How nice to hear Sir Mike Penning, chairman of something called the all-party parliamentary group for Roadside Rescue and Recovery, condemn ‘smart’ motorways as the death traps they are. The motorways use a variety of ‘smart’ methods to vary traffic flow, including part-time hard shoulders managed from a central control room and enforced using electronic motorway signs. Some smart motorways have no hard shoulder at all. This relatively new innovation was described by Penning’s group as a ‘public policy failure’ that has been introduced with a ‘shocking degree of carelessness’. In the past five years, 38 people have been killed on these stretches of motorway – which are so ‘smart’ that it takes CCTV operators an average of 17 minutes to spot when a vehicle has broken down in a live traffic lane.
What a wise fellow Penning sounds. If only we had more of his sort in government, making the decisions.
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