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UK government: no more smart motorways without stopped car detection

40 points by clouddrover 6y ago

jtokoph 6y ago
As someone that doesn’t live in the UK, I had to look up what smart motorways were. It seems like the key thing here is that these roads have lights that signal that the hard shoulder can sometimes be used as a lane of traffic. Without a hard shoulder, broken down cars have nowhere safe to stop and must stop in a lane of traffic. I think the idea is that the systems need to detect stopped cars and mark the affected lanes/shoulders as non-traffic lanes.
- pharmakom 6y ago
  The concern is that the outside lane doesn’t get converted into a hard shoulder fast enough to provide a safe place to stop.
  - lilSebastian 6y ago
    Also, what happens most of the time on UK motorways, drivers ignore the signage.
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      That's why they need actuated spikes... It's pretty hard to keep driving at dangerous speeds when your tyres are flat... Ignore the signage and you'll be buying new tyres... That will soon have everyone paying attention to the signs.
      - ytwySXpMbS 6y ago
        That’s obviously ridiculous, you can’t purposefully puncture a moving cars tires to enforce a lane. You’d kill people, what about people who missed the signs?
        londons_explore 6y ago
        People who miss the signs also kill people. Which is less bad?
        nl 6y ago
        Deliberately creating a safety hazard is much worse than someone who is inattentive.
      - lilSebastian 6y ago
        Introducing a safety hazard, likely to cause further issues, when vehicles are traveling at speed, with nowhere else to go. Good job on suggesting one way to make things much worse.
    - tomatocracy 6y ago
      The signage is a disaster on these roads. Lane closures are a very unobtrusive red X and not posted frequently enough. Text is too short and doesn't indicate how far ahead any hazard might be. Some signs are in a different style (small board overhead rather than a gantry across all lanes) which can easily be mistaken for an advisory notice not a command/prohibition. Worst of all, the signs are almost always massively out of date and present a false alarm. You'll see a lane closure and very short text "obstruction in road" sign but then nothing actually there. I don't do huge mileage on these roads and I've probably come across this false alarm scenario 40 or 50 times, and never seen an actual hazard which was signed. It's not at all surprising they get ignored by a significant minority of drivers.
      - lilSebastian 6y ago
        100% Agree. It's badly designed and badly implemented. Dangerous by design.
- IneffablePigeon 6y ago
  There's a few things that fall under the "smart motorway" umbrella. They also have systems to detect traffic flow and impose variable speed limits when approaching a queue, and usually regular speed cameras to enforce those limits. This stopped car detection thing is indeed about the ones that can open the hard shoulder for traffic, though.
- Closi 6y ago
  Exactly - basically there used to be 2/3 lanes and a hard shoulder, and they changed the road to 3/4 lanes and no hard shoulder. Because branding them “motorways without a hard shoulder” sounded unsafe and bad they decided to call the proposal “smart motorways” (Because who would want to argue with that? You want regular stupid motorways?).
  - emayljames 6y ago
    I remember when this clearly deadly and badly thought out idea was implemented, and thinking "what, who are they kidding!".
- michaelt 6y ago
  The political context here is: There have been four different coroners' reports where smart motorways have contributed to deaths. Most recently in January [1] after two stopped vehicles - which would otherwise have stopped on a hard shoulder - instead had to stop in a traffic lane and were hit by a truck. In principle, smart motorways are already supposed to be covered in cameras etc, so people in a control centre can stop the traffic in a lane if the need arises. Apparently it doesn't work all that well in practice, though. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-55708791 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-557087...
  - helsinkiandrew 6y ago
    Smart roads contribute to some deaths but stop others: "Overall, what the evidence shows is that in most ways, smart motorways are as safe as, or safer than, the conventional ones. But not in every way. The statistics suggest that fatal casualty rates are lower while injury rates are slightly higher." https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/936811/smart-motorway-safety-evidence-stocktake-and-action-plan.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
    - tialaramex 6y ago
      My understanding is, a "Smart Motorway" gets a bunch of safety upgrades, the government won't fund these upgrades for other motorways, even though they'd be applicable, because then you'd have an apples-to-apples comparison and you likely find that, duh, Smart Motorways are unsafe. Because the purpose of this work is capacity increase, it almost unavoidably increases total fatalities because it increases traffic. If 10% more cars make a journey, even if those journeys aren't made less safe you get 10% more fatal accidents.
      - helsinkiandrew 6y ago
        The accidents are quoted per 'traveller mile' so an increase in capacity won't increase accidents. Any type of motorway is safer (in accidents per traveller mile) than other roads so if the increased capacity steals traffic from those rather than just increases the amount of journeys it would decrease the accidents. UK motorways are some of the safest in the world - alcohol, phones and other distractions, tiredness, driving recklessly are probably more of an issue than smart motorways.
