But who could have guessed having no hard shoulder would be dangerous?

bossab, maybe put a summary of the article in the header.

I assume the Stupid Motorway is a bit like the Information Superhighway, but specifically for bossab and his ilk.

Not much to say: motorways without hard shoulder more dangerous than those with shocker !

Many of us said so, here on JTT, when they were first proposed. See, the Government could save trillions on expensive think tanks, were they to peruse UK News.

The fucking idiots.

We need a new Dr Beeching to review our motorways and decide which ones need to be abandoned to make way for the next generation of popular, money making, tax generating transport.

When new motorways are built, they just fill up with more cars.

Induced demand. And Khan's going ahead with the Silvertown tunnel, it's crazy.

The Department for Transport will just see them as a cheap way of getting an extra lane at a lower cost rather than building a proper motorway.

These stats are a bit dubious. The motorways with no hard shoulder are by definition the busiest, with the least distance between vehicles. Doesn't that make it inevitable there will be more accidents per kilometre than the rest of the network? Seems there's a bit more number crunching to be done.

You have to ask yourself what the rationale was for hard shoulders in the first place.

I think the only difference now is that cars are more reliable. But that's somewhat cancelled out by the huge increase in traffic.

Motorways everywhere in Europe have hard shoulders (or at least only use them for traffic intelligently). Just using them as a new lane all the time is bound to have a negative safety impact.

Sure - just questioning the validity of what appear to be pretty raw figures. There's a tradeoff involved here between capacity and safety, no question.

Yup. I think there's definitely a place for intelligent rush-hour hard-shoulder use.

This is just doing it on the cheap though.

What else do you expect? The UK isn't overburdened with money, space or a streamlined planning system.

The real answer, of course, is for people to drive less.

#14 that's a political choice, really (the money bit).

#14 that's a political choice, really.

Yes. But it's the choice that has been made. With the result we have.

Also the planning bit. Planning laws aren't laws of nature.

#15 brings up lots of other questions such as the rise of modern suburbs with shit public transport and local amenities so everyone basically needs a car anyway.

Yes. These smart motorways are a symptom of a much wider problem. But again, I think we have to dive a bit deeper than that article does to decide whether they're really as terrible as it seems to be suggesting.