Technology designed by Highways England to detect broken-down vehicles on smart motorways stops working in “moderate to heavy” traffic, according to its own chief engineer.
The system, called stopped vehicle detection (SVD), which the government plans to introduce across the country, uses radar technology to identify broken-down cars and lorries. It is designed to reduce the dangers of sections of motorway where use of the hard shoulder has been removed to create four lanes of live traffic.
However, the system, now used only on the M25, creates an “unmanageable amount of false alarms” when traffic builds up, according to documents obtained by The Sunday Times. This means there is no way to detect vehicles that have stopped running in heavy motorway traffic. Drivers of such vehicles spend an average of 17 minutes in live lanes before being detected.
Read full story here >https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/smart-motorway-stopped-vehicle-detector-does-not-work-33m7qxwbj?fbclid=IwAR37mZZe8M7R7yCxJFR0h-CIYlfZOK2LhIqcofFWVgEAmUo9D3jTa3s8BiY