It got put in the swear filter when the other forum was set up in 2010 in opposition to us. It isn't of course in opposition now, but while I can create new items for the filter there isn't any means of taking them out. Sorry!

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7905879/Now-AA-sa...l

I'm not a reader of the Mail, but this was linked from another site i was reading, according to the story normal AA patrols will no longer attend a breakdown on a live lane

I'm amazed the AA or any other breakdown recovery outfit would ever attend a breakdown in a live lane - ALR or not. They and RAC used to lose staff on hard shoulder with monotonous regularity. For a while my I had an AA patrolman as next door neighbour and he related having attended colleagues funerals.

The HA are supposed to secure the lane by closing it 'in rear' of incident and/or arranging tow to refuge. They have, as well as the fairly heavy duty 4WD patrol vehicles assorted other kit including crash resistant 'incident protection vehicles' and probably either themselves or via their contractors kit that can lift a breakdown onto a flat bed same as for untaxed/uninsured off a city street.

At the same time UK motorists are constantly checking and re-checking the limits as they change from 40 to 50, back 40 then 60 and then back to 40

I'm informed 'variable speed limits' will only ever change by 10MPH. I've never experienced anything otherwise.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7905879/Now-AA-sa...l

I'm not a reader of the Mail, but this was linked from another site i was reading, according to the story normal AA patrols will no longer attend a breakdown on a live lane

I'm amazed the AA or any other breakdown recovery outfit would ever attend a breakdown in a live lane -...….

I really do not like smart motorways. I agree they are dangerous.

You find foreign HGV drivers totally ignoring the rules and racing along at 60 in lane 4 when the posted limit is 40 or 50 - and what are they doing in lane 4 - they know full well there are no coppers to catch them!

At the same time UK motorists are constantly checking and re-checking the limits as they change from 40 to 50, back 40 then 60 and then back to 40 just to catch you out - concentrating on the limits and not the road and the authorities wonder why there are accidents with people not spotting stranded vehicles that have no where to go!

So foreign HGV drivers are driving illegally whilst all the UK drivers aren't watching where they are going as they are looking at their speedos? Why don't they just go in lane 4 the same as the HGV drivers and not be caught as their are no coppers?

The foreign registered drivers will not get points on their licence if a camera flashes, a UK driver will.

I have been in lane 1 on the M1 around Milton Keynes and watched the HGVS race down lane 4 that has a filter left sign because the motorway is closed ahead.

Slightly confused by lorries, lane 4 and filter signs.

Is lane 4 here the outside lane, ie that closest to central reservation, from which LGVs are prohibited anyway?

Exactly and nothing gets done about it.

Nothing gets done about them going down the third lane in our default perma motorway roadworks at 56mph+ either, which is not only banned for HGVs and coaches but also normally has a 6' 6" width limit too.

There's barely enough room for todays ridiculously wide cars in that 6'6 lane let alone a lorry 2' wider.

If we had some traffic police about and they were made self funding, fines for those 3 offences alone would pay for an officer and car for the day, and you be sure if he's in that much of rush he's speeding down a restricted outside lane there's going to be some juicy potential for DVSA officers to milk another few £thousand in fines for hours and vehicle offences.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7905879/Now-AA-sa...t-

So foreign HGV drivers are driving illegally whilst all the UK drivers aren't watching where they are going as they are looking at their speedos? Why don't they just go in lane 4 the same as the HGV drivers and not be caught as their are no coppers?

The foreign registered drivers will not get points on their licence if a camera flashes, a UK driver will.

I have been in lane 1 on the M1 around Milton Keynes and watched the HGVS race down lane 4 that has a filter left sign because the motorway is closed ahead.

I drive on M1, M62 and M18 week days during rush hour and can't think I haved ever seen a HGV in the outside lanes when they should not be there - maybe it is you southern drivers? :-)

I also don't see the issue with following the speed limits on the gantries - very easy to do so and no need to constantly check your speed - when you are driving you get a good feeling for what speed you are doing and don't need to constantly check.

They never were smart motorways - in this context I assume "smart" was intended to mean having intelligence or possessing acumen.

It was almost certainly a term dreamt up by a creative civil servant (I assume they exist) or a politician. The real meaning of "smart" in the context of motorways meant "saves money and increases capacity". The impact on accidents, emergency services, traffic monitoring etc was clearly not raised, or if raised dimissed as a trivial irrelevancy!

Good to see the other side of this argument, expressed in your usual reasoned way.