- azalemeth 6y ago
  Motorways ("freeways" in en-us, I think) are traditionally 3 lanes with a 4th lane as a 'hard shoulder' that is closed to all traffic except those who have broken down and the emergency services. Smart Motorways were a Tory government idea designed to be "car friendly" and increase apparent road capacity without actually costing much money -- by using already-existing lightable signs above the motorway to convert the hard shoulder into another lane of traffic, and adding in "refuge areas" every $[$RANDOM % 5+1] miles. The trouble is, if you're in a motorway where every one of the now four lanes of traffic is going at the speed limit of 70 miles an hour (or, more likely, 80 miles an hour) and your tire explodes, you might not be able to coast the requisite distance to a refuge area, and you might not have the wherewithall to adequately pull into what is in effect a small siding about the size of an articulated lorry. If you break down in a "live lane" the signs are supposed to change to move traffic out behind you, so it doesn't ram into the car. Naturally, this hasn't worked well, and a bunch of people have died. At least one coroner has specifically called out Her Majesty's Government for directly contributing to deaths and blamed the smart motorway concept in general. There's at least one harrowing 999 call I've heard somewhere of someone saying "Help, I've broken down in lane 2 of the M4 and my car has stopped and I couldn't get into lane 1 when <BANG> <sound of young child crying> <no more adult voice>". Some of the "smarts" in smart motorways in doing lane-light switching this have been provided by humans and/or computer vision on the basis of CCTV. The trouble is, they've been ineffective. This announcement states that they're going to replace the previous approach with mmWave radar that I presume can detect changes more rapidly (quite how that works with shadows and reflections -- and cars in front of lorries, I don't know). Fundamentally, this seems to be "papering over the cracks" of the idea -- and I unfortunately don't think it will work. Many, if not most, British people want to go back to the old system of having 3 lanes + a hard shoulder. We don't understand why the Tories really, really love smart motorways: it probably comes out of a combination of 'driver friendly' Manifesto promises combined with economic modelling about the cost of traffic jams.
  - Veen 6y ago
    > Smart Motorways were a Tory government idea Not so. The first smart motorway was introduced in 2006 under the Blair government. They were expanded under Ruth Kelly, Labour Secretary of State for Transport in 2007 when Brown was PM. They were further extended when the coalition came to power in 2010, but smart motorways were not originally a “Tory idea”.
- shortercode 6y ago
  Not all smart motorways have the hard shoulder thing, the ones that do have semi frequent "stopping bays". However, stopping in one without contacting the support staff(there are intercoms) or a good reason is an offence. They all feature per lane adjustable speed limits, as well as linked speed cameras at frequent intervals. This is supposed to help ease congestion by adjusting flow in certain areas. In practice random signs are often left on the wrong setting, so you get a speed reduction to 40mph for 250m. Or a lane is closed for 6 miles with no reason. I've no doubt that in the scenario where there is congestion that it greatly aids safety, as approaching traffic can be slowed before they reach the affected area
  - VBprogrammer 6y ago
    My least favourite thing is when they apply a patently absurd speed limit, I've seen 20mph signs on the M25 when traffic is moving freely. You are then faced with the dilemma between setting those speed cameras off or risking a lorry driver playing candy crush on his mobile phone running into the back of you.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  I live in the Netherlands and they've been doing it here for a while, but they've called it differently (a 'spitsstrook', or a 'rush hour lane') which is opening up the hard shoulder for traffic during rush hour. There's no pretense of it being 'smart' anywhere, they had to in some places because the pressure of traffic is too high and widening the road is not an option.
  - fmajid 6y ago
    I remember visiting the Netherlands in 99. That was the first sunny weekend and they had 1000km of traffic jams, when the entire highway network is 4000km...
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  > Without a hard shoulder, broken down cars have nowhere safe to stop and must stop in a lane of traffic. Sounds absolutely insane and lethal when you write it down doesn't it?
- martin-adams 6y ago
  As a Uk person who has driven on them, I had to look it up as well at the time. I was shocked to find how they weren’t smart. I honestly thought the smart part was safety and breakdown detection as the hard shoulder was used for traffic. I was wrong and shocked.
- lsllc 6y ago
  Come to Massachusetts where "Breakdown Lane Travel" is allowed during rush-hour (only in the inbound direction in the morning and outbound in the afternoon/evening and where signposted). We have reasonable sized pull out areas every mile or so, but the really nasty part is that the on-ramps now suddenly dump you into the moving breakdown lane traffic (which would otherwise be your acceleration / merge lane). Thankfully, traffic is so bad around Boston, that typically it's all at a standstill anyway.
net_greybeard 6y ago
