Government agrees to 'pause' smart motorway rollout
Five years worth of safety and financial data will now be collected by the Government
The Government has agreed to 'pause' the rollout of smart motorways across England.
It follows a report by the Transport Select Committee, with the Government now set to collect five-years worth of financial and safety data for every smart motorway introduced before 2020.
The conversion of seven dynamic hard shoulder motorways to all-lane running schemes will also be paused.
The Committee’s report concluded that the March 2020 decision to make all new motorways all-lane running was premature as the evidence base was insufficient.
Chair of the Transport Committee, and Bexhill MP, Huw Merriman said: "There's a real danger that people will not use smart motorways, because of the perception that they are less safe than motorways that have a hard shoulder.
"That actually may be an incorrect assumption, but if people aren't going to use the motorways and they're on less safe A-roads and B-roads where you are more likely to suffer a serious collision or fatality, then that can't be right.
"The key part is being led by the evidence and the data. Obviously if the evidence and data show over a long period of time that smarter motorways are less safe than conventional motorways with a hard shoulder then I wouldn't support them going ahead.
"If you look at the period between 2015 and 2019, they do appear to be safer. If you look at a snapshot of 2019 when there was more miles added, they appear to be less safe. So it's clearly inconclusive, and it's right to take a pause and build no more of them until we can really tell the public with confidence whether they are safe or not."
Where work is already underway, like on the M27 between Southampton and Fareham, £390 million will be spent on retrofitting additional emergency refuge areas and Stopped Vehicle Detection.
Mr Merriman continued: "This isn't the first time a Transport select Committee has made recommendations, the committee did so in 2016, they were not adopted.
"Some of the assurances we got that we would have this Stop Vehicle Detection technology which identifies whether a vehicle has broken down in a live lane and takes action, they've not been put in place. The emergency refuge areas have been set apart much further than was originally designed and those are things that should not have taken place.
"We shouldn't have got to this point where we retrofit safety mechanisms, they should have been there in the first place."