National Highways’ delayed all lane running (ALR) smart motorway scheme on the M56 is now operating at the national speed limit but the government-owned company has not said what level of performance its stopped vehicle detection (SVD) technology has delivered.
The £85m scheme between Junction 6 and Junction 8 was originally scheduled to open in Spring 2022 but National Highways said the opening would be delayed until last autumn to allow SVD to be installed.
An extra lane – previously the hard shoulder – was opened on each carriageway in March but National Highways said that the section would run at 60mph, with other safety measures in place, until work to calibrate technology, including SVD, was completed.
Last month, the company said the 70mph limit would be restored ‘once the system is performing to an acceptable level’.
The company’s procedures allow it to restore the national speed limit on ALR schemes when SVD is performing to ‘an acceptable level’ at 60mph and sending alerts to control rooms, where operators can then close lanes with a Red X signal, display speed limits and deploy traffic officers.
On Tuesday (27 June), the speed limit was raised to 70mph. However, the company has declined to tell Highways what level of performance the SVD system had delivered.
A spokesperson said that it had made ‘positive progress’ on its programme to improve the performance of SVD on ALR scheme and had ‘successfully completed’ upgrades, adding that the M56 scheme was opened with those upgrades in place.
This is a reference to a pledge made last year after the Office of Rail and Road disclosed that SVD on ALR schemes was falling short of performance requirements, including the speed and rate of detection of stationary vehicles.
The national roads operator said it would bring the technology up to the required levels by the end of this month.
In January Highways revealed that the company had failed to get SVD working properly on any ALR section to which it was retrofitted, including schemes like the M56 that it pledged not to open without the technology.
National Highways has said it will reveal the outcome of its work to improve the performance of SVD ‘in due course’.