I wish they would scrap them entirely. I used to do very long commutes in the car. If anyone here has done a lot of driving they will know that you tend to go into "autopilot", you are paying attention and know exactly what going on but you probably have no recollection of the last 20-30 miles. Typically unless you are gunning it on the motorway you will be somewhere between 65-75 to be cruising with the other traffic and that variation of speed is normal unless you have cruise control. I don't have cruise control in my car. The amount of worry and stress these things induce because I can't remember whether I was travelling at the correct speed (I didn't get a ticket so I must have been fine) drives me insane.
- IneffablePigeon 6y ago
  Pretty sure the cameras have some leeway built in, and in addition your speedometer will probably read a few mph under at 70, unless you're using one on a satnav. I do agree though, I tend to just try and find someone else who has cruise control and keep a steady distance behind them.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- dazc 6y ago
  I have come upon a stranded car a couple of times and it is apparent that most drivers do not notice until it is almost too late. Factor in the time it takes the brain to respond and you literally have an accident waiting to happen. I am now at the age where I am never in a hurry so, both times, managed to avoid any contact but witnessed some hair-raising near misses.
londons_explore 6y ago
I really don't understand how these smart motorways are so expensive. They're literally a regular motorway but with slightly different signs that update over WiFi. Adding those to an existing road doesn't justify costing far more than building the road in the first place!
- misnome 6y ago
  And they’ve been blocking roads with highly disruptive roadworks for literal years to “convert” them
- helsinkiandrew 6y ago
  Roads are hideously expensive - but smart motorways aren't just wifi enabled signs: there's traffic/weather detection and then the control systems behind adaptive traffic lighting/speed control - and those systems have to be reliable and maintained. I haven't seen recent statistics/costs but remember that the cost of the converting the M42 in 2006 to a smart motorway was £9M per mile, creating a new lane would have been £16M per mile.
  - kylegordon 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_motorway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_motorway has a list of miles and costs.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    In the days when I can buy a weather station for $16 or get the weather in my phone for free, I don't think this should add much to the cost. Likewise I can get bulbs that turn themselves on and off based on weather, light, the stock market or the phase of the moon, all for $3 from China. There is no way someone should be allowed to charge the UK government millions for the same.
    - reom_tobit 6y ago
      I doubt the $3 weather sensor has been tested / rated / secured in the same way that sensors for a motorway would be.
Aeolun 6y ago
It may just be me, but using the one (relatively) safe place on a highway for cars sounds like a spectacularly bad idea in the first place. Think how much money can be saved by just... not allowing anyone to drive there.
- deergomoo 6y ago
  > Think how much money can be saved by just... not allowing anyone to drive there Completely agree that it's a dumb idea, but I think the point is that converting 3 lanes + a hard shoulder to just 4 lanes is far cheaper and logistically easier than adding a whole extra lane. I'm not sure if Highways England have any right to the land either side of a motorway, but if not I imagine spilling over into other people's land would be a huge sink of time and money.
  - scatters 6y ago
    Also not great for the environment.
- alichapman 6y ago
  It's definitely not just you. Even worse than the hybrid hard shoulder is one stretch of the M5 where the road is 4 lanes at all times, and the occasional lay-by for if you break down.
- scatters 6y ago
  Taking the outside lane out of use would reduce capacity proportionately.
- Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  It's a tradeoff though, because opening up the hard shoulder alleviates pressure on the other lanes, thus (theoretically) reducing traffic jams. It's a patch though, it alleviates some of the symptoms but the underlying problem that is much more difficult to stop is commuting and travel in general. I'm kinda glad we've been forced into a work-from-home experiment the past year, it gives hard data on WFH's effect on traffic pressure. But it's not enough. I think companies should be incentivized to open up smaller offices across the country, and people incentivized to live where they work / work where they live. Which will mean bringing the 'good' jobs out of the cities.
londons_explore 6y ago
The death statistics for smart motorways are misleading because most of them are very busy motorways with speed limits of 40/50/60, while regular motorways usually have a speed limit of 70. You can't exactly compare death rates per mile on fast and slow roads and be surprised when the slow roads are safer.
aboringusername 6y ago
I'm honestly baffled by how "dumb" driving still is, in 2021. Most people have smart phones in their cars but the cars themselves are dumb! The obvious idea in the future is to allow cars to communicate themselves over a network and allow themselves to avoid actual danager - removing human control will save so many lives. We'll look back in 100/200 years and think we were insane for allowing humans to ever manually control a car.
- xxs 6y ago
  None of the these devices are real-time or have any deterministic latency for communication. It's very far from a trivial issue. The entire idea is very futuristic.
- bellyfullofbac 6y ago
