Transport Insights

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

Author

Chris Ames

Tag: road safety

  • DfT to feel the heat over smart motorway cover-up

    I will be taking part in an event at the Department for Transport on Wednesday to highlight the continuing suppression of evaluation reports on the safety and effectiveness of smart motorways and to call on ministers to release them in the name of transparency.

    I revealed in September that ministers are sitting on a huge amount of data on the controversial schemes, in the form of multiple post opening project evaluation (POPE) reports, including at least nine that were due for completion in 2022.

    When the five-years after POPE on the scheme to convert the M1 between junctions 10 and 13 to dynamic hard shoulder was published in September 2021, it revealed that it had cost the economy £200m instead of a projected benefit of £1bn, because it slowed traffic down. It made national news.

    The event is a collaboration between myself and Claire Mercer of the Smart Motorways Kill campaign, who has done most of the work.

    Confirmed attendees at the event include her MP, Sarah Champion, and crash survivor Jack Gallowtree, as well as representatives from road safety and motoring groups.

    Irrespective of what you think about smart motorways, as the official press release puts it:

    The event’s purpose is to shine a spotlight on the years of delay and lack of transparency surrounding these critical reports. Campaigners are urging the DfT and National Highways to release all outstanding POPE evaluations, answer questions, and ensure that lessons are learned to improve future road safety and infrastructure planning.

    Who could argue with that?

    The event will include a demand to “Release the POPE”, a playful reference to the occasions in the past when the pontiff has been captured, including following the 1527 sack of Rome.

    Expected to be a lot more orderly, it will take place at the Department for Transport, 33 Horseferry Rd, London, SW1P 4DR at 12:15pm on Wednesday 5 November.

    There won’t be fireworks, but we hope ministers will feel the heat over the continued cover-up.

  • ORR praises National Highways as casualties increase

    As National Highways’ safety record gets worse, the spin from both the company’s chief executive and its regulator continues.

    The latest government data shows that 1,931 people were killed or seriously injured (KSI) on the strategic road network (SRN) in 2024. This is an increase of 23 people (1%) compared to 2023.

    So the number of KSIs is going up when it is supposed to be going down.

    In a blog post, the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) notes that this is 38% below the (2005-09) baseline against which National Highways is required to achieve a 50% reduction by the end of this year, “which means that National Highways needs to achieve a further reduction of 12 percentage points (381 KSI casualties) if it is to achieve its target”.

    The ORR says:

    The latest figures confirm that it is now almost certain the target will not be met.

    Note that the regulator says the target will not be met, rather than that National Highways will miss the target.

    (more…)

  • Harris blames crash victims for road safety failings

    National Highways’ chief executive has sought to dodge responsibility for the company’s poor progress on road safety, claiming “success” for its limited efforts to reduce casualties through engineering.

    With the company expected to miss its key performance indicator (KPI) for reducing killed and seriously injured (KSIs) casualties during the second (2020-25) road investment strategy (RIS), Nick Harris pointed out that the next RIS does not currently have an equivalent target.

    In an interview for the official podcast of the Highways UK trade show, he said:

    Increasingly on safety though the focus is shifting from that headline KPI to the things we are doing. So there’s a little bit of a shift there.

    The comment also reflects the expectation that the next RIS will give National Highways a National Programme on safety, “supporting specific programmes of activity” and measure it against how much it delivers.

    Harris also sought to blame the victims of collisions:

    (more…)

  • Back off!

    The AA is again flagging up the dangers (and irritation) of tailgaiting – and it’s right to do so.

    The motoring organisation says that, in to a survey of 12,014 drivers, more than a quarter (27%) named tailgating as the most irritating behaviour carried out by “other drivers”.

    The poll also found that a fifth (19%) of drivers are “hacked off” by middle lane hoggers, while one in six (16%) get annoyed at drivers picking up and using a mobile phone when they are behind the wheel.

    A study carried out by AA Accident Assist in 2023 also highlighted driver frustration over tailgating and in another survey last year more than half (55%) of drivers said it had been getting worse in recent years.

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  • Labour demonstrates four wheel drift on road safety

    Meanwhile, in the absence of a roads minister, the minister for local transport has ducked a question about when the government will publish its road safety strategy.

    In response to a parliamentary question from fellow Labour MP Darren Paffey:

    To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what options her Department is considering to reduce fatalities involving young drivers through the Road Safety Strategy; and when that strategy will be published.

    Lightwood seems to have got mixed up with the difference between “when will the next road safety strategy be published?” and “when was the last road safety strategy published?”.

    Basically, they are thinking about it:

    The Government treats road safety seriously and is committed to reducing the numbers of those killed and injured on our roads. The Road Safety Strategy is under development and will include a broad range of policies. More details will be set out in due course.

    We absolutely recognise that young people are disproportionately victims of tragic incidents on our roads and continue to tackle this through our THINK! campaign. We are considering measures to address this and protect young drivers, as part of our upcoming strategy for road safety – the first in over a decade.

    Labour takes road safety so seriously, it doesn’t have a roads minister.

  • Road deaths continue as Starmer plays musical chairs

    As the BBC reports on the “relentless” toll of deaths on Essex’s roads in 2025, we wait to see what impact the latest game of musical chairs at the Department for Transport (DfT) may have on Labour’s long-promised road safety strategy.

