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Comment by jtokoph | Hacker News Reader

As someone that doesn’t live in the UK, I had to look up what smart motorways were. It seems like the key thing here is that these roads have lights that signal that the hard shoulder can sometimes be used as a lane of traffic. Without a hard shoulder, broken down cars have nowhere safe to stop and must stop in a lane of traffic.

I think the idea is that the systems need to detect stopped cars and mark the affected lanes/shoulders as non-traffic lanes.

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The political context here is: There have been four different coroners' reports where smart motorways have contributed to deaths.

Most recently in January [1] after two stopped vehicles - which would otherwise have stopped on a hard shoulder - instead had to stop in a traffic lane and were hit by a truck.

In principle, smart motorways are already supposed to be covered in cameras etc, so people in a control centre can stop the traffic in a lane if the need arises. Apparently it doesn't work all that well in practice, though.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-557087...

Smart roads contribute to some deaths but stop others:

"Overall, what the evidence shows is that in most ways, smart motorways are as safe as, or safer than, the conventional ones. But not in every way. The statistics suggest that fatal casualty rates are lower while injury rates are slightly higher."

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

My understanding is, a "Smart Motorway" gets a bunch of safety upgrades, the government won't fund these upgrades for other motorways, even though they'd be applicable, because then you'd have an apples-to-apples comparison and you likely find that, duh, Smart Motorways are unsafe.

Because the purpose of this work is capacity increase, it almost unavoidably increases total fatalities because it increases traffic. If 10% more cars make a journey, even if those journeys aren't made less safe you get 10% more fatal accidents.

The accidents are quoted per 'traveller mile' so an increase in capacity won't increase accidents. Any type of motorway is safer (in accidents per traveller mile) than other roads so if the increased capacity steals traffic from those rather than just increases the amount of journeys it would decrease the accidents.

UK motorways are some of the safest in the world - alcohol, phones and other distractions, tiredness, driving recklessly are probably more of an issue than smart motorways.

> The accidents are quoted per 'traveller mile' so an increase in capacity won't increase accidents.

More capacity => More journeys => More fatalities. Dead people aren't dead "per traveller mile" they're just dead.

The government set out knowing they'd kill more people, but rationalising this as acceptable, unsurprisingly it takes a coroner to point out the problem here.

> alcohol, phones and other distractions, tiredness, driving recklessly are probably more of an issue than smart motorways.

Legislation exists to prohibit or mitigate the causes you list. Whereas astonishingly legislation was written to authorize, and indeed fund smart motorways.

> More capacity => More journeys => More fatalities. Dead people aren't dead "per traveller mile" they're just dead.

This is overly simplistic - it’s not useful to quote “number dead” without considering the quantity.

By just the “number dead” metric, bull fighting or skydiving would be safer than a game of football. It only really makes sense when you consider (deaths from football / games of football played) vs (deaths from bull fights / number of bull fights) which is when we find that bull fights are actually more dangerous!

We could also say the same with surgeries: the more surgeries that are carried out the more deaths by surgery there are, but it doesn’t follow that this means that we should stop doing surgeries.

A few cases make great news articles but can't be extrapolated to the underlying problems of over 1700 deaths.

The total traveller miles in the UK has risen about 10% in the last decade, total accidents have dropped 30%, deaths 20%, despite the killer smart motorway conspiracy

I wonder if that's just because of comparing an otherwise modern and well designed stretch of road, with older roads that might not meet the latest standards for lane width, turn radius, visibility splays, etc...

In fairness, all of the smart motorways schemes follow the same path as the existing roads they replaced to my knowledge. I don't think there would have been a lot of scope to improve a lot of these factors when they were upgraded.

The overhead signage warning of problems ahead (until people get used to the fact that they are often left saying something which is no longer relevant), the variable speed limits and the enforcement cameras are the big differences.

I don't think accepting that on face value is a big conciliation to the people who find themselves trapped in a live traffic lane with no refuge. Or indeed the people who are pottering along at 70mph for the car in front of them to move suddenly revealing a broken down vehicle in their path.

There isn't really a plausible scenario where removing the hard shoulder improves the safety of a motorway. The difference is most likely that smart motorways are bristling with automatic speed cameras and often have lover than normal speed limits applied during any busy period.

Reducing congestion and the kind of dangerous behaviour that produces presumably has some impact? You'd think that spread out cars all travelling at similar speeds are in general safer than more tightly packed cars with impatient drivers overtaking, switching lanes and so on.