  Reading that they need cameras to monitor the roads makes me think, why not have the government pay people to install data collecting sensors/cameras on their private cars. Yeah, the answer to the "why not" is simple, because most governments can't be trusted nowadays, especially not with data. Which is a freaking sorry state of the world.
deergomoo 6y ago
As someone who drives a very small car (Peugeot 107), I always feel a little on edge on smart motorways in a way that I don't when there's a hard shoulder to stop in should something go wrong. I'm not sure how large each "block" is, but even if it's something like a mile, if I break down and have to stop that's still an awful lot of cars and lorries that are already in the block behind me that need to see me and move over before people further back are routed into the next lane.
thih9 6y ago
The article mentions a promising first-year progress report (with reduced fatality rate). A related wikipedia article [1] also mentions fewer accidents in the pilot 2006 program: > This has proved very successful, with journey times decreasing by 26% northbound and 9% southbound. Drivers can also better predict their journey times as the variability decreased by 27%. The average accident rate dropped from 5.2 to 1.5 per month. It would be interesting to know what caused the project to start showing worse results. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoulder_(road)#Peak_period_use_by_all_traffic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoulder_(road)#Peak_period_us...
- zelos 6y ago
  I don't know if they did start showing worse results. I think the problem is that a death from a collision with a stopped car is very visible, while the drop in average accidents over a longer period isn't.
- Neil44 6y ago
  There are some schemes with automatic detection of stranded vehicles and lane closure. These work well. But some of the schemes rely on humans looking at cameras to spot people and shut lanes. This has left people sat in live lanes for 20+ minutes, eventually someone isn't paying attention and hits them.
tda 6y ago
I feel these kind of solutions where the hard shoulder is used as an extra lane are used to sneak in widening roads. When an extra lane is suggested, NIMBY and/or environmental concerns will immediately raise objections and kill the proposal. So instead, the idea is to use the existing road in a more "efficient" way by making it "smart". This is of course ok, as it's not like we're adding any road, just using the existing road in a better way. After some time, accidents happen and people clamor for a hard shoulder, which should be ok environmentally as its not adding extra road, its just a hard shoulder for safety and not meant to drive on (and who can object to safety). And in the two step process, somehow we ended up with a widened road whilst completely avoiding the discussion if we want a wider road or not. I sometimes also use this tactic in software if the PO's are non cooperative. First build the feature but hide it in a dev menu/behind a feature flag. No harm adding a feature if it's not available right? And then some time after it was implemented without explicit approval, I propose to enable the feature at zero cost, it is already implemented anyway. You can also view the idea of smart roads in a more benign way of course. As cheaper way to experiment if adding an extra lane could be worth it. In the Netherlands it is done a lot, usually only during rush hour. It is then often paired with a stricter speed limit, so when the 4th lane is open the speed limit is 100km/h instead of 130km/h. But as the speed limit is 100km/h during day time anyways this is less of a change than it used to be.
daveoc64 6y ago
One factor that people often overlooked is that it's not physically possible to widen some of the most congested sections of the motorway network in the UK. They are often over extended elevated sections, bridges, and tunnels. When it is physically possible, the cost is prohibitive. On balance, "Smart Motorways" can be safe - but poor driver behaviour is impossible to mitigate against. The automatic stopped vehicle detection should help things. The government has said that it will scrap the older "Dynamic Hard Shoulder" sections of motorway (where the hard shoulder is brought into use as a traffic lane during busy times only - which some drivers clearly don't understand), and replace them all with "All Lanes Running" systems, where there is simply no hard shoulder. That consistency should make it easier for drivers to know what to do in all cases, and help remove some of the accident risks. Stopping on the hard shoulder (where there is one) is very dangerous by itself - again, due to poor driver behaviour. The presence of a hard shoulder does not eliminate accidents.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  The other problem is as the road is extended either by these means or more building the traffic increases to fill that extra capacity.
NVHacker 6y ago
This misses the point of the hard shoulder - which is to provide a safe place to get out of the motorway traffic. Detecting cars that have stopped and alerting others is only one problem but not the biggest one. The main issue is how do you stop safely without a hard shoulder ?
bananapear 6y ago
I was recently driving on a section of the M1 which has been converted to “smart” motorway. Despite being almost empty, the variable speed limit signs on the overhead gantries were lit up: 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 50, 60, 60... Guess which gantry had the speed cameras.
physicsguy 6y ago
They're so dangerous. The worst part is that they don't have signs showing the speed limit as you immediately merge onto the motorway in all places. So I can come onto the M1 at my junction, and not know immediately that the speed limit is 40mph instead of 70mph for my vehicle

