From the BBC News article on smart motorways being scrapped, smart motorways can fall in to three categories:
* controlled, which have a permanent hard shoulder, but use technology such as variable speed limits to adjust traffic flows
* dynamic, where the hard shoulder can be opened up at peak times and used as an extra lane; when this happens, the speed limit is reduced to 60mph
* all-lane running, where the hard shoulder has been permanently removed to provide an extra lane; emergency refuge areas are provided at regular intervals for cars that get into trouble
IMO there shouldn't be any objections to "controlled" smart motorways. All lane running is idiotic; dynamic running is OK but I would say that the speed limit needs to be lowered from 60 mph.
As an aside: British drivers have terrible lane discipline on motorways ("middle lane hogging"), which eats up road capacity for no good reason. There's plenty of variable message signs on motorways - they should display "Keep left unless overtaking" if there's no other message to be displayed.
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.
> 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.
Rule 268 of the Highway Code touches upon this:
> In congested conditions, where adjacent lanes of traffic are moving at similar speeds, traffic in left-hand lanes may sometimes be moving faster than traffic to the right. In these conditions you may keep up with the traffic in your lane even if this means passing traffic in the lane to your right. Do not weave in and out of lanes to overtake.
Ashley Neal's video on motorway driving provides some good examples of when sticking in lane 2 is OK, provided that you continuously observe and anticipate other road users: https://youtu.be/Vo7sNwf80lI?t=766
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.
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.
* controlled, which have a permanent hard shoulder, but use technology such as variable speed limits to adjust traffic flows
* dynamic, where the hard shoulder can be opened up at peak times and used as an extra lane; when this happens, the speed limit is reduced to 60mph
* all-lane running, where the hard shoulder has been permanently removed to provide an extra lane; emergency refuge areas are provided at regular intervals for cars that get into trouble
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-65288852
IMO there shouldn't be any objections to "controlled" smart motorways. All lane running is idiotic; dynamic running is OK but I would say that the speed limit needs to be lowered from 60 mph.
As an aside: British drivers have terrible lane discipline on motorways ("middle lane hogging"), which eats up road capacity for no good reason. There's plenty of variable message signs on motorways - they should display "Keep left unless overtaking" if there's no other message to be displayed.