- The Road Safety Investigation Branch will investigate smart motorway crashes
- Over 60% of UK drivers believe hard shoulders should be reintroduced
- Smart motorways have their hard shoulders scrapped and converted into a lane
Serious smart motorway crashes are set to be investigated by a new independent body focused on road safety after a string of tragic deaths occurred on the roads.
Collisions on motorways with the hard shoulder removed will fall under the remit of the Road Safety Investigation Branch launched by the Department for Transport.
Similar stand-alone organisations already exist to investigate air, maritime and rail accidents, but significantly more people are killed on roads than other modes of transport.
full article here
Yesterday, returning along the M4 following a visit to my daughter in East Molesey, driving westbound around 6pm with good visibility and light, I spotted an overhead sign indicating that there was a broken down vehicle in the smart lane and an arrow indicating drivers must exit the lane. However, two cars ignored the sign and continued at speed in the lane. The next gantry had a only a large red X above the lane which they also ignored. Fortunately, on seeing the stationery car , both vehicles indicated, and were able to exit the lane at the last second, thanks to the quick response of other drivers. The solitary lady driver was standing on the other side of the barrier, the car being tight up against the barrier she could only have exited the car from the motorway side, running the gauntlet of the speeding traffic. This could have been my daughter, trying to remove her two tiny children from the car. A nightmare situation. The car had broken down a long way from any refuge. I have just emailed my MP, Mark Harper, asking him to help reverse this madness.
Hi Graham,
Thank you for sharing your experience – a terrifying situation which I’m sure is familiar to many supporters of the Smart Motorways Kill campaign.
Can I ask, did Mark Harper MP reply? If so, did he sound supportive of our aims? As you’ll have seen from today’s news, Mark Harper has been promoted to Transport Secretary by the new PM, and is in the perfect position to end the All Lanes Running madness, once and for all.
Thanks again, and please keep up the pressure until our hard shoulder is restored.
All the best,
Gary.