Ministers are being urged to reinstate the hard shoulder on smart motorways. The RAC issued the plea exactly a year after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak cancelled all future planned smart motorway projects, citing financial pressures and a lack of public confidence in the roads.
RAC head of policy Simon Williams said: “There is a real irony when it comes to talking about cost pressures in relation to these distinctly unpopular types of motorway. While heralded as a cost-effective way of increasing capacity on some of our busier roads, a colossal amount of public money has since gone into trying to make them safer – for instance by installing radar-based technology to detect stricken vehicles more quickly, plus the creation of additional emergency refuge areas.
“We continue to believe that the Government should either convert existing all-lane running smart motorways to dynamic ones – where the hard shoulder is only opened to traffic during busy periods – or repaint the white line and reintroduce a permanent hard shoulder on these roads. In either case, queue-busting technology such as variable speed limits could remain to help ensure traffic flows as smoothly as possible.