Smart motorways to be reviewed over driver safety fears

[Reckless Rat]

The problem now is that by reverting back to carriageway plus hard shoulder the most congested parts of the motorway network will lose 25% of their peak hour capacity, and that means just one thing. More congestion. There is a way round it, which is to reduce the width of the existing lanes which will enable 4 lanes to run in the current space occupied by three. This narrow lane solution is used on the Continent, but usually for roadworks . The very narrow lanes tend to cause tailbacks as everyone slows down to adjust, even when it's not busy.

There isn't an ideal solution. The "smart" motorway idea was to make the best use of available roadspace in order to maximise capacity but they failed to dial into the equation the fact that when a breakdown occurs and a vehicle is stranded in a running lane the risk of it being struck by a following vehicle was very high. Humans are fallible. The collisions on smart motorways can probably all be attributed to driver error, lack of forward observation, inattention at the wheel, following too close etc. Human frailty was something the engineers and statisticians forgot about when they came up with the idea because all they wanted to do was to get more vehicles from A to B and hard shoulder running was an easy fix.

Heads will roll for this because someone knew and ignored the evidence.