Managed Motorways

[-Ralph-]

Here you go, a transport related topic...

What do we think of this, and of managed motorways in general?

M1 triple fatal coach crash: Driver Alan Peters guilty
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-be ... s-38001454

OK, he clearly wasn't paying attention and has been convicted for that today.

But wasn't this an accident waiting to happen? Inevitable from the day traffic was put on the hard shoulder, that one day someone would screw up and get it wrong, or indeed someone breaks down whilst the hard shoulder was legitimately open?

Rewind back to 2013 and this is what was on the BBC news pages

M1 managed motorway scheme puts 'lives in danger'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-23810951

[JonnyBravo]

surprised that there have not been more to be honest

like everything else - managed motorways means a job done on the cheap

By the way, as per another thread - the M1 gantry signs were stating max speed 50 yesterday but with hardly any traffic and those new haldecs cameras were having a field day around junction 31

as I was driving north the bloody flashing was like close encounters of the third kind from the south side !

[Nigel]

Total madness Ralph, how can it be a hard shoulder until it's busy hmy: as said an accident waiting to happen!

[boatman]

The whole idea is ludicrous from a safety point of view , NO safe space available until some one on a camera spots a problem , an then there is a time lag till the lane is closed and then another time lag till the drivers see it and react .

You could hardly make it up

[hotbulb]

As JB says, doing a job on the cheap.
I thought that these "managed motorways" had to provide refuge areas every x metres, so that broken-down vehicles were not in the (former) hard shoulder. And given the ubiquity of CCTV keeping a beady eye on all of us, shouldn't the "hard shoulder" have been closed to running traffic because of the stopped vehicle?
Far less serious, but only today our local press is highlighting a whole series of collisions on a stretch of road where the council, in its wisdom, decided to produce a bus lane on a road that was really only wide enough for one lane in each direction and a few parked cars. The collisions seem to occur at side turnings, where the bus lane traffic travels fast and does not see/ is not seen by, the vehicles joining the main road. Short-sighted penny-pinching yet again.

[simonw]

And as an aside, there's no way I would sit in my car on a motorway if it had broken down. I would be well behind the crash barrier, further back down the road (in the direction of oncoming traffic) so that if something did hit it I wouldn't be hit by flying debris. (I always wonder about the risk of standing a little way up the road as you see some people do, since that's the direction everything's going to go flying in if it gets hit.)

[skipper]

surprised that there have not been more to be honest

30 years ago there would have been many more, but cars have become so much more reliable that they can even think to do this.

[Mike101]

This links to the recent tram crash in Croydon....bear with me.

So the report today's said the tram was going too fast when it crashed. The oh so helpful unions said the was because of a lack of safety equipment on the trams. But when any such equipment or ideas are put in place the unions say it's unsafe as it's taking safety away from people!

So back to motorways....people make mistakes. While people are in control of cars the will always crash and some will die. Three lanes or ten...hard shoulder or not..makes no difference.

Put humans in the loop and some will die...this will never change.

Mike

[Mike54]

Did you all know that smart motorways work on the basis of pressure pads in the tarmac? They sense the speed and closeness of the traffic. the closer the cars get the lower the limit gets.

In the case of the speed cameras, if you go under one as it changes say fro 60-50, and you're doing 60, you wont get flashed as they have a minute grace to calibrate.

I was on a speed awareness course recently and they had a guy there talking about it. was interesting. In the case of a breakdown the red X goes up immediately, it doesnt need someone watching a screen to see.

[-Ralph-]

Three lanes or ten...hard shoulder or not..makes no difference.

Put humans in the loop and some will die...this will never change.

Mike

The second statement I have quoted here is indeed true.

But the bus driver in this crash was on a managed motorway, and he thought the hard shoulder was open for use. Had this not been on a managed motorway, he would have known without doubt the hard shoulder was not open for traffic, the accident wouldn't have happened, and three lads would not be dead. So the first of the two statements certainly is not true, it certainly does make a difference.

Humans are already fallible by nature, do we need to introduce more confusion?