40 points by clouddrover 6y ago

As someone that doesn’t live in the UK, I had to look up what smart motorways were. It seems like the key thing here is that these roads have lights that signal that the hard shoulder can sometimes be used as a lane of traffic. Without a hard shoulder, broken down cars have nowhere safe to stop and must stop in a lane of traffic. I think the idea is that the systems need to detect stopped cars and mark the affected lanes/shoulders as non-traffic lanes.

pharmakom 6y ago
The concern is that the outside lane doesn’t get converted into a hard shoulder fast enough to provide a safe place to stop.
- lilSebastian 6y ago
  Also, what happens most of the time on UK motorways, drivers ignore the signage.
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    That's why they need actuated spikes... It's pretty hard to keep driving at dangerous speeds when your tyres are flat... Ignore the signage and you'll be buying new tyres... That will soon have everyone paying attention to the signs.
    - ytwySXpMbS 6y ago
      That’s obviously ridiculous, you can’t purposefully puncture a moving cars tires to enforce a lane. You’d kill people, what about people who missed the signs?
      - londons_explore 6y ago
        People who miss the signs also kill people. Which is less bad?
        nl 6y ago
        Deliberately creating a safety hazard is much worse than someone who is inattentive.
    - lilSebastian 6y ago
      Introducing a safety hazard, likely to cause further issues, when vehicles are traveling at speed, with nowhere else to go. Good job on suggesting one way to make things much worse.
  - tomatocracy 6y ago
    The signage is a disaster on these roads. Lane closures are a very unobtrusive red X and not posted frequently enough. Text is too short and doesn't indicate how far ahead any hazard might be. Some signs are in a different style (small board overhead rather than a gantry across all lanes) which can easily be mistaken for an advisory notice not a command/prohibition. Worst of all, the signs are almost always massively out of date and present a false alarm. You'll see a lane closure and very short text "obstruction in road" sign but then nothing actually there. I don't do huge mileage on these roads and I've probably come across this false alarm scenario 40 or 50 times, and never seen an actual hazard which was signed. It's not at all surprising they get ignored by a significant minority of drivers.
    - lilSebastian 6y ago
      100% Agree. It's badly designed and badly implemented. Dangerous by design.
IneffablePigeon 6y ago
There's a few things that fall under the "smart motorway" umbrella. They also have systems to detect traffic flow and impose variable speed limits when approaching a queue, and usually regular speed cameras to enforce those limits. This stopped car detection thing is indeed about the ones that can open the hard shoulder for traffic, though.
Closi 6y ago
Exactly - basically there used to be 2/3 lanes and a hard shoulder, and they changed the road to 3/4 lanes and no hard shoulder. Because branding them “motorways without a hard shoulder” sounded unsafe and bad they decided to call the proposal “smart motorways” (Because who would want to argue with that? You want regular stupid motorways?).
- emayljames 6y ago
  I remember when this clearly deadly and badly thought out idea was implemented, and thinking "what, who are they kidding!".
michaelt 6y ago
The political context here is: There have been four different coroners' reports where smart motorways have contributed to deaths. Most recently in January [1] after two stopped vehicles - which would otherwise have stopped on a hard shoulder - instead had to stop in a traffic lane and were hit by a truck. In principle, smart motorways are already supposed to be covered in cameras etc, so people in a control centre can stop the traffic in a lane if the need arises. Apparently it doesn't work all that well in practice, though. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-55708791 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-557087...
- helsinkiandrew 6y ago
  Smart roads contribute to some deaths but stop others: "Overall, what the evidence shows is that in most ways, smart motorways are as safe as, or safer than, the conventional ones. But not in every way. The statistics suggest that fatal casualty rates are lower while injury rates are slightly higher." https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/936811/smart-motorway-safety-evidence-stocktake-and-action-plan.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
  - tialaramex 6y ago
    My understanding is, a "Smart Motorway" gets a bunch of safety upgrades, the government won't fund these upgrades for other motorways, even though they'd be applicable, because then you'd have an apples-to-apples comparison and you likely find that, duh, Smart Motorways are unsafe. Because the purpose of this work is capacity increase, it almost unavoidably increases total fatalities because it increases traffic. If 10% more cars make a journey, even if those journeys aren't made less safe you get 10% more fatal accidents.
    - helsinkiandrew 6y ago
      The accidents are quoted per 'traveller mile' so an increase in capacity won't increase accidents. Any type of motorway is safer (in accidents per traveller mile) than other roads so if the increased capacity steals traffic from those rather than just increases the amount of journeys it would decrease the accidents. UK motorways are some of the safest in the world - alcohol, phones and other distractions, tiredness, driving recklessly are probably more of an issue than smart motorways.
