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That's the other way around: in heavy congestion, using the hard shoulder as a lane is not so bad due to the lower speeds. All-lane running is the reverse: the

That's the other way around: in heavy congestion, using the hard shoulder as a lane is not so bad due to the lower speeds. All-lane running is the reverse: the hard shoulder is completely missing and you have to just hope that if you break down and can't make it to a refuge bay that a camera operator notices your car stationary in the lane, which is still going at full speed, and closes the lane before someone hits it. In personal experience of coming up on stopped cars in live lanes, with no signed warning of any kind, they aren't noticed immediately. A stationary vehicle in a lane comes appears very quickly when the lane is moving at 55-70mph.

jaclaz 4y ago
But (usually) the hard shoulder (emergency lane) is narrower than normal lanes. Typically (here in Italy) the normal lanes are 3.25 to 3.75 meters wide while the emergency lane is 2.50 to 3.00 (it depends on the period the highway was built, I believe) So you need to change horizontal lines/signage and make all lanes, including the hard shoulder/emergency lane, the same width, and this means that in "normal" operation travel lanes will be narrower.
dsfyu404ed 4y ago
> That's the other way around: in heavy congestion, using the hard shoulder as a lane is not so bad due to the lower speeds. On paper, sure. In practice it's the worlds best passing lane because the drivers who make the left lane useless as a passing lane don't self select to use a lane that's narrower than the rest, has a ton of merging traffic and a barrier on the harder to see side of the vehicle.