    BBC News, Essex reports that crashes have killed 48 people in the county since the turn of the year, almost matching the 50 total for 2024.

    It’s the beginning of September so we are just over two-thirds of the way into the year.

    Adam Pipe, head of roads policing at Essex Police, cited drug-driving, speed and carelessness as the biggest problems seen on the county’s highways.

    “It is relentless,” Mr Pipe added.

    Twenty-five of the 48 deaths on Essex’s roads in 2025 have been sent to the Crown Prosecution Service to consider charging drivers.

    “These are not, in most cases, an accident – there is a behaviour behind it,” Mr Pipe continued.

    (more…)

  • Smart motorway shortcomings combined in fatal crash

    National Highways’ response to the coroner examining the death of a motorist on a “smart motorway” section of the M6 where the emergency areas are officially too far apart also raises concerning questions about the effectiveness of the technology involved.

    In June 2023, Kevin O’Reilly ran out of petrol on the all lane running M6 northbound approaching Junction 12 and was stationary in lane three when his car was hit by an HGV.

    Emma Serrano, area coroner for Staffordshire sent National Highways a Regulation 28: Report to Prevent Future Deaths in relation to the death of Mr O’Reilly, expressing concern over the frequency of emergency areas and that the motorway was ‘not monitored’.

    I wrote about the issues around emergency area spacing – and what the government isn’t doing about them – earlier today but what National Highways said about the role that stopped vehicle detection (SVD) played is very worrying:

    Having reviewed our CCTV footage after the incident, we determined that Mr O’Reilly’s vehicle was slow moving until approximately 30 seconds before the collision. Once stopped, SVD operated correctly in detecting the vehicle and triggered the automatic “Report of obstruction” message just after the HGV, that collided with Mr O’Reilly’s car, passed the variable message sign. Therefore the HGV driver was not presented with this warning message.

    So, everything worked as it should, but a driver in a stationary vehicle without access to an emergency area (in the absence of a hard shoulder) still lost his life.

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  • Don’t look to Labour to fix smart motorways

    The draft of the third Road Investment Strategy (RIS 3) published this week suggests that ministers are happy with a smart motorway network where many places to stop in an emergency are officially too far apart, putting drivers at increased risk.

    In November 2021, the Transport Select Committee recommended that:

    The Department and National Highways should retrofit emergency refuge areas to existing all-lane running motorways to make them a maximum of 1 mile apart, decreasing to every 0.75 miles where physically possible.

    The Department (for Transport – DfT) accepted this recommendation in principle and in January 2022 announced that £390m would be spent by the end of March 2025 to retrofit “more than 150 additional emergency areas”, alongside a pause on the construction of new all lane running smart motorways.

    The waters were muddied when it emerged that National Highways was counting other places to stop towards the spacing standard, but the company did deliver a promised 151 new emergency areas by the end of March under the National Emergency Area Retrofit (NEAR) programme.

    Although this was said to provide “around a 50% increase in places to stop”, neither the DfT nor National Highways ever said how far the programme would go to fill in all the gaps where the spacing was longer than the official standard.

    National Highways has told me that it had  “prioritised locations where emergency areas could make the most difference and bring benefits to drivers as soon as possible” and suggested that it would like to see a continuation of the programme.

    Labour delayed the start of RIS 3 by a year and gave the company an interim settlement for the current year that says nothing about improving safety on smart motorways.

    In a section on Smart Motorways, the draft RIS 3 document claims that “substantial investment continues to improve the safety of the existing network” citing “the recent completion of additional Emergency Refuge Areas on the All Lane Running (ALR) smart motorways under the National Emergency Areas Retrofit (NEAR) programme”, which it acknowledges “was finished in March 2025” – a whole year before the new RIS.

    There is no commitment to continuing the retrofit of what Labour has now returned to calling “Emergency Refuge Areas”, which leaves National Highways with a spacing standard that it is not funded to deliver.

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  • Official: Smart motorway tech not fit for purpose

    Following on from my piece yesterday about the safety commitments – or lack of them – in the draft 3rd Road Investment Strategy, perhaps the most important comment on the issue comes in a section not about safety but “A technology enabled and enabling network”:

    National Highways should not be over-reliant on technology, for example drawing on insights from the use of cameras and stopped vehicle detection when considering driver safety and welfare.

    For me this is a recognition from government that technology such as stopped vehicle detection (SVD) is not up to the job given to it – keeping people safe when vehicles stop on all lane running “smart motorways” that do not have a hard shoulder.

    It can even be read as a repudiation of “smart motorways” themselves, where the word “smart” was used to imply that their key feature was technology, rather than the removal of the hard shoulder, or at least that the former compensated for the latter.

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  • Safety takes a back seat in Labour’s “draft RIS”

    Ministers have let National Highways off the hook over its continued failings on safety, excusing the company’s failure to meet its 2025 casualty reduction target and allowing it to put its 2040 zero harm pledge back by a whole decade.

    The Department for Transport has published what it is calling a Draft Road Investment Strategy 3, running from April 2026 to March 2031, although the document is billed as a “high-level vision” policy paper and has very little detail.

    The document notes that a consultation on previous papers “revealed that respondents placed the highest importance on improving road safety and environmental outcomes” but offers almost nothing to take these issues forward.

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