Transport Insights

With no real sign of the Department for Transport (DfT) allowing National Highways to release the 14 suppressed evaluation reports on smart motorways, the Guardian has picked up on the story:

Road campaigners and motoring organisations have urged ministers to immediately release a series of “withheld” safety assessments on Britain’s smart motorways – some dating as far back as 2022

With suggestions that the reports could be released at (last) Christmas having come to nothing, the DfT is still claiming there is nothing to see:

The Department for Transport has said that the reports, known as Popes (post-opening project evaluations), will be published imminently, and do not undermine the broad case for smart motorways as statistically the safest roads.

That last bit about a “broad case” is perhaps the key part of the whole article, suggesting that some POPEs may show that individual stretches of motorway have become less safe since the hard shoulder was removed, particularly as they have once again filled up with traffic.

The article quotes Claire Mercer of Smart Motorways Kill, who has campaigned with me for the POPEs to be released, as saying that:

If [the reports] showed good news, they’d release them.

And links to this blog, in which I made a similar point:

Ames was told that a total of 14 reports would eventually be released before Christmas last year “subject to the DfT agreeing the communications handling plan”. He said the continuing delay suggested the contents “must be really, really bad”.

Jack Cousens, the head of roads policy at the AA, said: “These safety reports on so-called ‘smart’ motorways have been withheld for far too long, and we urgently need to see them published.”

He said the reports needed to “show the outcomes of these schemes regardless of their failures or successes”.