Religion and Ethics Forum
General Category => Politics & Current Affairs => Topic started by: Walt Zingmatilder on January 23, 2018, 08:11:18 AM
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Smart motorways or A roads manqué?
Technowonk on BBC breakfast peddling line Smart Motorways have more technology on them so they must be good.
Technically all such roads should be redesignated as A roads as the number of motorways is effectively being cut.
Lives at stake here.
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Smart until it all goes wrong! :o
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The M5 between Bromsgrove and Worcester, I think, is a case worth considering. The hard shoulder has been transformed into a fourth lane. There are stopping points at 1km intervals.
My opinion is that hard shoulders have been a defining point of motorways and a significant contribution to safety. Sooner or later there is going to be a major incident due to the absence of a specific emergency stopping lane. When it happens, watch the hand wringing ...
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The smart motorways are a social Darwinian metaphor for Conservative Britain.
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The smart motorways are a social Darwinian metaphor for Conservative Britain.
It really isn't.
However, I do think we should be concentrating more on making drivers smarter - see the Daily Mirror headline this morning.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/driver-caught-doing-60mph-both-11896876
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Think of it though. The government are definition riddling here. Roads without hard shoulders were A roads I can think of a long stretch of Motorway at Swansea where the inside lane was designated as the A road.
Of course properly designating roads as A roads would mean that the government has cut back on motorways. So for political expedience for the car loving electorate they are now Smart motorways.
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No disagreement there - just not seeing it as a metaphor in the way you described it.
Are you trying to draw an equivalence between political expediency and social Darwinism?
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No disagreement there - just not seeing it as a metaphor in the way you described it.
Are you trying to draw an equivalence between political expediency and social Darwinism?
Not really but it's come to something when calling an A road an A road is political suicide whereas turning a road into some kind of death race is not.
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The defining feature of a motorway is not the hard shoulder. There are A roads with hard shoulders and now motorways without some of the time (bad move IMO).
Amongst other defining features are
- the restrictions on the types of vehicles allowed
- the fact that you have to hold a full driving licence to use them
- only access is by slip road
- no stopping
- no pedestrians or animals (e.g. horses)
Also motorway construction has different standards. For example there is a lower maximum gradient and a larger minimum radius for a curve.