I agree that there's a tendency towards hyperbole: we perhaps need more Wilson and less Jones and Frazer. But I think that what leads to the strong views is an element of fear.

Yes, four lanes should mean less congestion and fewer accidents. But the fear is of the type and severity of the accidents that might happen: someone being killed through breaking down in the inside lane - no power to get to a refuge - and being cannoned into by another vehicle whose driver simply hasn't got the time to stop. Opinions seem to differ on how long it takes for a broken-down vehicle to trigger the 'lane closed' signs.

Does anyone know what precautions are in place on motorways like the M4 where the unwanted smart motorway is being set up, taking an almost unbelievable 3 years? Three narrow lanes and no hard shoulder: are there any refuges, or any system of alerting the authorities when someone breaks down?

It was almost certainly a term dreamt up by a creative civil servant (I assume they exist) or a politician. The real meaning of "smart" in the context of motorways meant "saves money and increases capacity". The impact on accidents, emergency services, traffic monitoring etc was clearly not raised, or if raised dimissed as a trivial irrelevancy!

There was and remains a need to increase motorway capacity. That is true even if one allows for the 'if capacity is created usage will fill it' argument.

Politicians said Austerity, no money old chap go off and find away of doing it at a cost we say is affordable. The civil servants and engineers responded with managed or smart motorways.

The impacts were considered and mitigated. Can you show me the statistics that show the actual impact on accidents, emergency services etc ?

I suspect not.

Over the weeks before/over Xmas and New Year I drove to the South Coast and back, then to Liverpool and subsequently North Wales. Miles of smart m/way in sections on the M1 between 6A and 24, the whole of the M20 and long lengths of the M6. No accidents seen, a few cars in refuges, no breakdowns in running lanes.

These things are here and while I'm no particular advocate we are going to be living with them for many years to come. So instead of hyperbole and Corporal Jones/Private Fraser reactions about the largely unrealised problems let's think through what, in terms of publicity, driver training and tweaks we need to do to make them work better.

Bromp - didn't I already respond to all this after I reviewed the Highways England bigwigs appearance at that Select Ctte? They had no evidence that things were better.

Bromp - didn't I already respond to all this after I reviewed the Highways England bigwigs appearance at that Select Ctte? They had no evidence that things were better.

I don't think I've said they're better. Neither did the witnesses in front of the committee.

My position is that we are where we are and we're there for usual reasons of politics and pragmatism. My issue with posters in this thread is that here's too much panic and 'we're doomed' based on hyperbole, exaggeration and tilting at windmills.

The reality is that ALR is doing what's suggested by the writing on the tin.

I might be proven wrong by a cluster of accidents or a seventies style pile up on a fogbound section of all lane running.

Otherwise, in absence of revolution, we've got to make them work

Why do we 'have to make them work'? If there's currently no evidence to say they are any safer and increase traffic flow/reduce congestion, then there needs to be at least a puase for new ones until enough existing schemes have been proven one way or the other (not helped when there are many variants).

Rather jumping the gun in my view. I personally still feel this change to smart motorway/ALR schemes has been dictated by a need to increase traffic flows at the lowest monetary cost and very little on safety.

Remembering back on the Select Committee video, it appeared that the whole scheme still apeeared to be in the 'R&D' phase, essentially using real people as guinea pigs and potentially putting lives at risk - and shamefully without any actual studies done or completed yet to say anything either way, despite the schemes being in use for quite a while now.

Sorry to say this is why I regularly get narked about the Public Sector - the number of times I was involved in public sector projects myself where this sort of thing went on and I could do nothing about it (despite bringing such issues to the attention of the 'design team' leadership), mostly because politically it would look bad for those in charge from the X/Y/Z Ministry and their chosen (admitedly) private sector 'project management' consultant (often they did not stand up to the civil servant to ensure bad decisions weren't made, but they also made some doozies themselves - often just to please their civil servant masters, who themselves may (to what extent is not always clear) do the same for their minister, but I suspect not always.

I've often seen such people deliberately holding their tongue to avoid being labelled a 'trouble maker' which doesn't do their career (or salary) any good. In my early career, I did to a lesser degree, but from about 10 years ago, I gave up caring and just said what I thought.

It's the reason I vowed to avoid working in that environment in the future as much as possible. Whether current political changes will make any difference and attract people like me back (I would love to make a contribution to projects that could help the nation), I don't know.

Bromp - I never said that ALR wouldn't increase capacity, but that there is yet no documented evidence that existing schemes have resulted in either lower numbers of accidents and/or of a serious type (and the numbers of serious injuries/deaths vs a similar period beforehand when they can be compared [i.e. advances in emergency medicine are discounted]), and whether that leads to money being gained or lost from the economy overall.