azalemeth 6y ago
Motorways ("freeways" in en-us, I think) are traditionally 3 lanes with a 4th lane as a 'hard shoulder' that is closed to all traffic except those who have broken down and the emergency services. Smart Motorways were a Tory government idea designed to be "car friendly" and increase apparent road capacity without actually costing much money -- by using already-existing lightable signs above the motorway to convert the hard shoulder into another lane of traffic, and adding in "refuge areas" every $[$RANDOM % 5+1] miles. The trouble is, if you're in a motorway where every one of the now four lanes of traffic is going at the speed limit of 70 miles an hour (or, more likely, 80 miles an hour) and your tire explodes, you might not be able to coast the requisite distance to a refuge area, and you might not have the wherewithall to adequately pull into what is in effect a small siding about the size of an articulated lorry. If you break down in a "live lane" the signs are supposed to change to move traffic out behind you, so it doesn't ram into the car. Naturally, this hasn't worked well, and a bunch of people have died. At least one coroner has specifically called out Her Majesty's Government for directly contributing to deaths and blamed the smart motorway concept in general. There's at least one harrowing 999 call I've heard somewhere of someone saying "Help, I've broken down in lane 2 of the M4 and my car has stopped and I couldn't get into lane 1 when <BANG> <sound of young child crying> <no more adult voice>". Some of the "smarts" in smart motorways in doing lane-light switching this have been provided by humans and/or computer vision on the basis of CCTV. The trouble is, they've been ineffective. This announcement states that they're going to replace the previous approach with mmWave radar that I presume can detect changes more rapidly (quite how that works with shadows and reflections -- and cars in front of lorries, I don't know). Fundamentally, this seems to be "papering over the cracks" of the idea -- and I unfortunately don't think it will work. Many, if not most, British people want to go back to the old system of having 3 lanes + a hard shoulder. We don't understand why the Tories really, really love smart motorways: it probably comes out of a combination of 'driver friendly' Manifesto promises combined with economic modelling about the cost of traffic jams.
- Veen 6y ago
  > Smart Motorways were a Tory government idea Not so. The first smart motorway was introduced in 2006 under the Blair government. They were expanded under Ruth Kelly, Labour Secretary of State for Transport in 2007 when Brown was PM. They were further extended when the coalition came to power in 2010, but smart motorways were not originally a “Tory idea”.
shortercode 6y ago
Not all smart motorways have the hard shoulder thing, the ones that do have semi frequent "stopping bays". However, stopping in one without contacting the support staff(there are intercoms) or a good reason is an offence. They all feature per lane adjustable speed limits, as well as linked speed cameras at frequent intervals. This is supposed to help ease congestion by adjusting flow in certain areas. In practice random signs are often left on the wrong setting, so you get a speed reduction to 40mph for 250m. Or a lane is closed for 6 miles with no reason. I've no doubt that in the scenario where there is congestion that it greatly aids safety, as approaching traffic can be slowed before they reach the affected area
- VBprogrammer 6y ago
  My least favourite thing is when they apply a patently absurd speed limit, I've seen 20mph signs on the M25 when traffic is moving freely. You are then faced with the dilemma between setting those speed cameras off or risking a lorry driver playing candy crush on his mobile phone running into the back of you.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
I live in the Netherlands and they've been doing it here for a while, but they've called it differently (a 'spitsstrook', or a 'rush hour lane') which is opening up the hard shoulder for traffic during rush hour. There's no pretense of it being 'smart' anywhere, they had to in some places because the pressure of traffic is too high and widening the road is not an option.
- fmajid 6y ago
  I remember visiting the Netherlands in 99. That was the first sunny weekend and they had 1000km of traffic jams, when the entire highway network is 4000km...
chrisseaton 6y ago
> Without a hard shoulder, broken down cars have nowhere safe to stop and must stop in a lane of traffic. Sounds absolutely insane and lethal when you write it down doesn't it?
martin-adams 6y ago
As a Uk person who has driven on them, I had to look it up as well at the time. I was shocked to find how they weren’t smart. I honestly thought the smart part was safety and breakdown detection as the hard shoulder was used for traffic. I was wrong and shocked.
lsllc 6y ago
Come to Massachusetts where "Breakdown Lane Travel" is allowed during rush-hour (only in the inbound direction in the morning and outbound in the afternoon/evening and where signposted). We have reasonable sized pull out areas every mile or so, but the really nasty part is that the on-ramps now suddenly dump you into the moving breakdown lane traffic (which would otherwise be your acceleration / merge lane). Thankfully, traffic is so bad around Boston, that typically it's all at a standstill anyway.

