‘Smart’ motorway reports expose costly failure

After much delay, National Highways has finally published the evaluation reports for 16 ‘smart’ motorways. As expected, they showed that almost all of the ‘smart’ motorways had been costly failures. Instead of delivering a predicted £10 billion of economic benefits, they delivered under £2bn, which is less than they cost to build. And that’s not counting the £900 million spent on retrofitting additional emergency laybys and upgrading technology.

Post Opening Project Evaluation (POPE) studies are produced after a new road is built (usually one and five-years after opening, although there is a move towards three year reports now). The purpose of these is to assess whether the road schemes worked or not: did they relieve congestion, improve safety, did the environmental mitigation work, and did they provide value for money for taxpayers?

Not that smart or safe

‘Smart’ motorways have been controversial since being introduced in 2008. The most contentious feature is the conversion, and loss, of the hard shoulder, turning it instead into a live, running lane. If a vehicle breaks down there is nowhere to go, unless the driver happens to be next to one of the emergency refuges, but these can be up to one and a half miles apart. The occupants of the car are reliant on technology and cameras spotting them, and then alerting other drivers and closing the lane. However, the technology has often failed, leaving stranded motorists sitting ducks, with sometimes fatal consequences.

A factsheet (see page 6) by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), shows that live running lane stoppages are far more dangerous on a ‘smart’ motorway with all lane running than on a conventional motorway with a hard shoulder. Personal injury collision rates are also higher for all types of ‘smart’ motorway compared to a conventional motorway.

The writing was on the wall

The last published POPE study of a ‘smart’ motorway was in 2021, on the M1 Junctions 10-13 Smart Motorway scheme. It revealed that although the scheme was justified on predictions of time savings worth a billion pounds over the 60-year appraisal period, it had actually increased congestion (due to induced traffic), slowed journey times, and actually lost the economy money!

So, we were not expecting good results from these latest POPE studies, especially as the government had delayed their publication. However, they were worse than anticipated and contained some shocking results.

9 ‘smart’ motorways cost the economy over £2 billion

Focusing on the 11 schemes with 5 year studies and hence had the most reliable data, we found that only two came anywhere near delivering their claimed benefits. The other nine were an economic disaster, costing the economy over £400m on (lack of) time savings, when National Highways had predicted over £7 billion of benefits. This is before counting the cost of building these nine ‘smart’ motorways, which comes in at a staggering £1.6 billion. This doesn’t include the £900 million that has been spent on retrofitting more emergency refuges and upgrading the technology across all ‘smart’ motorways. That means that these nine ‘smart’ motorways have cost the economy well over £2 billion.

Looking across all 11 schemes, the economy lost over £500 million, showing how bad these motorways are financially, before any consideration of safety.

The huge exaggeration of the economic ‘benefits’ of roadbuilding perfectly illustrates the many and serious problems with the way National Highways over-eggs the need for road expansions. It is well known that roadbuilders will overstate the benefits of a scheme, and underestimate the costs in order to secure ministerial approval. It is so common the Treasury has a term for this practice: ‘optimism bias’.

‘Smart’ motorways still being built despite government claims

Exactly the same thing is happening with the Lower Thames Crossing (LTC), which is a ‘smart’ motorway in all but name. Despite the traffic modelling revealing the LTC will massively increase traffic (on the the wider network, including on the M25, A13 and A2/M2) and will only relieve the Dartford Crossing for just 5 short years, National Highways are having to invent ‘wider economic benefits’ for the LTC in order to try and justify the scheme. With the Dartford Crossings being privatised to help fund the construction of the privately owned LTC, the public will lose £120m of toll revenues every year, which is currently used to support things like bus services. This is on top of the £3bn of public money being gifted to the owners.

In the north, the M60 Simister Island scheme is also being widened without hard shoulders, so again is a ‘smart’ motorway in all but name.

Ministers are treating the public as fools, claiming that no more ‘smart’ motorways are being built. Even though both the AA and RAC are calling for hard shoulders to be reinstated ministers have greenlighted more of these much-hated motorways. Also, despite the DfT’s report (para 2.6) on National Highways’ Performance flagging that a third of All Lane Running ‘smart’ motorways still have emergency refuges further apart than the standard, with the M1 Junctions 39-42 being especially bad, no further safety work is proposed.

Time for smart decisions

The question is what happens next? If government ministers are not going to reinstate the hard shoulders on these roads, are they going to install more refuges? Are they going to improve the technology to make it more reliable and ensure there are enough people monitoring it? Or do they bury their heads in the sand and pretend that everything is ok, and keep claiming that they are not building more of these roads when they are? In more ways than one, this government is showing how out of touch it is with the public mood.