‘Hundreds of millions’ to be spent retrofitting safety areas on smart motorways

“Hundreds of millions of pounds” could be spent retrofitting existing smart motorways with emergency refuge areas (ERAs), the Commons transport select committee inquiry into the roads heard yesterday.

The exact figure to be spent has yet to be determined, according to Department for Transport (DfT) strategic roads, economics and statistics director Jill Adam.

“That’s still in a sense an open question where we’re waiting for some detailed advice from Highways England but I think we’re expecting the cost of a national retrofit to be hundreds of millions of pounds as well as the cost of the disruption of closing lanes in order to do that work,” she said.

“So it’s quite a big decision and one that we’ve committed to look at and we’re looking forward to seeing the information so we can consider that question.”

Retrofitting proposals were included in Highways England’s Smart motorways stocktake first year progress report published in April. Options are currently under consideration.

Highways England acting chief executive Nick Harris said that there is “some correlation between spacing [of ERAs] and safety but not a very strong one”.

But he added that there is evidence to suggest people feel safer with more ERAs and, as such, the design standard has been updated to reduce the spacing between them. Ten additional ERAs have already been installed on the M25.

“Since last year we’ve been evaluating the performance there as well as in general evaluating the impact of spacing on safety,” he said.

“Together with that evaluation we are going to be bringing forward proposals for a retrofit programme.”

Adam said that the cost per additional refuge area in the retrofit “varies according to the specific circumstance”.

She added: “One of the challenges with retrofit is that the design of the road will likely have taken the easier places to deliver spacing so it can in some cases be harder and more expensive to find places to put those additional refuge areas in between the ones that were part of the original design.

“But again we’ll look carefully at the information we get from Highways England.”

AA president Edmund King said the organisation shares the “desire to make our roads as safe as possible”.

“However, a number of poor decisions and delayed infrastructure have led to a series of fatalities and serious collisions, many of which could have been avoided if there was a permanent hard shoulder or more places of safety,” he said.

“In order to make ‘smart’ motorways safer, we need to focus on retrofitting emergency laybys on existing schemes as well as installing the best available radar system on the network as quickly as possible.”

The safety of smart motorways – where the hard shoulder has been replaced by a live traffic lane – has been repeatedly called into question.

Transport secretary Grant Shapps has defended the roads but in March he conceded that they should be safer. As such, he said that the rollout of stopped vehicle detection technology would be sped up across all of Highways England’s 800km smart motorway network.

In April, the road operator was referred to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) for manslaughter in connection with the death of a woman on the M1 2018, while another inquest concluded that the lack of a hard shoulder contributed to the deaths of two men near junction 34 of the M1 in June 2019.

The DfT has also asked the Office of Rail & Road to carry out an independent review of Highways England’s data.

In its written evidence to the inquiry – published in May – Highways England said that smart motorways “deliver much needed additional capacity and maintain safety, at the same time as realising significant benefits over conventional motorways”.

These benefits include smoother journeys; reduced disruption for road users, businesses and local communities, through quicker, less complex design and construction; and better communication with drivers using electronic signage.

Highways England does, however, acknowledge that the risk of a live lane collision between a moving vehicle and a stopped vehicle is “greater on all-lane running (ALR) and dynamic hard shoulder (DHS) motorways” – an admission also made in the Department for Transport’s evidence.

Source https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/hundreds-of-millions-to-be-spent-retrofitting-safety-areas-on-smart-motorways-01-07-2021/

Department of Civil Engineering https://www.ibu.edu.ba/department-of-civil-engineering/