National Highways has opened a new stretch of 'smart motorway' on a scheme that edged into completion just before the Department for Transport put a temporary ban on the controversial road design.
The government-owned company said it had opened an extra lane on each carriageway of the M56 between Junction 6 for Junction 8, following an £85m upgrade.
Last January, ministers agreed to pause new smart motorway schemes while the Government collects five year's worth of data from existing routes.
This did not include schemes more than 50% complete. At the time, the M56 scheme was just over halfway through what turned out to be a three-year construction period.
Following the removal of traffic management, the all lane running section (ALR) will operate a 60mph speed limit, with other interim safety measures in place, until work to calibrate technology, including stopped vehicle detection (SVD), is completed.
It added that the upgrade is then expected to fully open, with the 70mph maximum national speed limit restored, early this spring.
The project started in March 2020 and was originally due to open in ‘spring 2020’. The Office of Rail and Road noted in its Annual Assessment of National Highways' performance 2021-22 that the open for traffic date had moved from quarter four of 2021-22 to quarter two of 2022-23 ‘to incorporate SVD’.
As Highways has reported, the later date, i.e. September 2022 was the original date for National Highways to retrofit SVD to all its existing ALR smart motorways, although it subsequently changed the target to exclude schemes that were in construction.
National Highways has said that it considers SVD to have been installed when calibration has been completed to the point where the national speed limit has been reinstated and operators are able to act on alerts. This is what it means by ‘fully open’.
However, in January Highways revealed that the company has failed to get SVD working properly on any ALR section to which it was retrofitted, including schemes like the M56 that it pledged not to open without the technology.
The four-mile scheme will have four emergency refuge areas, which National Highways said will mean that someone travelling at 60mph will reach a place to stop in an emergency every 74 seconds.
At a spacing of approximately one and a quarter miles, this is slightly longer than the maximum spacing of one mile recommended by the Transport Select Committee.