net_greybeard 6y ago

I wish they would scrap them entirely. I used to do very long commutes in the car. If anyone here has done a lot of driving they will know that you tend to go into "autopilot", you are paying attention and know exactly what going on but you probably have no recollection of the last 20-30 miles. Typically unless you are gunning it on the motorway you will be somewhere between 65-75 to be cruising with the other traffic and that variation of speed is normal unless you have cruise control. I don't have cruise control in my car. The amount of worry and stress these things induce because I can't remember whether I was travelling at the correct speed (I didn't get a ticket so I must have been fine) drives me insane.

IneffablePigeon 6y ago
Pretty sure the cameras have some leeway built in, and in addition your speedometer will probably read a few mph under at 70, unless you're using one on a satnav. I do agree though, I tend to just try and find someone else who has cruise control and keep a steady distance behind them.
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dazc 6y ago
I have come upon a stranded car a couple of times and it is apparent that most drivers do not notice until it is almost too late. Factor in the time it takes the brain to respond and you literally have an accident waiting to happen. I am now at the age where I am never in a hurry so, both times, managed to avoid any contact but witnessed some hair-raising near misses.

londons_explore 6y ago

I really don't understand how these smart motorways are so expensive. They're literally a regular motorway but with slightly different signs that update over WiFi. Adding those to an existing road doesn't justify costing far more than building the road in the first place!

misnome 6y ago
And they’ve been blocking roads with highly disruptive roadworks for literal years to “convert” them
helsinkiandrew 6y ago
Roads are hideously expensive - but smart motorways aren't just wifi enabled signs: there's traffic/weather detection and then the control systems behind adaptive traffic lighting/speed control - and those systems have to be reliable and maintained. I haven't seen recent statistics/costs but remember that the cost of the converting the M42 in 2006 to a smart motorway was £9M per mile, creating a new lane would have been £16M per mile.
- kylegordon 6y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_motorway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_motorway has a list of miles and costs.
- londons_explore 6y ago
  In the days when I can buy a weather station for $16 or get the weather in my phone for free, I don't think this should add much to the cost. Likewise I can get bulbs that turn themselves on and off based on weather, light, the stock market or the phase of the moon, all for $3 from China. There is no way someone should be allowed to charge the UK government millions for the same.
  - reom_tobit 6y ago
    I doubt the $3 weather sensor has been tested / rated / secured in the same way that sensors for a motorway would be.

Aeolun 6y ago

It may just be me, but using the one (relatively) safe place on a highway for cars sounds like a spectacularly bad idea in the first place. Think how much money can be saved by just... not allowing anyone to drive there.

deergomoo 6y ago
> Think how much money can be saved by just... not allowing anyone to drive there Completely agree that it's a dumb idea, but I think the point is that converting 3 lanes + a hard shoulder to just 4 lanes is far cheaper and logistically easier than adding a whole extra lane. I'm not sure if Highways England have any right to the land either side of a motorway, but if not I imagine spilling over into other people's land would be a huge sink of time and money.
- scatters 6y ago
  Also not great for the environment.
alichapman 6y ago
It's definitely not just you. Even worse than the hybrid hard shoulder is one stretch of the M5 where the road is 4 lanes at all times, and the occasional lay-by for if you break down.
scatters 6y ago
Taking the outside lane out of use would reduce capacity proportionately.
Cthulhu_ 6y ago
It's a tradeoff though, because opening up the hard shoulder alleviates pressure on the other lanes, thus (theoretically) reducing traffic jams. It's a patch though, it alleviates some of the symptoms but the underlying problem that is much more difficult to stop is commuting and travel in general. I'm kinda glad we've been forced into a work-from-home experiment the past year, it gives hard data on WFH's effect on traffic pressure. But it's not enough. I think companies should be incentivized to open up smaller offices across the country, and people incentivized to live where they work / work where they live. Which will mean bringing the 'good' jobs out of the cities.

londons_explore 6y ago

The death statistics for smart motorways are misleading because most of them are very busy motorways with speed limits of 40/50/60, while regular motorways usually have a speed limit of 70. You can't exactly compare death rates per mile on fast and slow roads and be surprised when the slow roads are safer.

aboringusername 6y ago

I'm honestly baffled by how "dumb" driving still is, in 2021. Most people have smart phones in their cars but the cars themselves are dumb! The obvious idea in the future is to allow cars to communicate themselves over a network and allow themselves to avoid actual danager - removing human control will save so many lives. We'll look back in 100/200 years and think we were insane for allowing humans to ever manually control a car.

