Transport Insights

The transport stories you won't see in the industry-friendly media

Author

Chris Ames

Tag: road safety

  • Awaiting answers on smart motorway safety

    Following my stories pointing out that ministers had quietly dropped a pledge to consider adding more emergency refuge areas on smart motorways to comply with a 2021 recommendation from MPs, one MP has put down a written parliamentary question on the issue.

    Sarah Champion, who is Labour MP for Rotherham and therefore smart motorway campaigner Claire Mercer’s MP, asked transport secretary and fellow Labour MP Heidi Alexander:

    with reference to the Third Report of the Transport Committee of Session 2021–22, Rollout and safety of smart motorways, HC26, what steps her Department is taking to ensure that emergency refuges on All Lane Running Smart Motorways are spaced no more than 1,500m apart, and no more than 1,000m apart where possible.

    As I wrote here, this was a recommendation from the Transport Committee (albeit that it referred to “emergency refuge areas”) and the Department for Transport said in its response:

    The Government agrees in principle with this recommendation as we recognise that the installation of EAs at closer spacing is valued by drivers and road safety organisations.

    It announced the £390m over the rest of the second Road Investment Strategy to for a retrofit programme that would see over 150 additional EAs being added to all lane running smart motorways by 2025.

    In recognition of the fact that this would not achieve the recommended standard, it added:

    A decision on whether to retrofit across the remainder of ALR smart motorways will be considered as part of the formulation of the third Road Investment Strategy, based on evidence of safety benefits.

    This last bit (considering the issue) does not appear to have happened. It certainly isn’t being done.

    Champion’s “named day” question should in theory have been answered last week but is still awaiting a response.

    One response to “Awaiting answers on smart motorway safety”

    1. clearlyteenage2e6308de03 avatar
      clearlyteenage2e6308de03

      Did the country really need most of the (un)Smart motorways at all? Do they contribute to carbon reduction? Might they encourage more peak hour car use especially near our big cities where we are trying to encourage sustainable transport use? Do they make it harder for emergency vehicles to reach incidences or accidents?

      If somebody (who – I ask?) thinks they might help reduce traffic congestion at certain times (on past evidence – possibly for a couple of years only) we must surely go back to opening the hard shoulder only on limited occasions to reduce congestion. At such times average and peak driving speeds need rigorous enforcement to say 40mph. That should save the really serious accidents and probably be an optimum speed for capacity anyway.

      There is no real case for higher speeds except for the truly daft economic appraisal system used by DfT and abused by National Highways in the promotion of their expensive schemes.

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  • Lightwood plums new depths of churlish opacity

    Roads minister Simon Lightwood, who was complicit in hiding the smart motorway evaluation reports and seems to have gone into politics to hide things from the public, has blanked a question from an MP about safety spending under the new road investment strategy (RIS).

    Asked by Helen Morgan how much money is committed to the Safety National Programme and Small Schemes National Programme elements of the RIS, Lightwood said:

    RIS3 included for the first time a set of four National Programmes, which are a new way for National Highways to deliver defined outputs that support RIS3 objectives, where these are not funded in other programmes. Details of the funding for each National Programme will be confirmed in National Highways’ Delivery Plan for 2026-31, which is expected to be published in the summer.

    It’s worth unpicking this to see how evasive Lightwood is being. The RIS, written by his department, is literally a strategy for spending on the strategic road network. Its purpose is to give National Highways a budget and tell it, Parliament and the public how it should be spent.

    Lightwood knows how much is in the budget for the Safety and Small Schemes National Programmes but is simply choosing to hide this.

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  • What the RIS doesn’t say

    Two articles from me in the latest edition of Local Transport Today pick up on pledges that the Department for Transport (DfT) has failed to honour in the new Road Investment Strategy (RIS) – on both smart motorway safety and toxic  road runoff.

    One piece says:

    Campaigners have slammed the DfT after it quietly dropped a commitment to consider adding more emergency areas (EAs) on smart motorways under the new RIS, leaving the network short of the spacing standard recommended by MPs in a landmark report.

    The story notes that in its November 2021 report on smart motorways, the Commons Transport Committee recommended that the DfT and National Highways should retrofit EAs to existing all lane running (ALR) motorways to make them a maximum of 1,500 metres apart, decreasing to every 1,000 metres (0.75 miles) where physically possible.

