A recent BBC Panorama report has prompted a fresh wave of criticism and fervent responses over smart motorways, as it claimed that the technology used to support England’s smart motorways repeatedly failed – leaving motorists at risk.
The Panorama report showed that figures obtained revealed “hundreds of incidents” owing to crucial safety equipment being out of action, including radar and cameras designed to spot broken down vehicles and signs to alert fellow motorists of lanes with accidents. Between June 2022 and February 2024 there were 392 reported incidents of smart motorway technology losing power.
Delving into these incidents, it revealed that for five days in July 2023 there were no signals, camera or radar operating at junction 18 on the M6; meanwhile in December 2023 there were no signals, signs, sensors or CCTV for 3.5 days at junction 6 on the M5.
Proving the divisiveness of the issue, National Highways responded to the report commenting that the coverage “is absent of key information and relevant context.” One example given included unplanned outages and power cuts affecting technology including CCTV, to which National Highways said: “We have well-rehearsed contingency plans for both planned and unplanned outages. These include lowering speed limits, increasing patrols by our traffic officers, enhanced monitoring of CCTV and using pre-positioned vehicle recovery.”
In response to a figure given in the report that in 2022 there were 2331 faults on the radar system, they stated: “The majority of faults were resolved in 48 hours. A radar fault doesn’t always mean that the radar itself is faulty; a fault will be generated if it’s not been possible to communicate with the device for a period for 15 minutes.”
In April 2023 the construction of new smart motorways was scrapped by the UK government following concerns about safety and costs, as it set aside £900m on technology to improve the safety of the network. “We want the public to know that this government is listening to their concerns,” said Transport Secretary Mark Harper at the time of the announcement.
An estimation from the Department of Transport has predicted traffic on the UK road network will increase by between one-third and two-thirds in the next 30 years, prompting an urgent need to adapt the road network to handle steadily increasing capacity. Smart motorways have proven a particularly alienating answer to this problem.
How smart is the tech?
In September 2022, sister publication Electronic Specifier discussed at length how to characterise smart motorways – noting that they are not a new feature and at the time of reporting, make up 10% of the road network. There are three types of smart motorways – all-lane running (ALR) which have no hard shoulder; controlled, with a permanent hard shoulder and tech to set variable speed limits; and dynamic, where the hard shoulder is open during peak times.
The technology supporting smart motorways includes sensors, to monitor speed flow; radar vehicle detection, which utilises radar to detect stopped vehicles; CCTV and a Motorway Incident Detection and Automatic Signalling (MIDAS) which monitors traffic and recognises key differences between queueing traffic or congestion.
Stopped Vehicle Detection (SVD), a kind of smart technology which National Highways uses on the motorways it looks after, is employed across transportation systems and intelligent traffic management systems to identify and detect stopped vehicles. It relies on a combination of sensors and/or cameras, and algorithms to monitor traffic conditions. Sensors such as radar or LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) or video cameras monitor the flow and capture data related to vehicle speed, position, and trajectory – in doing so it can identify moving and stopped vehicles.
National Highways has received criticism for failing to meet targets for its SVD technology as in 2022 the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) said the performance of vehicle detection was poor and below its own requirements. In 2023 in a press release, it welcomed a software fix which was tested on three motorways and showed the detection rate ranged from 91% to 97%. National Highways’ target is 80%.
It warned that it would continue to monitor targets – and in February 2024, announced it would be investigating whether National Highways was taking “every action that could be reasonably expected of it to meet its targets”.
Although the construction of smart motorways has been halted, estimates place approximately 375 miles of smart motorway within the UK that continues to operate. If the BBC report and other concerns are to be believed, a critical issue is the failure for technology to operate as normal, and perhaps a warning against a speedy roll-out of ostensibly smart tech.
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