Technology aimed at improving safety on all-lane running smart motorways needs to be improved "urgently", the transport watchdog has said
technology meant to improve the detection of stranded vehicles on smart motorways with no hard shoulder is falling short of targets, the Office for Rail and Road (ORR) said
All-lane motorways are meant to ease congestion, but critics say they have contributed to deaths
Their rollout was paused in January The government is now collecting data on existing all-lane smart motorways to assess their safety before it allows any more to be built
At the end of 2020, there were 369 miles of smart motorways in England, including 168 miles without a hard shoulder
Stopped Vehicle Detection was installed on every existing all-lane motorway by the end of September this year and is one of the measures designed to further improve safety on these types of motorways
The ORR said that it was too early to see the full effects of SVD given the rapid rollout of the technology
it said that while SVD had "helped to reduce the duration" of breakdowns in live lanes, it was "not working as well as it should
Among other things, the regulator said that "false detection rates" of breakdowns were too high
ORR chief executive John Parkinson said It's clear National Highways [the agency in charge of motorways] needs to urgently improve its performance in this area
Under the performance requirements for SVD, alert times should be below 20 seconds
the testing data to date shows that in four out of National Highways' five English regions, the average time was higher than 40 seconds
In Yorkshire and the North East, it was 64.8 seconds - over a minute. In the North West, the average was only 15.7 seconds, well within the target
The watchdog said that National Highways was now "seeking rapid improvements" to the SVD technology to achieve "the required performance levels by the end of June 2023", and the ORR would take further action if improvements do not happen
National Highways said: "Our roads are among the safest in the world every road death is a tragedy and we know there's more we can do to further improve safety
It said it was committed to making sure SVD works as it should do within the next six months, also pointed out various sources were used to notify and detect stopped vehicles, including the police, the public, the
- Controlled, which has a permanent hard should uses technology such as variable speed limits to adjust traffic flows
- Dynamic, where the hard shoulder can be opened up at peak times and used as an extra lane; when this happens, the speed limit is reduced
The president of the AA motoring organization, Edmund King, said the fact that the SVD system was not working effectively was "a major concern for drivers
"For
Under the plan, the government is collecting evidence on smart motorway safety and devising measures to improve their safety
The ORR says it is too early to draw a firm conclusion on success notes that "National Highways has achieved substantial improvements in attendance times for traffic officers
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