A leading intelligent transport systems (ITS) expert has suggested that all existing smart motorway designs should be converted into controlled motorways.
Alistair Gollop, founder of ITS Now and previously Global Transport Technology Technical Champion at Mott MacDonald, told Highways that ministers’ recent decision to cancel new all lane running (ALR) schemes stemmed from strong public and political opinions.
He went on to say to reassure the public and make the most of the investment so far, existing ALR and remaining dynamic hard shoulder (DHS) motorway routes could be converted to controlled motorways - where there is a hard shoulder but technology helps manage traffic flow.
Mr Gollop said: ‘To respond to this pre-emptively, in order to get ahead of public opinion, it might therefore be worth considering looking to change DHS and ALR sections to become controlled motorways instead.
‘This would at least then retain the existing infrastructure investment that has been made on these sections, by using the technology to actively manage traffic flow, albeit at the cost of losing “Lane 0” to a hard shoulder. This would be far less abortive than converting these sections back to conventional motorways.
‘The next steps for smart motorways need to be taken carefully to avoid further discrediting the public opinion of the technologies used to manage and operate our highways, and the industry’s ability to implement these effectively and safely.’
Citing the Department for Transport's 2020 Smart Motorway safety report, he argued there was still a lack of compelling evidence to date that they are significantly less safe than conventional motorways.
He pointed out that the Government had announced in January 2022 that new ALR schemes would be paused to allow a thorough evidence-based assessment of five years of safety data, it had not waited for this exercise to be completed.
He attributed the loss of public confidence to a number of issues, including information about smart motorways not getting to users fast enough, concerns that emergency areas are too far apart, delays in rolling out features such as stopped vehicle detection and implementing automatic enforcement of red X signals, poor discipline from a significant proportion of drivers and general mistrust of the accuracy of message displays.
This, he said, was compounded by recent reports of systems faults, which resulted in monitoring systems used by operators in Regional Control Centres failing.
Mr Gollop told Highways: ‘The cancellation of new smart motorway schemes should be a stark warning that political decisions don’t always follow a predictable path and it is therefore important for a level of pragmatism to proactively deal with the inevitable pressure to resolve what happens to the existing sections of smart motorway.’
Mr Gollop also suggested that the 2020 decision to convert DHS sections to ALR had been dropped, leaving all three variants of smart motorway on the network.