xxs 6y ago
None of the these devices are real-time or have any deterministic latency for communication. It's very far from a trivial issue. The entire idea is very futuristic.
bellyfullofbac 6y ago
Reading that they need cameras to monitor the roads makes me think, why not have the government pay people to install data collecting sensors/cameras on their private cars. Yeah, the answer to the "why not" is simple, because most governments can't be trusted nowadays, especially not with data. Which is a freaking sorry state of the world.

deergomoo 6y ago

As someone who drives a very small car (Peugeot 107), I always feel a little on edge on smart motorways in a way that I don't when there's a hard shoulder to stop in should something go wrong. I'm not sure how large each "block" is, but even if it's something like a mile, if I break down and have to stop that's still an awful lot of cars and lorries that are already in the block behind me that need to see me and move over before people further back are routed into the next lane.

thih9 6y ago

The article mentions a promising first-year progress report (with reduced fatality rate). A related wikipedia article [1] also mentions fewer accidents in the pilot 2006 program: > This has proved very successful, with journey times decreasing by 26% northbound and 9% southbound. Drivers can also better predict their journey times as the variability decreased by 27%. The average accident rate dropped from 5.2 to 1.5 per month. It would be interesting to know what caused the project to start showing worse results. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoulder_(road)#Peak_period_use_by_all_traffic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoulder_(road)#Peak_period_us...

zelos 6y ago
I don't know if they did start showing worse results. I think the problem is that a death from a collision with a stopped car is very visible, while the drop in average accidents over a longer period isn't.
Neil44 6y ago
There are some schemes with automatic detection of stranded vehicles and lane closure. These work well. But some of the schemes rely on humans looking at cameras to spot people and shut lanes. This has left people sat in live lanes for 20+ minutes, eventually someone isn't paying attention and hits them.

tda 6y ago

I feel these kind of solutions where the hard shoulder is used as an extra lane are used to sneak in widening roads. When an extra lane is suggested, NIMBY and/or environmental concerns will immediately raise objections and kill the proposal. So instead, the idea is to use the existing road in a more "efficient" way by making it "smart". This is of course ok, as it's not like we're adding any road, just using the existing road in a better way. After some time, accidents happen and people clamor for a hard shoulder, which should be ok environmentally as its not adding extra road, its just a hard shoulder for safety and not meant to drive on (and who can object to safety). And in the two step process, somehow we ended up with a widened road whilst completely avoiding the discussion if we want a wider road or not. I sometimes also use this tactic in software if the PO's are non cooperative. First build the feature but hide it in a dev menu/behind a feature flag. No harm adding a feature if it's not available right? And then some time after it was implemented without explicit approval, I propose to enable the feature at zero cost, it is already implemented anyway. You can also view the idea of smart roads in a more benign way of course. As cheaper way to experiment if adding an extra lane could be worth it. In the Netherlands it is done a lot, usually only during rush hour. It is then often paired with a stricter speed limit, so when the 4th lane is open the speed limit is 100km/h instead of 130km/h. But as the speed limit is 100km/h during day time anyways this is less of a change than it used to be.

daveoc64 6y ago

One factor that people often overlooked is that it's not physically possible to widen some of the most congested sections of the motorway network in the UK. They are often over extended elevated sections, bridges, and tunnels. When it is physically possible, the cost is prohibitive. On balance, "Smart Motorways" can be safe - but poor driver behaviour is impossible to mitigate against. The automatic stopped vehicle detection should help things. The government has said that it will scrap the older "Dynamic Hard Shoulder" sections of motorway (where the hard shoulder is brought into use as a traffic lane during busy times only - which some drivers clearly don't understand), and replace them all with "All Lanes Running" systems, where there is simply no hard shoulder. That consistency should make it easier for drivers to know what to do in all cases, and help remove some of the accident risks. Stopping on the hard shoulder (where there is one) is very dangerous by itself - again, due to poor driver behaviour. The presence of a hard shoulder does not eliminate accidents.

tonyedgecombe 6y ago
The other problem is as the road is extended either by these means or more building the traffic increases to fill that extra capacity.

NVHacker 6y ago

This misses the point of the hard shoulder - which is to provide a safe place to get out of the motorway traffic. Detecting cars that have stopped and alerting others is only one problem but not the biggest one. The main issue is how do you stop safely without a hard shoulder ?

bananapear 6y ago

I was recently driving on a section of the M1 which has been converted to “smart” motorway. Despite being almost empty, the variable speed limit signs on the overhead gantries were lit up: 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 60, 50, 60, 60... Guess which gantry had the speed cameras.

physicsguy 6y ago

They're so dangerous. The worst part is that they don't have signs showing the speed limit as you immediately merge onto the motorway in all places. So I can come onto the M1 at my junction, and not know immediately that the speed limit is 40mph instead of 70mph for my vehicle