    In its response, the DfT said it “agrees in principle with this recommendation” and committed £390m over RIS 2 to retrofit over 150 additional EAs to ALRs by 2025.

    And, in an implicit recognition that the extra 150 EAs would not bring the whole network into compliance with the standard recommended by MPs, the DfT also said: “A decision on whether to retrofit across the remainder of ALR smart motorways will be considered as part of the formulation of the third Road Investment Strategy, based on evidence of safety benefits.”

    The story notes that I had approached the DfT and National Highways for comment, but had not received a response at the time of publication. I still haven’t.

    Similarly, neither replied in relation to this story on toxic road runoff:

    National Highways’ longstanding pledge to mitigate “high priority” water outfalls on its network by 2030 is mired in confusion after its regulator questioned whether it could be achieved following a doubling of costs and the new RIS appeared to backtrack on the pledge.

    The story notes that company’s 2030 Water Quality Plan set that year as the target to first confirm and then mitigate sites on the strategic road network where there was a high risk of toxic runoff polluting watercourses and the wider environment.

    While this was subject to funding during RIS 3, last September National Highways’ then chief executive Nick Harris told MPs that it that it expected to be “funded to do all 250” of the “high-risk” outflows that were expected to be confirmed and that in October, the company published a document setting out 182 confirmed high-risk locations in tranches representing “when we expect to deliver improvements work at each location, subject to funding and delivery constraints, with all to be delivered “before 2030”.

    A month later the Office of Rail and Road’s (ORR) advice on National Highways’ draft strategic business plan noted that estimated costs had more than doubled to between £900,000 and £1.2m per asset, meaning that National Highways expected to deliver 110 and 130 mitigations from the allocated budget, leaving between 75 and 95 assets carried over under RIS 4. The regulator noted that National Highways had “previously proposed and committed” to mitigating 250 assets and said it should work with the DfT “to manage expectations where it has previously committed publicly to deliver a bigger programme and the reasons this is no longer feasible”.

    The new RIS includes a commitment to mitigate a total of 190 – 250 high risk water outfalls / soakaways, implicitly by 2031, “reviewing a deliverability plan by the end of 2027/28”. It adds: “This range includes those outfalls and soakaways mitigated during Road Period 2 and 2025/26”.

    So it’s entirely unclear whether there is more money or whether the DfT and National Highways are simply misleading the public about what can be done. Either way, the 2030 deadline has slipped by at least a year.

  • National Highways secures little safety funding but a soft safety target

    Documents published by National Highways’ regulator show how the company tried to avoid being held to account during the new Road Investment Strategy (RIS 3) for its continued failure to meet casualty reduction targets and how little it is likely to do by way of dedicated safety work.

    The Office of Rail and Road (ORR) efficiency review, or advice on National Highways’ draft strategic business plan, discloses what the company was proposing at the end of last year to do under the RIS that runs for five years from tomorrow.

    If the proposed spending levels in the draft strategic business plan (SBP) have been carried through to the RIS itself, dedicated spending on safety over five years will be (significantly) less than the cost of one major enhancement scheme, such as the £600m A38 Derby Junctions scheme.

    The ORR reported that National Highways’ draft SBP proposed a spend of £342m in its safety National Programme and £122m in its safety Designated Fund, totalling £464m.

    The regulator has also published a document that informed its own review, Safety Advice to inform the RIS3 Efficiency Review by Thomas Fleming Transport Consulting.

    This describes in quite scathing terms what the £464m looks like out of a budget totalling £25bn:

    The commitment of less than 2% of the RIS3 Statement of Funds Available to specific safety activities is difficult to reconcile with safety being the number one priority for the organisation.

    Comparison between the ORR’s account of the SBP and the RIS itself reveals that a proposal for the National Programme to deliver safety interventions on 18 priority corridors with current poor safety performance and a low International Road Assessment Programme (iRAP) star rating has been carried forward – suggesting that the funding levels will be very close to what was proposed.

    In terms for casualty reduction, the Thomas Fleming analysis reveals that the National Programmes and Designated Funds combined were forecast to achieve a reduction of just 85 killed and seriously injured (KSI) casualties per year by the end of the RIS. It calculated that this would represent a cut of just 2.7% relative to the 2005-2009 baseline against which previous RIS targets were calculated.

