UK government scraps all smart motorway plans

That's the other way around: in heavy congestion, using the hard shoulder as a lane is not so bad due to the lower speeds.

All-lane running is the reverse: the hard shoulder is completely missing and you have to just hope that if you break down and can't make it to a refuge bay that a camera operator notices your car stationary in the lane, which is still going at full speed, and closes the lane before someone hits it.

In personal experience of coming up on stopped cars in live lanes, with no signed warning of any kind, they aren't noticed immediately. A stationary vehicle in a lane comes appears very quickly when the lane is moving at 55-70mph.

Especially in the UK, motoring is extremely political. The TV show Top Gear was politically formative fir a lot of people here.

Smart motorways are unpopular because they typically include a lot of speed enforcement cameras and lower speed limits, so you can no longer zig zag through traffic at 90 miles an hour.

Thus, smart motorways, pollution enforcement zones, and neighbourhood traffic charging schemes are very controversial. The same people who got exercised about face masks will cross the country to protest them.

These people are the base of the current government, which needs a culture war as the real issues look unwinnable right now so the civil service are under pressure to find a reason to roll this stuff back.

From daily experience of 10 miles of the M25, the all-lane-running has had a broken-down car in a live lane (i.e. the lane is not closed with a red X) about twice a year for me.

Also there are vague electronic signs saying "reports of obstruction", "report of blocked lane" or "reports of pedestrians" with no further actions (like a lane closure) maybe twice a week. There very rarely actually is an obstruction to be seen in the end, so the signs get ignored, even when there is an actually dangerous hazard like a car in the middle of a lane.

> British drivers have terrible lane discipline on motorways

They certainly do. They even made it illegal a few years ago, but it's virtually never enforced. For a start, there aren't very many road police to enforce it.

A small but significant number of people also completely disregard the red X markers and zoom down closed lanes towards, presumably since they don't usually do the red X for fun, a broken down vehicle or accident. This is very much illegal (though it's only a £100 fine), but again seems not to be enforced sufficiently to prevent it.

I’ll provide an unpopular opinion. People who rigidly stick to the “furthest left lane at all possible moments” are far more dangerous than middle lane hoggers. I witness many, usually white vans, who seem to want to enforce this rule seemingly moving constantly like a pawn on a chessboard. I think some people (not suggesting you) don’t seem to recognise that in congestion, 3 lanes actually provide more capacity than 1, and that it’s not possible or logical to stick to the left lane at all times/conditions. I will yield that the far right lane is sacred and you really do need to be demonstrating some significant overtaking to be sticking in that lane.

As I understand it, (I'm licensed to drive here, but I don't) the way this went down was:

1. Government adds more safety equipment to some test Motorways which allows monitoring lanes and separately varying limits per lane. Unsurprisingly this makes these motorways safer, let's say a factor of X.

2. Government converts hard shoulders into running lanes to save money on some test Motorways. Unsurprisingly this makes motorways more dangerous, let's say by a factor of Y.

3. Government argues that X/Y > 1, therefore adding safety equipment and converting hard shoulders into running lanes, would be on net an improvement. Conveniently the fact that they're doing this because it's cheaper is not mentioned.

We don't accept this sort of arithmetic in other contexts and we shouldn't here. Maybe adding safety equipment is too expensive to justify the reduced danger, but moving to all-lane running is unacceptably dangerous, so, you can't do that, regardless of whether somehow then the safety equipment is magically free.

Previous governments have chosen not to take up obvious safety improvements because they were too expensive. For example, trains in the UK all have the very simplest and oldest SPAD-prevention, the Automatic Warning System, which is activated by an electromagnet (well, technically a magnet which is deactivated by an electromagnet so as to fail safe) but doesn't distinguish between Danger (do not pass this signal) and Caution (expect to find the next signal at Danger) so drivers can get into a bad habit of reflexively cancelling it since they need to pass Caution signals on many routes all the time. Government could have required Automatic Train Protection, a more sophisticated but expensive system which was demonstrated on a small fraction of UK lines and they elected not to spend that money to do the rest. Today most passenger trains have TPWS (which is cheaper than ATP but fairly effective) and a few newer ones are starting to do ETCS (the European system which obviously has production scale benefits, you're buying off the shelf gear that's sold across the continent).

On the other hand, unlike not making them safer, making the roads more dangerous is clearly just a bad idea, and so it became politically harder to defend this practice, hence Rishi now scrapping it.

What I really like is the lane modification system on the Golden Gate Bridge connecting San Francisco to Marin in California. The bridge is usually 3 lanes each way during normal hours. But during peak hours one is added to the direction of peak traffic flow by moving the lane divider. The bridge then becomes 2-4 with 4 lanes for the peak traffic direction. I think this is doable for other highways as well - at least for the sections where a major artery merges. California drivers are pretty damn terrible when it comes to merging and forcing them to accelerate to highway speed by giving them a lane of their own at these merges with lane switch allowed in only direction will save everyone a lot of time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Gate_Bridge#Traffic

HGV = Heavy Goods Vehicle, presumably.

>especially as motorway driving isn't on the driving test and learners weren't allowed on motorways at all until 2018, so most drivers have never had any formal motorway training

The geography of the UK makes it difficult to require that- there are very large areas where it wouldn't be possible for a learner to reach a motorway then get home in a typical 2 hour lesson. Even if you only required learners to go on a national speed limit dual carriageway it wouldn't be possible in some places (far north of Scotland, for instance).

The MIDAS [0] system used to set dynamic speed limits can make for some frustrating driving.

A few weeks back I had a journey on the M42 at evening rush hour where the dynamic speed limit was frequently cycling between NSL -> 60 -> 50 -> 40 -> NSL. Each limit was enforced for 1-2 gantries.

Even to someone who understands the benefit of dynamic speed limits for ensuring good traffic flow, it's not a good experience.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorway_Incident_Detection_an...

>Dynamic speed limits are a good idea, because they allow a global view of the system to be used to improve it.

That's the theory. However, based on my experiences, it seems the control loop is badly tuned. In general, people's paniced response to a new speed limit needs turning down. All that happens is that people randomly slow down or brake at each new speed limit, and 1/2 mile down the road, there's the regular traffic jam anyway.