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National Highways publish Smart Motorways Stocktake – Third Year Progress Report

19th Dec 2023

In the third progress report since the 2020 Action Plan, National Highways confirm it has now delivered on all actions planned to be completed to date, and provided evidence that, in most cases, smart motorways are safer than the roads they replaced.

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Smart motorways scrapped earlier this year

On 15 April this year, the UK Government announced that plans for new smart motorways would be cancelled, due to financial pressures and the current lack of public confidence felt by drivers.

Despite the cancellation, existing smart motorways in England have remained in place, and National Highways have invested £900 million in further safety improvements on them.

2020 Action Plan Progress

In March 2020, the Department for Transport (DfT) and National Highways published an Action Plan to improve smart motorway safety.

Since then, National Highways publish a yearly stocktake, which provides a progress report on the actions set out in the 2020 Action Plan.

Last Thursday (14th December) the third year progress report was published, in which National Highways confirmed it has now delivered all the actions set out in the Action Plan which were due to be completed by this point.

This includes notable actions such as:

Launching the ‘Go left’ breakdown advice campaign to further increase awareness and understanding of smart motorways, how they work and how to use them confidently.
Providing over 700 extra signs so drivers are almost always able to see a sign informing them of the distance to the next place to stop in an emergency.
Implementing stopped vehicle detection (SVD)* on all ‘all lane running’ (ALR)** schemes – over 250 miles of motorway.
Upgrading cameras to support Red X*** compliance, which enables the detection of vehicles that pass under a Red X or enter the lane beyond a Red X.
Achieving an average national emergency attendance time of 9 minutes and 49 seconds, fulfilling National Highway’s commitment to reducing the time it takes traffic officers to attend incidents from 17 to 10 minutes.

* SVD identifies a stopped vehicle, providing an alert to National Highways’ regional control room, who set a Red X signal to close one or more lanes, and to adjust speed limits and deploy traffic officers.
** ALR allows the hard shoulder to be used full-time as an additional lane with emergency refuges installed intermittently to provide protection.
*** A Red X sign on a Smart Motorway shows that a lane is closed and must not be used.

Transport Select Committee Smart Motorways Inquiry

In November 2021, the Transport Select Committee (TSC) launched an inquiry into the roll-out of smart motorways which looked at their safety, public confidence in their use as well as their impact upon congestion. CIHT provided written and oral evidence to this inquiry.

The TSC then published a report which expressed strong concerns about the design and implementation of ALR motorways and included nine recommendations for National Highways to improve this.

In each progress report, National Highways provide an update on the recommendations set out by the TSC. This year’s report included National Highways’ progress on:

Continuing to invest in additional safety measures at locations which, before the 2023 cancellation had been due to be upgraded to ALR.
Publishing and updating their emergency area retrofit programme.
Completing an initial desktop options study, which is the first phase of work to consider whether alternative dynamic hard shoulder (DHS) operating regimes would reduce the potential for driver confusion.
Completing a full impact assessment, safety risk assessment and stakeholder consultation on the emergency corridor concept.

Safety evidence headlines

The progress report also provides an update on safety data of smart motorways, some notable statistics included:

All three types of smart motorway are safer than conventional motorways in terms of deaths or serious injuries.
3.9% of collisions on all roads involve moving vehicles colliding with stopped vehicles.
The risk of a collision between a moving and a stopped vehicle is greater on ALR and DHS motorways than on other motorway types, but the risk of a collision involving only moving vehicles is lower.
The comparisons of smart motorway sections before they were constructed and afterwards, show that in most cases smart motorways are safer than the roads they replaced.
Among those who had recently driven or ridden on a smart motorway, 82% reported that they were very or fairly confident when travelling on smart motorways and 16% reported that they were not very or not at all confident.

Your voice @ CIHT

Smart motorways have always been a source for in-depth conversations and debates within the CIHT Membership.

Whether it has been on public perception:

The cause of the current mess is a comms failure - the public not told what was being done and why.

I do think that National Highways/DfT and ministers have not given out the right information about the safety issues in a timely fashion. It would also be better for the general public to understand if we worked in crash numbers rather than the rates which we understand but they do not.

It will be for a future government to decide whether the fatality rate or public perception should dominate in determining whether the existing schemes are retained and/or any new ones (dynamic; controlled or all lane running - or something different) [are] installed.

The perceived risk of removing the hard shoulder:

However much the DfT insists that the statistics show that smart motorways are just as safe as non-smart ones I find it very difficult, no, impossible to understand how that conclusion is derived. Crashes aside, there is also the facility that a hard shoulder offers for emergency vehicles to access scenes of carnage which disappears when the hard shoulder is converted into a 4th running lane.

Or, the environmental impact of increasing capacity on motorways:

As an industry we have a responsibility to future generations to reduce the need to travel by road and ensure that our existing infrastructure can function more efficiently and effectively. Trying to increase highway capacity, either by explicit widening or stealth removal of hard shoulders flies in the face of the science and prevailing policy.

>>> CIHT Members can read and join in on the discussion on CHIT Connect here