The comparison I was making was with a road with the same number of live lanes with and without a hard shoulder. You may regard this as an unfair comparison because the cost to fully add a new lane is so much higher. However, I'd postulate that any improvement in safety due to a reduction in congestion is bound to suffer from the Jevons paradox in the fullness of time.

The government (DfT) asks itself (DfT, Highways England (a government-owned company)) to review safety and finds they're wonderful and safe. Hm, quelle surprise!

(Highways Agency, which was replaced by Highways England, was the very organisation that developed the "Managed Motorways" concept)

> so people in a control centre can stop the traffic in a lane if the need arises

This is what the public were led to believe. In practice one of the things revealed by the inquest into one of those deaths was that no one is actually responsible for monitoring those cameras, so marking the lane out of action is on a kind of best efforts basis.

Exactly - basically there used to be 2/3 lanes and a hard shoulder, and they changed the road to 3/4 lanes and no hard shoulder.

Because branding them “motorways without a hard shoulder” sounded unsafe and bad they decided to call the proposal “smart motorways” (Because who would want to argue with that? You want regular stupid motorways?).

I remember when this clearly deadly and badly thought out idea was implemented, and thinking "what, who are they kidding!".

Motorways ("freeways" in en-us, I think) are traditionally 3 lanes with a 4th lane as a 'hard shoulder' that is closed to all traffic except those who have broken down and the emergency services.

Smart Motorways were a Tory government idea designed to be "car friendly" and increase apparent road capacity without actually costing much money -- by using already-existing lightable signs above the motorway to convert the hard shoulder into another lane of traffic, and adding in "refuge areas" every $[$RANDOM % 5+1] miles.

The trouble is, if you're in a motorway where every one of the now four lanes of traffic is going at the speed limit of 70 miles an hour (or, more likely, 80 miles an hour) and your tire explodes, you might not be able to coast the requisite distance to a refuge area, and you might not have the wherewithall to adequately pull into what is in effect a small siding about the size of an articulated lorry. If you break down in a "live lane" the signs are supposed to change to move traffic out behind you, so it doesn't ram into the car.

Naturally, this hasn't worked well, and a bunch of people have died. At least one coroner has specifically called out Her Majesty's Government for directly contributing to deaths and blamed the smart motorway concept in general. There's at least one harrowing 999 call I've heard somewhere of someone saying "Help, I've broken down in lane 2 of the M4 and my car has stopped and I couldn't get into lane 1 when <BANG> <sound of young child crying> <no more adult voice>".

Some of the "smarts" in smart motorways in doing lane-light switching this have been provided by humans and/or computer vision on the basis of CCTV. The trouble is, they've been ineffective. This announcement states that they're going to replace the previous approach with mmWave radar that I presume can detect changes more rapidly (quite how that works with shadows and reflections -- and cars in front of lorries, I don't know).

Fundamentally, this seems to be "papering over the cracks" of the idea -- and I unfortunately don't think it will work. Many, if not most, British people want to go back to the old system of having 3 lanes + a hard shoulder. We don't understand why the Tories really, really love smart motorways: it probably comes out of a combination of 'driver friendly' Manifesto promises combined with economic modelling about the cost of traffic jams.

> Smart Motorways were a Tory government idea

Not so. The first smart motorway was introduced in 2006 under the Blair government. They were expanded under Ruth Kelly, Labour Secretary of State for Transport in 2007 when Brown was PM. They were further extended when the coalition came to power in 2010, but smart motorways were not originally a “Tory idea”.

Hah, another disaster at the hands of Tony Blair. No wonder they are cursed.

Smart™ Motorways are an appalling idea no matter who proposed them. The current government should reverse the idea. Transport is meant to enhance life, not to end lives.

>Hah, another disaster at the hands of Tony Blair.

I wouldn't be surprised if it came out of the civil service in response to increasing congestion. It's easy to blame the current minister but the reality is much of government goes on with or without them.

This is a great post let down by the need to inject some lame shots at the Tories. A quick Google search shows that smart motorways first came about under a Labour government, and were extended several times during their tenure.

> The trouble is, if you're in a motorway where every one of the now four lanes of traffic is going at the speed limit of 70 miles an hour (or, more likely, 80 miles an hour) and your tire explodes

This actually happened to a family member of mine on the M1. Tire exploded and rolled straight off across the motorway. It took several minutes for the motorway operators and to close the lane that their car was stranded on. The driver and passengers had to get out of the car onto a live motorway lane just to reach the safety area behind the crash barrier.

