Jim O’Sullivan, chief executive of Highways England, says that “Bad drivers are to blame for crashes on smart motorways” in an interview with the Times. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bad-drivers-to-blame-for-crashes-on-smart-motorways-says-roads-chief-5jntx0zgj
This is the equivalent of stating that the problem with hospitals are patients, or the problem with pavements are pedestrians. Motorways in England accounted for 69 billion vehicle miles in 2018, with the M1 alone accounting for 140,000 vehicles per day. That’s a lot of drivers. So, if the problem is drivers, one would have thought that the geniuses in charge of road transport would have tried to make their journeys as safe as possible, not even more dangerous.
If O’Sullivan’s argument was transferred to hospitals, it would rightly be regarded as a rationale for the scrapping of health and safety regulations and proper care. After all, if patients were the obstacle to a smooth-running hospital, then just eliminate them!
But this is the mentality that governs what is happening on England’s motorways. In his remarks to the Times, O’Sullivan said that “reckless actions by drivers, including stopping on ‘live’ vehicle lanes without good reason, was one of the main causes of crashes on motorways, not the design of the road.”
As O’Sullivan knows full well, if drivers are stopping in “live lanes” it’s because they have no choice now that the hard shoulder has been turned into one.
His reasoning is the same that the Transport Select Committee slammed as “disingenuous” in 2017. This was in response to Highways England arguing that the elimination of the hard shoulder had reduced fatalities because people were no longer being killed on it!
Mr O’Sullivan told the Times that smart motorways were safe pointing to “figures showing that 77 people were killed on traditional motorways with a hard shoulder last year compared with nine on the smart network.”
How did he arrive at this figure? Only last month Highways England admitted that the number of deaths on motorways had increased last year—by 8 percent: the greatest proportional increase of all road types.
O’Sullivan isn’t merely dissembling. He is defending a dangerous system and trying to pre-empt any examination of it.
Last month, the coroner into the inquest of 8-year-old Dev Naran, killed in a live lane on the M6 last year, used her legal powers to demand Highways England answer questions as to the “risk to life from the loss of the hard shoulder”. In the same interview with O’Sullivan, the Times reported that Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, is “thought to have requested that research be carried out into the system’s ‘true safety record’.”
In advance of any such research, however, O’Sullivan insists there is no problem and “rejected calls to pause the extension of the programme and to retrofit existing smart motorways with extra emergency areas. Additional lay-bys would cost £1 million each and would not improve” safety, the Times reported.
That is precisely why the critical issue of public safety cannot be left in the hands of Highways England and must be subject to a thorough investigation. Support the campaign for a judicial review, donate to fundraiser and share with all your friends and family.