Police chief prefers hard shoulders

A police chief has stated he would prefer his loved ones to use roads with hard shoulders than smart motorways. Following several deaths, Ministers are under pressure to scrap or overhaul smart motorways, where the hard shoulder is turned into a live traffic lane.

 

Asst Chief Constable Chris Todd, who oversees the West Midlands Police motorway patrols, said he would want relatives to have the "additional" safety of a hard shoulder. His comments to the Commons transport select committee come as MPs heard that the Government rollout of smart motorways without a public information campaign was akin to "changing the emergency procedures on a plane and not telling the pilot".

 

Experts criticised the lack of warning drivers were given when losing the hard shoulder for long stretches describing the current "Go Left" awareness campaign as "several years too late". Ministers and Highways England were also lambasted for allowing refuge areas on smart motorways to be as far as 1.5 miles (2.5km) apart.

 

Last year the Government ordered more than 18 urgent safety improvements to smart motorways by next year including ensuring they all have a camera system to spot stranded drivers. The committee asked police officers and motoring experts if they would feel safer with their loved ones on a "controlled" motorway with a hard shoulder, or a smart one with all the promised safety improvements.

 

Mr Todd said: "In the way it was described, the all-lanes running [motorway] with ERAs [emergency refuge areas] and the SVD [stopped vehicle detection] system in place, I would have a high level of confidence. But if I was pushed for an overall or binary decision, I would probably opt for the controlled motorway in terms of the additional facilities that it provides from a policing perspective."

 

He also added that smart motorways make it harder for police to reach crash victims when all lanes are in use. He said officers sometimes had to close the motorway off ahead of serious accidents so they could reach the injured by driving the wrong way down it. Mr Todd said it was "unlikely" officers would reach the scene within their 10-minute target time.

 

The Transport Secretary, Grant Shapps, has criticised Highways England's rollout of smart motorways as "entirely wrong" pointing to the fact that some had launched without stopped vehicle camera systems. However he warned they were too expensive to scrap as the Government would have to purchase land equivalent to 700 Wembley Stadiums to replace all the hard shoulders.

 

Mr Nicholas Lyes, of the RAC, said: "We changed what was needed to be done in the event of a breakdown because for decades we have had a hard shoulder. Then suddenly you take the hard shoulder out and there is a completely different way of having to deal with an emergency breakdown. It is a bit like changing the emergency landing procedures of an aeroplane and not telling the pilot."

 

For the AA Mr Edmund King said drivers should never be out of sight of a refuge area on a motorway and that in similar schemes - such as those in Germany – the areas are no more than a third of a mile apart. Mr King cited a stretch of the M1 where proposals to install six more refuge areas were reportedly rejected due to the £1-2 million cost.

 

"What cost is a life?" added Mr King. "The cost of a life is more than millions of pounds and too many lives have been lost already. I think they should be retrofitted as a matter of urgency whatever the cost."