Smart motorways: Warning safety tech must improve 'urgently'

Technology aimed at improving safety on all-lane running smart motorways needs to be improved "urgently", the transport watchdog has said.

Radar-based technology meant to improve the detection of stranded vehicles on smart motorways with no hard shoulder is falling short of targets, the Office for Rail and Road (ORR) said.

All-lane motorways are meant to ease congestion but critics say they have led to deaths.

Their rollout was paused in January.

The government is now collecting data on existing all-lane smart motorways to assess their safety before it allows any more to be built.

Stopped Vehicle Detection (SVD) was installed on every existing all-lane motorway by the end of September this year and is one of the measures designed to further improve safety on these types of motorways.

The ORR said that it was too early to see the full effects of SVD given the rapid rollout of the technology in the last few years.

But it said that while SVD had "helped to reduce the duration" of breakdowns in live lanes, it was "not working as well as it should".

Among other things the regulator said that "false detection rates" of breakdowns were too high.

ORR chief executive John Larkinson said: "It's clear National Highways [the agency in charge of motorways ] needs to urgently improve its performance in this area."

The watchdog said that National Highways was now "seeking rapid improvements" to the SVD technology to achieve "the required performance levels by the end of June 2023", and the ORR would take further action if improvements do not happen.

The ORR has also been assessing how well the Smart Motorway Action Plan put in place by the government in 2020 is working.

Under the plan, the government is collecting evidence on smart motorway safety and devising measures to improve their safety.

The ORR says it is too early to draw firm conclusion on success, but notes that "National Highways has achieved substantial improvements in attendance times for traffic officers".

When it comes to response times, where there is more than one mile between safe places to stop, a national average below 10 minutes was achieved for the first time in September.