Transport Insights

Roads minister Simon Lightwood is clearly determined never to give a straight answer to a straight question, particularly when it comes to the lack of safety of smart motorways, and his latest evasion is to sidestep an MP’s question on emergency refuge areas.

As I have written, with Department for Transport (DfT) going back on a pledge to consider improving the spacing of emergency areas, Sarah Champion MP has been asking parliamentary questions about where this leaves smart motorway safety.

With the DfT signalling that it has allowed National Highways to kick the issue into the long grass, Champion’s latest question was:

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what is the current average distance between emergency refuge areas on All Lane Running Smart Motorways.

Lightwood being Lightwood, he answered a different question:

National Highways has completed construction of 151 additional emergency areas across the All Lane Running smart motorway network, through the National Emergency Area Retrofit programme. Across every All Lane Running motorway, the average distance between places to stop in an emergency is now less than a mile (around 0.9 miles), compared to around 1.2 miles before the retrofit.

It is likely that the reference to “places to stop in an emergency” is a version of National Highways’ “places of relative safety”, which includes relatively unsafe places to stop in an emergency such as slip roads.

Even without that sleight of hand, it looks as if the deliberately vague average distance is very close to what is supposed to be a maximum under the Transport Committee recommendation that the DfT previously said it agreed with:

a maximum of 1,500 metres apart, decreasing to every 1,000 metres (0.75 miles) where physically possible

With the 1,500 metre maximum working out at 0.932 miles, an average of “around 0.9 miles” could be above that but is very likely to see quite a few instances of the spacing being worse than what should be the worst case.

Lightwood is right however to highlight the scale and positive impact of the National Emergency Area Retrofit (NEAR) programme, except that to do so raises the question of why it can’t be repeated, for the less than cost of a medium-sized roadbuilding scheme.