Why should the DfT 'press on' when there's no evidence to say what has been done thus far is any better or cost-effective over the longer term? I appreciate you're batting for you fellow Civil Servants to keep them in work, but I think you're jumping the gun here.

We as a nation often do this, either push on with plans that have not either been thought through or properly costed (including a proper cost-benefit analysis [I've worked on enough government projects to know most get authorised without much of one]) or that deliberately get stalled in red tape to provide work and power for those involved.

Yes, the DfT should have publicised the schemes and how to use them correctly more. And everyone involved in such projects should take their fair share of the responibility. It doesn't help that the major elephant in the room is the increasing demand and why this cannot be discussed without people flinging the 'ist' and 'ism' terminology around. We wouldn't need any changes if demand wasn't going up so much since the early 2000s.

Without data saying specifically so, I'm not sure that ALR can be proven as being cost effective compared to widening - whilst it's true that no expensive land purchases and bridge modifications or rebuilding have to be made, there's the huge cost of the ALR gantries and matrix signs, plus the *possible* cost of the any increase in road deaths and serious injuries, plus the cost in delays to journeys (not just fuel but time for business) to factor in.

My point about having discussions about related issues such as migration is important, but that they often get cast aside becuase people smear those talking about it with 'racist' etc - when it's 99% of the time a question of numbers. Whilst GDP goes up, the population goes up more so, thus productivity has fallen. That is bad and is often ignored in debates.

I think rather than importing people to do jobs, we should concentrate more on improving the skills of other existing population and getting more people into productive work and improving productivity. As such, we wouldn't need migration on anywhere near the scale it has been since the early 2000s, which would mean we wouldn't need to widen as many roads each year, build more train lines, hospitals, schools etc and have far longer to save up to build them when we do.

You take awy demand - you take away the need for the upgrades. Yes, some are needed now, but if we helped get many under or unemployed people into decent work and help raise skills and productivity elsewhere, then, yes, some imported labour wouldn't need to stay. That's what happens in many other countries around the world - people work on temporary visas to help that country over short-term issues in the workforce. It's no different in me goinf for a fixed-term contract job - I don't expect a permanent job at the end of the contract - I just look for another job elsewhere.

I agree that we're probably going round in circles a bit, given the lack of information as regards test results of these schemes, but a wider debate about transportation and how it is seriously affected by population growth via migration is one that needs to be had.

I was also only making the point about you 'batting' for your former colleagues as I could understand why you'd want to do that - I try (within reason) to stand up for fellow engineers - I just think we all should be open to the possibilities that people on all sides make mistakes and have agendas that can often cause serious problems in such issues of importance.

I'm not saying (and have never done) that civil servants are always and entirely to blame on all problems in government circles, but that they are often far from blameless, especially as I've had personal experience in my career of such things, as I'm sure you have of politicians an 'professional consultants' and contractors from the private sector.

Let's see what Monday's programme bring, though as I said below, I'm not hopeful that it brings much new information to the table.

I shudder to think what their insurance has gone up from and to as a result of 'smart' motorways - no wonder our premiums have been rising above inflation of late.

Government either self insures or, if working as a trading entity lodges money in court as is permitted by the Road Traffic Act.

"They do acknowledge that a number (20%) of drivers either don't know how to use them properly or ignore signs."

I have no idea how to drive on them.

When was the new method of driving explaining country wide to all motorists?

As far as I am aware there has been NO attempto to inform motorists at all...

There are word to describe the policy of changing things and not telling drivers and then blaming them (the drivers) when they don't know what to do.

Most are unprintable.

The Highways Head should be fired for culpable manslaughter..

Edited by madf on 22/01/2020 at 17:55

What information exactly is going to help the people who break down on an unlit section in filthy dark weather like now, is some public information film going to get their children and the dog out and all safely over the barrier and bank (assuming there isn't a 12 ft fence just the the other side or a 60/200ft drop if an elevated section) before they get cleaned up.

If these people cared at all, those sections still being built would have the distance between refuges reduced to 1/2 mile.

I bet all this looked brilliant on the computer model when someone was flogging this idea, ''here Claude have a gong why don't you'', as usual no one ever asked the people who use the motorways every day and have to pick the pieces up what they thought, ''never ask plebs Rupert''

Panorama BBC1 Monday 20.30 on this vey subject

Three years ago I suffered total engine failure on a motorway but fortuneately managed to get to the hard shoulder. When I rang the RAC they advised getting out the car and on the other side of the barrier I had to point out that there was a wall of impenetrable brambles on the other side!

