Some take away’s from the Transport Committee: The roll-out and safety of smart motorways, HC 26 (Wednesday 30 June 2021)
Number 4
Evasion on the economic case for All Lanes Running:
Greg Smith: That is very helpful. Perhaps we can turn to the economics. There has been a presumption that of the all-lane running motorways that have been built, largely since 2015, there was expectation of a £3 return for every £1 spent on building them. How many built so far have delivered on that?
Baroness Vere: We would not know that because we need to do the POPE reports… We have some POPE [Post Opening Project Evaluation] reports coming out fairly soon. Obviously, I will write to you, Chair, with the POPE reports, which I think you will find interesting. There are two things to consider. One is that there will be variation scheme by scheme, so it is better to look on a programme basis. It is the case that from what we can see at the moment we are making good progress against the business case. The other issue is that one year is often not reliable enough to draw direct conclusions, so after five years we look at the business case again, and then we re-evaluate what the system looks like after it has been functioning for five years.….
Greg Smith: I totally accept the point of the five-year review period. Covid has got in the way of that analysis, but there have been all-lane running motorways open for more than five years in this country. I can think of a couple.
Nick Harris: As the Minister said, there are a number of POPE reports that have been done, or evaluations. There are nine. Of those nine, from memory, only two or maybe three are at the five-year point. We have limited data on their economic performance. The data we have so far backs up the assumptions that were made in the business models. We need to continue to evaluate and monitor their performance, but the sorts of assumptions we made in the business plans about safety, shift of traffic from local roads to the motorways, economic benefits, journey reliability and so on are being evidenced. We need to wait for the five-year reports.
Greg Smith: Are those reports independent of Highways England and/or the DFT, or are they produced by Highways England?
Nick Harris: The POPE reports are produced by Highways England.
Greg Smith: Presumably, without pre-releasing the results, you will have a feel for right direction or wrong direction compared to the original business case. Can you share with the Committee whether you feel that the £3 for every £1 is close to reality? Is it better or worse?
Nick Harris: As the Minister said, it is important to look at this at a programme level. Some schemes deliver better. As yet, we have not realised the benefits that were put forward on some. At programme level, we are generally achieving or starting to achieve that level of benefit, or our expectation is that we are going to achieve it.
Greg Smith: … Would it be fair to say that when an all-lane running motorway is running well, the benefits are clearly there, but the minute something goes wrong you lose those benefits very quickly because of the way multiple lanes have to be shut down very quickly, and those delays then last longer because of the nature of the intervention that has to be taken after an incident?
Nick Harris: Again, I do not think the evidence bears that out… We do not find that it takes longer for us to clear incidents on smart motorways compared with other motorways, so—
Greg Smith: I am sorry to cut in. Would it be fair to say that on a smart motorway you take a bigger intervention because you do not have the hard shoulder? I can think of times driving along them when you wonder why two or three of the four lanes are closed for a car with a puncture in lane one.
Nick Harris: Live-lane breakdowns can happen on all roads. There are something like 50,000 live-lane breakdowns a year—
Greg Smith: But my point is that the intervention to make the road safe and to secure the vehicle that has stopped, for whatever reason, was actually bigger and involved more lane closures than on a conventionally designed motorway.
Nick Harris: Not necessarily. We close enough lanes to deal with the incident on any type of motorway. Our paramount focus, of course, is safety. We are focused on the safety of the recovery crews, our staff and the emergency services who may be involved. We close enough of the road to provide a safe working zone for them, regardless of the type of road. It is the size of the incident that will drive that, not the type of road.
Greg Smith: .. Could we try to dig deeper into some of the data, to look at a three-lane plus hard shoulder bit of motorway? Let’s say there is a tyre blow-out on a coach. How many lanes get shut each way round? There is some anecdotal evidence that on a smart motorway, because it is easier to throw up the Xs on the gantries, more lanes get shut, which then takes away the benefits of traffic flow.
Nick Harris: Again, I would suggest that that is anecdotal evidence. We have data on every single incident, how long it took to clear and what the impact was. I don’t believe that anecdotal evidence is borne out by—
Chair: Can I come in? Just to be clear, this is not anecdotal evidence. This is from a freedom of information request. I am working on the basis that it is either from Highways England or the DFT for it to be a freedom of information request. It was from 2019, looking at the M25. It showed that the live-lane carriageway on the four-lane controlled stretch of smart motorway was clear for 96%, a lot more often than the four-lane stretch of all-lane running, at 73%. That is a big gap. We are talking about the economics, so if your economics work on the basis, as you have just said to Greg Smith, that there should not be that difference, yet the evidence says that there is, your economic case cannot be as strong as you believe it is either.
Note to readers: According to Highways Magazine, Highways England has refused to publish five-year post opening project evaluations (POPEs) for smart motorway schemes on the M1 under the Freedom of Information Act and has so far not disclosed the reports to the committees.
The only five-year POPE released so far showed that the stretch of motorway studied became less safe as traffic levels rose.
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