Some take away’s from the Transport Committee: The roll-out and safety of smart motorways, HC 26 (Wednesday 30 June 2021)
Number 6
On reinstating the hard shoulder
Chair: …Let’s move on to reinstating the hard shoulder, what it would entail and what the consequences would be. Back to Greg Smith.
Greg Smith: Let me play devil’s advocate for a minute. There are a lot of groups and people out there who currently believe that reinstatement of the hard shoulder would be a good thing. What would it take to actually put back the hard shoulder? Can I ask you to reference in your answer the Secretary of State’s suggestion in a previous session? He said that “it would require the equivalent land for 700 Wembley stadium-sized football pitches to somehow undo it all.” In your answer, can you explain why that is the case and why we cannot just take lane one and turn it back into a hard shoulder, having three running lanes?
Baroness Vere: That is the point. What are you going to make it into? You have two choices. Either you are going to do the road widening, which is the 700 football pitches—and didn’t we have a good game last night?—or you can make the second choice, which is, as you say, “All right. We’re just going to put the white line back and make it into a hard shoulder again,” and we would reduce the capacity by 25% by doing that.
What would happen if that were the case and we decided that was a good thing to do? First, the safety of the local road network around that area would be impacted. There would be vehicles that would leave the road that is more congested than it was previously and drive on less safe, local roads.
We have done some high-level analysis. If you assume that 25% of traffic is pushed off the road, due to the 25% reduction in capacity, we reckon there would be 25 fatalities a year and 224 serious casualties. The names of those people will never be in the papers because they die on local roads. People who die on local roads never get into papers. That is one of the things that would happen. For example, we looked more specifically at junctions 13 to 16 on the M1 between Milton Keynes and Nottingham. You could expect up to six people to die. Again, they would not be in the national papers. That is the sort of quantity we are talking about. That is on the safety side, because you would push the traffic away from a road by reducing the capacity.
The other side is that you would push the traffic to where people live. For the M1, I imagine that people would go up the A5, which would make the people of Towcester deeply unhappy and it would be even more congested than it is now. Of course, it would cost money to the taxpayer to put the road back. Again, we would have to be absolutely convinced that it was the right thing to do. It would cost money in terms of delays. We have estimated that it would cost, if it was up to 25%, £2.85 billion.
Greg Smith: Okay. Within that, I think there are two things that flow. No. 1, an enormous number of motorways are in the conventional format right now. If it is the case, as we have heard, that smart motorways, all-lane running and so on are safer, what is the Department doing to improve the safety of the hard shoulders on the many hundreds, if not thousands, of miles of motorway still with hard shoulders?…
Baroness Vere: …For example, those who want to bring back the hard shoulder say, “Well, bring back the hard shoulder because it will be safer; it will be brilliant.” One in 12 fatalities happens on a hard shoulder. We know that 90% of stops on a hard shoulder are not necessary. People need to realise that you should only stop on any motorway in an absolute emergency. Do not stop to exchange insurance details. Do not stop to make a phone call. People do all of those things, and they should not.
Mr Bradshaw: Okay. What advice would you give, Minister, to a family that has broken down in a live lane on an all-lane running motorway?
Baroness Vere: It would be the same advice as I would give to anybody who has broken down in a live lane on any road. Obviously, if you break down next to a place of safety, you should absolutely try to get to that place of safety. If you break down and you cannot get to a place of safety, you should keep your seatbelt on. You should put your hazards on. You should dial 999….