right to know the truth about how people are killed and seriously injured on ALR SMs”
The full assessment document can be accessed here