Could Liz Truss as PM See the End of Smart Motorways?

 Liz Truss is apparently on record as saying the smart motorway experiment has failed.

Those of us that are forced to drive cars that are slightly sub-par in the reliability dept. know the buttock clenching and clammy sweat that s-called smart motorways produce.

The idea that you have a refuge every half mile or mile would be okay if there wasn't so many things that could immobilise the vehicle immediately. For instance a bad cam or crank sensor will instantly disable the engine. Once stopped it will refuse to crank. 

It may not even be the sensor. There are so many computers in modern cars now that just a simple inability for one computer to communicate with another can cause the car to shut down. Then after that it's a mission to diagnose the fault.

For instance I recently had a problem (one among many) in the cheap Vauxhall Astra I bought earlier this year. The display kept coming up intermittently with "Service ESP" and the engine would lose power until the car ground to a halt. Rather than the ESP, it turned out to actually be the crank sensor that caused the problem. Within metres the car was stopped. Now given my usual perseverance, removing the key and trying to restart the car eventually got it going, until a couple of days later it steadfastly refused to start.

Had that happened on a smart motorway there would be no way I could make it to a refuge. I would be stuck on a live lane of the motorway. With all the inherent risks that involves.

Now, if the use of smart motorways changed and said that the left lane was to be used as a hard shoulder most of the time and then it would be opened up when the speed of traffic got to below (say) 30mph, then you could understand that would be a safer option. But opening up the left lane to traffic travelling at 70mph is just a recipe for disaster.

Hopefully Liz will see sense and  rather than dispense immediately with the billions spent so far on smart motorways, will do the smart thing and use them intelligently. Keep the left lane for broken down vehicles unless traffic builds up to the point it's safe to open the left lane to live traffic.