In my view any distance between refuges is too short - there has to be a hard shoulder! Also there are just too many m****s on the road who only seem aware what is going on a few feet ahead of them! Smart motorways are NOT smart!

Pretty much all of that is true on the hard shoulder and same advice applies. Leave car, preferably via nearside and get over the barrier. That advice is of recent origin, last 20 years or so, and was disseminated by public information channels. Most people now do it. They used to sit in their cars, a sitting duck for being clipped by an HGV.

Are you really trying to say that stopping on a hard shoulder in the dark and exiting the car would be as dangerous as doing so on a live running lane?

Panorama, BBC 1 at 8.30 pm on Monday 27 Jan will feature this subject.

BBC 1 news this afternoon (Sun 26 Jan) said 38 people have been killed in the last five years on these smart motorways.

Edited by Dag Hammar on 26/01/2020 at 16:23

Panorama, BBC 1 at 8.30 pm on Monday 27 Jan will feature this subject.

BBC 1 news this afternoon (Sun 26 Jan) said 38 people have been killed in the last five years on these smart motorways.

No of UK motorway deaths /years approx 90 for 2300 miles. ie.. approx 0.04 deaths per mile/year......tinyurl.com/w43dscz

38 killed over 5 years = 7.6/year over approx 200 miles (may be less)..=0.038 deaths per mile/year

So no more dangerous than other motorways..

Note the 200 mile figure for smart motorways may be overstated????

Agree: we need to compare like with like.

The clip of a van narrowly missing a stranded car - clip being shown as a trailer for Panorama - merely shows atrocious driving by the van driver - totally failed to see the car until very very close. Any reasonable standard of observation would have avoided that near-miss.

Agree: we need to compare like with like.

I've a similar apples/bananas issue with the massive rise in near misses on M25 being trailed in publicity for same programme.

I need to know more.

Some additional information in advance to tonight's Panorama programme:

www.honestjohn.co.uk/news/driving-1/2020-01/driver.../

Sounds to me like 'ploughing ahead' without actual evidence isn't too good an idea, and spending so much on so many schemes without properly evaluating the originals, to me (as an engineer) at least, is a recipe for disaster.

Using ordinary people as guinea-pigs (and without them knowing they are effectly dicing with death) in an effective alpha test, rather like (IMHO) the 737-MAX situation could result in many mulit-million lawsuits if ministers and/or their officials covered that up just to push a policy or agenda through for either political reasons, cost-savings/increasing capacity quickly and cheaply (initially) or to pretend ideas they signed off (or put forward) worked when they were either guessing or not putting in sufficient mesaures to mitigate safety and operational worries.

The lack of a credible system to quickly spot stopped vehicles and people in live lanes - which it looks like, at best, will roll out in 3 years - is, to me, a disgrace and the whole thing never should've got off the ground until that was ready. To me, this is akin to the train warning/protection systems being added on after the faster trains and greater capacity was added to that network.

To be frank, if I had done this sort of thing in my time as an engineer, and I was found out, I would expect to be sacked and perhaps prosecuted, and likely to never work as one ever again.

One thing I also thought about was what happens when there is all lane running and there's a serious accident ahead? The hard shoulder is now blocked and vital time would be lost by the emergency services in getting through bumper-to-bumper stationary traffic. I saw essentially this up close when coming home from a holiday in Cornwall a few years ago - a car had been in an accident with a van or flat bed truck and had overturned on the A30, which has no hard shoulder.

All the traffic behind had nowhere to go for 10+ miles (myself included), and so it took the emergency services and recovery vehicle well over an hour to reach the scene, because the next juntion was another 5-10 miles away and the Highways people could not confirm (no cameras tracking every bit of road ahead to the next juntion) if any vehicles were still coming along, i.e. so they could close the next junction down and get to the scene the wrong way down the carriageway.

In that case, the people involved were found not to be in life-threatening conditions once evaluated, but that was more by luck than anything else. As above, the lack of a coherent plan of action for each 'test' case (going ahead with more despite not having any data to support it or not) and not, in these original stretches, over-engineering the roads to be far safer than needed so that they can evaluate where they could 'dial back' without safety penalty, was yet more evidence of poor project management.

