Mike Rutherford's column

	As something has to be done about crippling motorway congestion, I concede that some hard shoulders need to be active driving lanes

For once, something is about to be given to, rather than taken from, motorists. At little or no extra cost to us, or the Government come to that, we’re getting hundreds – and potentially thousands – more miles of highway to drive on. And the good news is, they exist already and are easily accessible. Sounds too good to be true? Well, it’s not. Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly has bitten the bullet and concluded that we should all be allowed to drive on hard shoulders... or, at least, some of them.

It’s a desperate solution to the congestion problem. But it needs to be, doesn’t it? After all, it’s in response to an equally critical situation. The quandary is not that we purchase too many cars, because only about half
of us have wheels, and that’s hardly excessive in a wealthy, industrialised nation such as ours. No, the congestion crisis is down to the fact that we’re
not given nearly enough road space to use the motors we buy.

You only need to look at our motorway ‘system’ for proof of that. Car-haters, motorist-loathers and anti-road campaigners lie through their teeth when they complain that our country is covered in concrete. The fact is that considerably less than one per cent of Britain is motorway. And even if it were to double in size, well over 99 per cent of our country would still be non-M-way. But despite this chronic undersupply, we’re not getting any new roads. And that’s why much needed additional driving space somehow has to be created – even though there’s no Treasury funds and fresh cement and tarmac.

That’s where hard shoulders come in to play. Yes, you could argue that it’s potentially lethal to allow moving vehicles to use lanes designed for drivers with debilitating roadside emergencies, such as blown tyres, faulty engines and empty fuel tanks. And hand-on-heart, I couldn’t disagree with that view. But another side of me says that we have to make the best of a bad job. Truth is, we’re a nation with an adequate number of cars trying to use an inadequately small road network, yet we have an almost empty ‘network’ of lanes that lay idle the vast majority of the time. So, speaking as a motorist desperate to see something done about crippling congestion on motorways, I reluctantly concede that some hard shoulders need to become active driving areas.

As far as I can tell, they can and do work safely. I’m a regular user of the M1 in Bedfordshire, M42 in Warwickshire and A2 in Kent, and at all these sites (plus countless others), hard shoulders have been upgraded to driving lane status, temporarily at least. As long as rush-hour limits are pegged to 50-60mph, it’s fine. Drivers and motorcyclists need to exercise a little more patience, but that’s not so difficult. And everyone has to keep an eye on their rear view mirrors for emergency vehicles, which obviously experience added problems when they don’t have dedicated, traffic-free access lanes to travel down.

None of the above worries me. But the Highways Agency does. I’ve already seen evidence that its overhead and roadside signs can be plain wrong when drivers are being told about the availability or otherwise of hard shoulders that can or can’t be driven on. I’ve even made desperate phone calls to the HA, pleading with it to amend some of its dangerously misleading signage.
Unless this organisation learns the art of sending clear and simple messages to drivers, hard shoulders that can be driven on will be an accident waiting to happen.