    It highlighted “significant disparities” between the scale of this reduction and the long-term trajectory required to achieve zero deaths and serious injuries on the strategic network by 2050 – a target date that National Highways has already put back by 10 years.

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  • RIS 3 to feature “Safety National Programme”

    Back on the subject of what National Highways might actually deliver by way of safety improvements during the new Road Investment Strategy (RIS), a minister has confirmed that there will at least be one of the new-style National Programmes with “safety” as a title.

    With the 2026-31 strategy (RIS 3) is set to be published this week, probably Thursday, here’s what last summer’s draft RIS said:

    We are considering introducing new National Programmes to deliver defined outputs that support RIS objectives or commitments which are not within other programmes (for example, supporting specific programmes of activity around safety and environmental mitigation). These types of projects would have been funded via the Designated Funds in RIS1 and RIS2 but by making them distinct programmes we can more effectively monitor their delivery and outcomes. If these National Programmes were to feature in RIS3, their core purposes would remain the same as the Designated Funds, but they will provide a different delivery and funding model to complement the more flexible Designated Funds. If approved, the scope and size of Designated Funds will need to be reviewed as we define exactly what should be considered under each programme.

    In response to a written parliamentary question from Helen Morgan, Liberal Democrat MP for North Shropshire, roads minister Lilian Greenwood said:

    National Highways has assessed the safety performance of the 6-mile section of the A483 between Oswestry and the Welsh Border, which includes the Llynclys Crossroads. Improvements to the route are being considered for delivery as part of the Safety National Programme within RIS3, which is due to be published later in March.

    The background to this is that two years ago Morgan (pictured) welcomed plans to cut the speed limit and install speed cameras at Llynclys Crossroads but this was subject to funding that never materialised. Now National Highways is believed to be looking at a roundabout, which would be a lot more expensive.

    It remains to be seen what the budget for the National Programme will be and indeed whether the A483 will be part of it, but a dedicated fund for safety is an improvement on the “Safety and Congestion” designated fund in the last RIS.

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  • Third time lucky on National Highways’ most dangerous roads?

    With the third Road Investment Strategy (RIS 3) due imminently, does the latest safety report from National Highways’ regulator give any reliable hints about what the government-owned company will be expected to do to improve the inherent safety of its roads?

    While the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) seems to be on a mission to give National Highways a free pass as it fails badly to meet its safety targets, its recent annual assessment of safety performance on the strategic road network suggests that National Highways is planning to make at least some improvements.

    iRAP star rating provides an objective measure of the level of ‘built-in’ safety for vehicle occupants, motorcyclists, cyclists and pedestrians. It uses star ratings on a five-point scale, where a 1-star rating reflects a high-risk road with little safety infrastructure, while 5-star indicates a road with minimal risk, designed for safety.

    As part of our work to assess National Highways’ approach to improving safety we asked the company to demonstrate how it uses iRAP assessments to inform the development of safety interventions on the SRN. We have reviewed case studies and evidence the company has used to develop schemes currently in feasibility and design stages, for potential delivery in road period 3 (RP3).

    The report concludes:

    The evidence provided shows that National Highways is applying iRAP analysis to existing 1- and 2-star routes to identify the interventions most likely to improve safety outcomes. These include measures such as improved lane delineation, enhanced signing, pedestrian and cyclist safety improvements, speed management and access control (where road users join the SRN from local or other major roads). The aim of these interventions is to raise the star rating of the route and reduce the predicted number of KSI casualties over time.

    A cynic like me might think identifying potential interventions is pretty meaningless unless there is a chance of delivering them.

    But the flipside of this is that both the company and its regulator must have some expectation that resources will be provided in RIS 3 for this purpose.

    The problem is that the draft RIS 3, published in the summer, is so vague.

    Let’s start with what National Highways said in its 2023 Initial Report for the RIS that was due to start in 2025 until the new government put it back a year:

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  • Did Cabinet Office comms diktat cost lives?

    The Office of Rail and Road’s (ORR) annual assessment of safety performance on the strategic road network, published today, provides some explanation for the Department for Transport (DfT) telling National Highways to cut back its safety plan for the current (interim) year.

