11 January 2022
The AA is delighted that the Transport Secretary has accepted the original AA demand, and Select Committee recommendation, that emergency refuge areas (ERAs) should be no more than three-quarters of a mile apart wherever physically possible. Applying this to new schemes and retrofitting current schemes is a major step in the right direction.
The key concern for the AA in its decade-long campaign to improve the safety of ‘smart’ motorways is that is 38% of breakdowns on smart motorways occur in live lanes.
If there are not enough refuges and not accurate enough technology to warn of the dangers, then drivers become ‘sitting ducks’.
The commitment to 150 new ERAs, alongside better technology, reduces that risk.
The original M42 pilot in 2006 worked quite well as refuges were only 400/500m apart but the roll-out with refuges at 2,500m apart, without decent technology, meant that lives have been put at risk.
The Select Committee produced a well-balanced report that included many of the things that the AA has called for.
The AA is also pleased that the Transport Secretary has committed to investigate the concept of an ‘emergency corridor’ which is a proposal the AA raised with DFT ministers in person and in a letter in November 2017.
At last, we have a Transport Secretary who has made progress and taken a positive and pragmatic approach. He has today accepted many of the measures we have been calling for and our important demand that emergency refuge areas should be no more than three-quarters of a mile apart.
The idea is to update the Highway Code to include the manoeuvre to help emergency services and traffic officers to access incidents when traffic is congested. In effect, traffic in the right-hand lane pulls over to the right and on the left-hand lane pulls over to the left, which leaves a corridor so that emergency services can access any incident rapidly.
The AA is also encouraging the Transport Secretary to further investigate ’controlled’ motorways which have a hard shoulder and all the gantry technology but are deemed to be the safest type of motorway. The committee also called for their safety and economic case to be reviewed for future schemes.
The AA gave both written and verbal evidence to the select committee and most of the AA’s recommendations are included in the report and have been accepted by the Transport Secretary.
Commenting on the Government response, Edmund King, AA president, said: “The AA has been a major critic of ‘smart’ motorways in our campaign for over a decade to improve their safety. At last, we have a Transport Secretary who has made progress and taken a positive and pragmatic approach. He has today accepted many of the measures we have been calling for and our important demand that emergency refuge areas should be no more than three-quarters of a mile apart.
“We would like further investigation, which the Transport Secretary has agreed to, of our proposal for Dynamic Hard Shoulder schemes to revert to hard-shoulder running between 7pm-7am to avoid confusion and to offer a refuge to counter live lane collisions that happen at night
“We are pleased our call for better evaluation of the Stopped Vehicle Detection technology has been accepted but still question why it wasn’t fitted before schemes opened. The AA view remains that controlled motorways with a hard shoulder are the safest option and we are pleased that the business case for these will be examined.
King adds: “The AA called for a new Highway Code rule in 2017 to create an emergency corridor in stationary traffic to allow emergency services access to incidents on motorways where there is no continuous hard shoulder. We are pleased that the Government has endorsed that call and we are already working with National Highways on this matter.
“Whilst ‘smart’ motorways will never be perfect, we do believe that considerable progress has been made to make them safer.
“We will be holding the Government to account to ensure these actions will be implemented as soon as possible.”