Indeed. In fact one of the cases discussed concerned a granddad and child trapped in a live lane on a bridge with nothing except a metal wall on the left - no where to go even if they managed to get out of the car. IIRC they were hit 45 seconds after coming to a halt.
That sounds like a general issue on bridges. If there had been a hard shoulder, they still would have had nowhere to go.
The transport minister (Shapps) , AA and Police on the programme confirmed that there were many cases where the only advice could be was to stay in the car, call 999 and wait until rescued.
How many is "many"? Ten? A hundred? Ten thousand?
This on motorways where the radar systems, that smart motorways were designed to have, have not been implemented - most smart motorways, ie. everywhere apart from the M25.
If there are such features, then there is no reason why they can't be implemented on motorways that do have hard shoulders or adequate refuge areas. As far as the statistics go, we must remember that in general overall fatal and serious injuries on motorways have been coming down for some years due to more speed cameras and better safety features in vehicles.
As a rule, there are no speed cameras on motorways, except smart motorways. They do have them on one non smart section of the M4 near Swindon, I believe, but nowhere else as far as I know.
- Accessible refuge areas
- Radar detection of stopped vehicles
- Elimination of temporary hard shoulder use
If you do point 3, you don't need to do point 1.
They need to do something about driver education also though. I can't see them throwing away anything good - such as the speed or monitoring cameras and variable speed limits.
Here is my problem. Some assertions have been made about the dangers of smart motorways some anecdotes have been cit4ed for their inherent danger. But nobody has done any serious research to find out if smart motorways are any more dangerous than the non smart motorways they replace. Even measures that may seem obvious ain't necessarily so. For example, reinstating hard shoulders seems like a good thing, but it is possible that the ability to use the hard shoulder as a lane reduces congestion which brings a whole slew of benefits e.g. reduced pollution, reduced stress of drivers and so on and these benefits may offset the extra deaths on the hard shoulder.
The above is all speculation but it does demonstrate that we should not be making decisions without adequate evidence. Your anecdotes are not adequate evidence.