    By way of a quick recap, I exclusively revealed that transport secretary Heidi Alexander told the company of which she is the sole owner to remove one action from its planned Safety Action Plan 2025-26. This was the HGV “know your zones” campaign. National Highways also curtailed two other road safety awareness campaigns.

    All three had the expected impact of reducing serious casualties.

    In its latest report, the ORR comments on National Highways’ Interim Delivery Plan, which included the safety plan:

    As we reported last year, government mandated a reduction in budgets for communication campaigns in 2024, which resulted in National Highways scaling back some of its proposed activities.

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  • Even less committed to road safety

    National Highways has effectively confirmed that it will halve the budget of its Driving for Better business campaign, which aims to reduce work‑related road risk.

    Fleet News has reported that:

    Fleet News understands that details around the future funding of the road safety programme are included in a draft business plan submitted by National Highways in response to the Government’s draft Road Investment Strategy (RIS).

    Sources suggest its annual budget will be halved from around £750,000 to £375,000 for the next financial year (2026/27).

    It notes that:

    Asked about the future of the Driving for Better Business campaign by Fleet News, National Highways wouldn’t be drawn on specifics, but said it remained “committed” to the programme.

    A National Highways spokesperson added: “National Highways funding for this programme continues, but we are reviewing as part of developing our plans for the next ‘road period’.

    “As with all our work, we regularly review to ensure we deliver the best value for taxpayer.”

    The non-denial, the use of the word “committed”, and the reference to “the best value for taxpayer” (sic) all provide a strong indication that the story is true.

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  • Greenwood parks pavement parking ban…again

    If you detected some reluctance from successive governments to tackle drivers who park on footways, the latest written parliamentary answers on the subject show that ministers are in no hurry to give councils the powers they promised them in January.

    Transport minister Lilian Greenwood was asked by fellow Labour MP Peter Dowd what the government’s proposed timeline is. She replied:

    On 8 January 2026, I announced the publication of the government’s formal response to the 2020 public consultation ‘Pavement parking: options for change’ which sets out what the government plans to do to tackle pavement parking. In the first instance we plan to give local authorities powers before the end of this year to issue Penalty Charge Notices for vehicles parked in a way that unnecessarily obstructs the pavement. The Department will engage with local authorities on the detail of these plans.

    As I reported at the time, the government said it would “create powers to enable local transport authorities to prohibit pavement parking in their areas” and in the meantime “enable local authorities to enforce against ‘unnecessary obstruction’ of the pavement”.

    At that time, Commons Transport Committee Chair Ruth Cadbury said:

    The Transport Committee will be watching closely to ensure that legislation is enacted without further delays.

    But, although ministers originally said the powers for councils to prohibit pavement parking in their areas would be created “at the next legislative opportunity” and “in parallel” with secondary legislation to allow enforcement against unnecessary obstruction of the pavement, the new area-wide power is clearly not happening any time soon.

    In relation to the pledge to allow enforcement against unnecessary obstruction of the pavement this year, Greenwood told another Labour MP, Anneliese Dodds:

    My officials have begun work on secondary legislation and guidance for this option, and associated stakeholder engagement.

    Oh good, more consultation.

  • Concrete barriers and the weight of expectation

    This week, I was asked to look at and comment on this BBC story about a mysterious “drainage defect” that has led to the closure of the “lane three” northbound and southbound on the M1.

    Work is continuing on a stretch of the M1 in Bedfordshire as engineers investigate a “drainage defect” in the central reservation, according to National Highways.

    Lane closures between junction 12 at Toddington and junction 13 for Brogborough were first put in place on 27 January.

    Although the story was dated nearly two weeks ago (14 February) at a time when all lanes on the northbound carriageway were open, it appears that lane three is again closed in both directions.

    When it says “no delays expected”, the hard shoulder on this dynamic hard shoulder scheme is being used.

    It looks as if the drainage defect has been caused by the replacement of the steel barrier with concrete, which has somehow compromised the drainage in one or more ways, including possibly changing the hydraulics and compressing the soil.

    This has in turn weakened the barrier supports, according to National Highways.

    And with cabling having been laid, it looks as if it might be a complex problem to fix.

    Tony Fisher/BBC

    It’s a shame. I have written before about what National Highways was pro-actively doing to replace steel barriers with concrete, which is safer because of the reduced risk of head-on crossover crashes.

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