31 October 2019
Drive Carefully, Now
It’s Complicated
by J.R.Thomas
It’s official. We are all stupid. Stooopid, as Mr Trump might say (though not of, or to, the voters). But in good old blighty, our betters have no hesitation in so saying to the voters, to the people, to their employers. It was basically the message of the Remain campaign (no, that’s not where we are going this week, don’t worry); “look you chaps, you really did not understand what you were voting about when you voted Leave”. (The flaw in that argument is that the Remainer voters didn’t understand it any better.) But now we have an unimpeachable demonstration of how thick we all are. From a man who knows.
Jim O’Sullivan is genius of the week, and he is chief executive of Highways England. He earns £402,000 per annum (after a 10% pay rise last year) and usual benefits. Highways England is a government owned company that operates England’s motorways and major “A” roads. It is not a government agency, which is what it used to be, but it was set free on 1st April 2015 (yes, we noticed the date too) to be a more dynamic and innovative finder of solutions to the problems of the road infrastructure; its words. Remember that next time you are sitting in a twenty mile tailback on the M4. It is not responsible for minor roads, or it would be presumably be Highways and Byways England, nor Scotland, which must presumably have Hi’roads and Low’roads Scotland (tak which’een ye please, och ay).
Mr O’Sullivan has been boss of all that tarmac since 1st July 2015, though one has a feeling that he may not be so for much longer; early retirement may be in his fast lane, time for long driving holidays, perhaps in a slow moving motor-home. For Mr O’Sullivan’s approach to dynamic solutions has gone a little bit array. It is very well being boss of all those roads, millions of cones, signs and gritting lorries, a budget for repairing potholes, and another one for introducing variable speed cameras. But, sad to tell, and even though the revenue from road users exceeds the expenditure on the roads by £35bn to around £10bn (RAC figures), Highways England has not enough money to meet all the commitments that it, or at least its customers – motorists such as you and I – would like it to make. In particular it has very little money to build new roads, or enlarge over-crowded ones – except, oddly enough, in marginal constituencies as general elections approach.
Now, imagine a situation in which your local Tesco is so overcrowded that for large parts of the day you cannot even get inside, and when eventually you do, the queue for the tills is so long that your Walls Viennetta has melted before you have paid for it. What would Tesco do? They would, of course, build a bigger one, or another one nearby. Otherwise they know you would be off to Aldi, or J.Sainsbury, or Waitrose (for wealthy readers). But Highways England, set free as it might have been, is not a proper company at all. It is still owned by the government and its budgets are whatever the government decides to graciously grant it. Or pretty ungraciously, to be honest. And it is a monopoly, a pleasure not granted to Tesco. With roads you do not have a choice run by Aldi (simple and cheap) or Waitrose (beautiful signage and Duchy Organic tarmac). Actually, you sort of do, you could drive slowly and hesitatingly along country lanes instead, but they are the responsibility of local government, and the endless potholes and blind corners make that only too apparent.
So Mr O’Sullivan and his team, strangely symbolically housed in an office building on a one way street in Guildford, have come up with, as they are charged to do, innovative and dynamic solutions to overcrowded motorways even with no money to enlarge them. They have begun converting the hard shoulders of especially busy ones to extra running lanes. At this point driver readers will raise a finger, and perhaps an eyebrow, over the breakfast toast, in consideration that hard shoulders are where you get off the motorway out of the way of all those 90mph BMW’s and 32 ton juggernauts should you break down. And, raising another finger, you may be thinking that on especially busy motorways there may be more persons breaking down and more traffic thundering past. What happens if you break down and you have nowhere to go? Jim and his team thought of this. Cameras and traffic lights over the former hard shoulder. Come to a stop for a puncture or a pee and the camera will note your presence, the message will be received at headquarters, and the red lights on the obstructed lane will come on. Should not take more than five or ten minutes. Say no more than 100 or 200 vehicles will have swerved out of the lane into another to avoid you. You hope. Don’t leave granny or Rover in the car though.
Hope is all you have. On a busy route, or at night, or in rain, or where the back street passengers are distracting the driver, or the Bulgarian left hand drive lorry driver is checking his sat-nav, there is a reasonably good chance they will have not noticed you. Highways England say that as soon as you stop your vehicle you and all your passengers should exit the car and get well clear of the road (good luck in a cutting or on a bridge).
Four people have been killed so far this year because they did not get clear, others have been injured, and there have been a number of smashes. What is the reason for that? Well, says Mr O’Sullivan, sighing in the way civil servants do, the smart motorways are just too complicated for the average motorist to understand. Some are smart during rush hours only; others are smart when the volume of traffic becomes above certain preordained limits; and others are smart all the time. Watch the lights and the signs. Perfectly simple. So simple that it turns out that Highways England has done practically no research into accident rates on various types of motorways or in varying conditions, let alone work out how many vehicles might come up behind a broken down car in the smart lane during the rush hour, and as to how long it might take to get the emergency warnings switched on, or how visible they are in pouring rain and spray. Let alone the ratio of vehicles breaking down in heavier traffic at the very time the hard shoulder has been turned into another 70mph (and the rest) motorway lane.
“These drivers,” Highways England does not say but its leader is rather obviously thinking, “what a bunch of dumbo’s. Roll on the day of the self-driven Tesla.” In the meantime public concern is growing, and the government has ordered a review of how these super-highways are working. Mr O’S has begun some rapid parking and reversing manoeuvres, saying that no more smart systems will be rolled out, though not that the ones in conversion or in place will be amended. “I don’t think we will be building any more dynamic hard shoulder smart motorways” he said last week “They’re just too complicated for people to use”.