Thankfully everyone was OK, but it cemented my belief that smart motorways are an utterly, ridiculously and unquestionably stupid idea.

If you want to get party political abut it, smart motorways were introduced under Labour in 2006.

I'm not sure the Tories love them per se, just that they don't really care enough either way to make a difference. The DfT civil servants and Highways England do love them though, largely on cost grounds (it's a lot cheaper to convert existing hard shoulder into a new lane than widen an old style road).

> Smart Motorways were a Tory government idea ... We don't understand why the Tories really, really love smart motorways

Wait, aren't they a Labour thing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smart_motorway#History

Why are you talking about Tories?

Not all smart motorways have the hard shoulder thing, the ones that do have semi frequent "stopping bays". However, stopping in one without contacting the support staff(there are intercoms) or a good reason is an offence.

They all feature per lane adjustable speed limits, as well as linked speed cameras at frequent intervals. This is supposed to help ease congestion by adjusting flow in certain areas.

In practice random signs are often left on the wrong setting, so you get a speed reduction to 40mph for 250m. Or a lane is closed for 6 miles with no reason.

I've no doubt that in the scenario where there is congestion that it greatly aids safety, as approaching traffic can be slowed before they reach the affected area

My least favourite thing is when they apply a patently absurd speed limit, I've seen 20mph signs on the M25 when traffic is moving freely. You are then faced with the dilemma between setting those speed cameras off or risking a lorry driver playing candy crush on his mobile phone running into the back of you.

I live in the Netherlands and they've been doing it here for a while, but they've called it differently (a 'spitsstrook', or a 'rush hour lane') which is opening up the hard shoulder for traffic during rush hour. There's no pretense of it being 'smart' anywhere, they had to in some places because the pressure of traffic is too high and widening the road is not an option.

I remember visiting the Netherlands in 99. That was the first sunny weekend and they had 1000km of traffic jams, when the entire highway network is 4000km...

The concern is that the outside lane doesn’t get converted into a hard shoulder fast enough to provide a safe place to stop.

Also, what happens most of the time on UK motorways, drivers ignore the signage.

That's why they need actuated spikes...

It's pretty hard to keep driving at dangerous speeds when your tyres are flat...

Ignore the signage and you'll be buying new tyres... That will soon have everyone paying attention to the signs.

That’s obviously ridiculous, you can’t purposefully puncture a moving cars tires to enforce a lane. You’d kill people, what about people who missed the signs?

People who miss the signs also kill people.

Which is less bad?

Deliberately creating a safety hazard is much worse than someone who is inattentive.

Introducing a safety hazard, likely to cause further issues, when vehicles are traveling at speed, with nowhere else to go. Good job on suggesting one way to make things much worse.

The signage is a disaster on these roads. Lane closures are a very unobtrusive red X and not posted frequently enough. Text is too short and doesn't indicate how far ahead any hazard might be. Some signs are in a different style (small board overhead rather than a gantry across all lanes) which can easily be mistaken for an advisory notice not a command/prohibition.

Worst of all, the signs are almost always massively out of date and present a false alarm. You'll see a lane closure and very short text "obstruction in road" sign but then nothing actually there. I don't do huge mileage on these roads and I've probably come across this false alarm scenario 40 or 50 times, and never seen an actual hazard which was signed.

It's not at all surprising they get ignored by a significant minority of drivers.

100% Agree. It's badly designed and badly implemented. Dangerous by design.

Come to Massachusetts where "Breakdown Lane Travel" is allowed during rush-hour (only in the inbound direction in the morning and outbound in the afternoon/evening and where signposted).

We have reasonable sized pull out areas every mile or so, but the really nasty part is that the on-ramps now suddenly dump you into the moving breakdown lane traffic (which would otherwise be your acceleration / merge lane).

Thankfully, traffic is so bad around Boston, that typically it's all at a standstill anyway.

There's a few things that fall under the "smart motorway" umbrella. They also have systems to detect traffic flow and impose variable speed limits when approaching a queue, and usually regular speed cameras to enforce those limits.

This stopped car detection thing is indeed about the ones that can open the hard shoulder for traffic, though.

As a Uk person who has driven on them, I had to look it up as well at the time. I was shocked to find how they weren’t smart. I honestly thought the smart part was safety and breakdown detection as the hard shoulder was used for traffic. I was wrong and shocked.

> Without a hard shoulder, broken down cars have nowhere safe to stop and must stop in a lane of traffic.

Sounds absolutely insane and lethal when you write it down doesn't it?

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