After billions of pounds of our hard earned taxes have been spent, the government have decided that there isn?t enough evidence to suggest smart motorways are as safe as they first thought, so they?re canning the rollout of any new smart motorway schemes for five years.

The plan is to spend the next five years gathering safety data from the hundreds of miles of motorway that is already ?smart?, before deciding whether or not it was a massive waste of money. Speaking of wasting money, keen to throw away some of the cash the Department for Transport are saving by pausing the rollout, they?ve vowed to spend £900 million to improve safety on all existing smart motorways. No, that?s not a typo; nine hundred million pounds, on roads they?ve already spent Christ-knows how much on ?making safer?. The cost of turning a normal motorway into a smart motorway is in the region of £10m per mile. Ludicrous, I know.
A smart motorway, for any of you ruralites out there, is an ?all lane running motorway?. It?s the ones that have variable speed limits and occasional red crosses on the overhead gantries. The idea is that at busy times, they can open up the what would have been the hard shoulder to help the flow of traffic. This only works if nobody ever breaks down though. And people obviously do break down. That?s why on a lot of these so-called smart motorways you have different speed limits every few miles; and of course the confusion that goes with it.

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