Safety technology on smart motorways is failing to work properly, the regulator has said, with one in three broken-down vehicles missed – and three in four detected in England proving to be false alerts.
National Highways has retrofitted stopped vehicle detection technology (SVD) across all smart motorways without a hard shoulder, after increasing public and political concern about safety.
However, the regulator, the Office of Rail and Road (ORR), said the radar-based system was missing critical performance targets in every region.
False alarms were “substantially above the required maximum” of 15%, the ORR said, at 75%, with five in six alerts flagged in the Midlands region proving to be incorrect.
Meanwhile, in some regions, fewer than three in five of vehicles which had stopped were registered by the system. Overall one in three stopped vehicles were missed.
And only one of National Highways’ five regions detected stopped vehicles within the target time of less than 20 seconds, with some taking more than a minute on average.
Smart motorways, most of which allow all lanes to be used by traffic instead of having a hard shoulder, are statistically the safest type of roads in Britain. However, the government committed in 2020 to an action plan to improve detection and refuge areas, after a series of deaths in harrowing circumstances where people in broken-down vehicles were hit by other vehicles.
The ORR chief executive, John Larkinson, said: “Our previous work on smart motorway data has shown that these roads are as safe as the motorways they replaced but the number of live lane breakdowns are higher.
“Having the SVD radar detection equipment in place sooner than planned has helped to reduce the duration of these breakdowns more quickly but it’s not working as well as it should.
“While it is still too early to have robust data, it’s clear National Highways needs to urgently improve its performance in this area.”
Motoring organisations said that the findings of the report were concerning.
The AA president, Edmund King, said: “Vulnerable drivers have been left stranded in the most dangerous of places, the live lane of a motorway. If there are doubts about the technology, then the motorways are not smart and we should revert to tried and tested methods.”
Steve Gooding, the director of the RAC Foundation, said: “Whilst it is good news that stopped vehicle detection has been rolled out ahead of schedule, it will remain a concern that it hasn’t yet been fine-tuned to do as much good as it should.”
The National Highways chief executive, Nick Harris, said: “Our roads are among the safest in the world, but every road death is a tragedy and we know there’s more we can do to further improve safety.
“The report acknowledges the good progress we have made in a number of areas, including completing most of the actions in the smart motorway stocktake action plan.”