I suspect the programme tonight will just give more detail of the events like the huge increase in near misses, something conveniently witheld until some enterprising journalist or brave person in government found out and leaked it to the media. I also suspoect the show will end up in a lot of finger-pointing on all sides trying to shift the blame to save their own skins. And coming after the HS2 debacle, why am I not surprised in any of this? I'm glad I left this sort of thing, as until things change, I don't want to be a part of this.

Watched Panorama and if that's the flagship of investigative journalism we're stuffed.

I'll accept your word for that Bromp, i expected nothing else, i can't bring myself to watch listen to or read anything from the state machine, you saved me that particular purgatory and i'm much obliged.

As somebody else pointed out the BBC maybe imperfect but it's not part of a 'state machine'.

If I took some messages they are:

1. Refuges are too far apart
2. The current Transport Minister is a shyster and his predecessor is 'not ower bright'
3. If you want an example of dangers of ALR breakdowns in lanes 3-5 are irrelevant
4. Widows and bereaved Mothers add emotion but only spotlight the stupidity of their husband and failings of their father/father in law

Edited by Bromptonaut on 27/01/2020 at 21:55

It's very noticeable when idiots start using the hard shoulder to circumvent a traffic jam that things rapidly get worse for this very reason - I also saw this on the M25 before ALR went live when at the M1-A41 area a load of idiots decided to take to the hard shoulder, then got stuck further ahead, stopping the Police getting to the scene of whatever caused the jam.

Exactly like on a train line - you can't get to the problem so you either get out and walk or (as I've witnessed first hand) go backwards (the train I was one reversed all the way back from Alexandra Palace all the way (slowly) back to New Barnet because there were no points to change over onto track 1. Meanwhile, other trains that were able to switch over much earlier came by, making us 1.5 hours late.

I'm still of the belief that major roads need a hard shoulder, not just as a safety zone, but so that emergency and accident clearance vehicles can easily/quickly make it to the scene, making a huge difference to the chances of people involved and to how quickly the scene can be documented and cleared up/put back into use.

Widening may be expensive (especially when factoring in the cost of upgrading bridges), but this SHOULD be a long-term exercise that should be planned for years, if not a decade in advance.

The reasons why they aren't, other than the cost (generally), it's because the population has been growing so quickly and without decades of road users from that group contributing taxes to help fund it that the DfT cannot keep up with demand. This is the case for schools, the NHS, most parts of government. We cannot keep going on like this.

Nailed it KB.

But I still maintain a hard shoulder is better than no hard shoulder and to be sat, stationary, in a live lane is a bad idea no matter how long you take to defend the idea.

For whatever reason, and you can perm from austerity through Civil Service or Ministerial stupidity/gullibility to any other theory, we've got several hundred miles of smart m/way.

It would be interesting to ponder whether a motorway designed for the 21st century and it's technology needs a hard shoulder but that's not where I'm coming from.

Smart M/way is not ideal ideal but we are where we are. Getting our knickers in a twist, as Panorama and several posters here do, won't solve anything.

What do we do to move forward?

And I'm less verbose than Engineer Andy :-P

Edited by Bromptonaut on 27/01/2020 at 22:30

I watched the Program..

As expected the program show a complete shambles.

No standard specification for Smart motorways.

No consistency of approach..

No sense of direction as to what is needed.

The Highways Agency is supposed to be taken to account by Transport Focus which allegedly represents the interests of road users..

In practise it would appear they are as useful as a chocolate teapot.

I have had a look at organisational numbers at the Board level and they appear grossly overpersonned..

If the UK wanted to save a substantial sum of salaries, I suggest they start with both organisations.

When you are rolling out a new road type, you standardise it to speed implementation and save costs. The Highways Agency does the opposite.

Mind you C Grayling was Transport Minister for a few years .. which figures..

As far as the actual program was concerned, it was junk.. populist rubbish..

Edit: a final thought. I always thought organisations learned from their prior mistakes if they had rational management. The HA appear to learn nothing from past mistakes and the proposed improvements : radar, most refuge places, etc..- are so obvious that clealry an unkind person would say they have excrement for brains running the place.

I would never say such unkind words....some of them are very highly qualified with years indeed decades of experience - so the shambles they are appears inexplicable...

..,.

Edited by madf on 28/01/2020 at 11:25

The boss of the AA has raised an interesting point about Electric vehicles breaking down on smart motorways or anywhere else for that matter. He states that EVs cannot be flat towed more than 800metres and some cannot be flat towed at all. I was not aware of this fact so that if you had to wait for a lifted tow you could be stranded for some time. Is anyone else aware of the towing restraints of EVs and or Hybrids and why the transmissions do not allow towing?