In 2006, National Highways (then known as Highways England) opened the first smart motorway, selecting the M42 in the midlands of England.
Smart motorways promised to revolutionise motorway travel. But almost twenty years on, with multiple fatalities attributed to them and plans to build more scrapped, they serve as a warning to the hazards of blindly investing in digitalisation.
What is a smart motorway?
In simple terms, a smart motorway uses sensors and cameras to detect hazards like vehicle breakdowns or accidents. This information is sent to a regional control centre (RCC), which can respond by closing affected lanes or adjusting the speed limit through messages displayed on overhead signs.
Drivers are meant to receive these messages at least two kilometers before an incident, giving them time to react. The goal is to create a motorway safe enough to convert the hard shoulder into an active lane, thereby creating an all-lane running (ALR) motorway—which increases traffic capacity and eases congestion.
Some motorways only use ALR in busy periods, while others, like sections of the M25 motorway, have made it a permanent feature. To provide a rescue area where drivers can stop in the event of an incident, National Highways recommends building emergency lay-bys every 500 meters along a smart motorway. These replace the hard shoulder during ALR periods.
Safety was given the cold shoulder
While a smarter motorway is arguably better for traffic flow, the removal of the hard shoulder has raised significant safety concerns from motoring organisations, the police, and the public.
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By GlobalDataThere are several reasons why smart motorways can be dangerous.
For example, many of the sensors and cameras that digitally patrol these motorways are often out of service. A freedom of information (FOI) request revealed that some cameras and radar detection systems were non-functional for up to five days at a time. Other systems had been knocked out of position, with the cameras pointing away from the road.
Such failures may have contributed to the tragic deaths of Jason Mercer and Alexandru Murgeanu on the M1 motorway in 2019. Mercer and Murgeanu had pulled over following a minor accident to exchange details when a heavy goods vehicle collided with their stationary vehicles. The lane they were in was not closed by the system or RCC until after the fatal collision. On a non-smart motorway, Mercer and Murgeanu could have safely pulled over on the hard shoulder. Instead, they were made to rely on a faulty and poorly managed detection system.
Similar incidents were uncovered in a BBC Panorama investigation into smart motorways, including cases where the detection system failed to spot broken-down vehicles, leaving them stranded in an active lane. Panorama also drew attention to an FOI request that revealed the permanent ALR section of the M25 registered a staggering 2000% increase in dangerous near misses and concluded that smart motorways had caused multiple fatalities since their introduction.
Some of the dangers exhibited by smart motorways appear to be by design. For instance, the distance between emergency lay-bys has steadily increased over the years, from about half a mile apart on the prototype M42 to around one and a half miles apart on newer versions. The larger the gap, the more opportunities for a vehicle to be stranded in an active lane.
Widening on the cheap
The growing gap between emergency lay-bys hints at one of, if not the main, motivation behind smart motorways—cost-cutting. The alternative to ALR is to widen the road and build additional lanes. However, this is a costly and disruptive venture, requiring substantial investment and lengthy road works.
Rather than bite the bullet and accept the unpopularity of such decisions, National Highways decided to take a shortcut instead. Tunnel-visioned by a cheap solution, it forced ALR to work without considering the implications. In the process, smart motorways have come to exemplify a wider problem with the emergence of smart technologies—the tendency to use them as quick fixes rather than realise their full potential.
Looking at the smart motorway experiment can help us to understand the digitalisation strategies of many companies today—often inconsistent, confusing, poorly managed, and, at times, even dangerous.
