Comment: A hard choice for traffic chiefs

Oct 29 2007 Liverpool Daily Post

THE proposal to use the hard shoulder of the M62 during the rush-hour, to help ease problems of congestion, must certainly merit further investigation – even though safety campaigners have rightly raised their concerns about the potential hazards of such a move.

After all, hard shoulders have been around since the birth of the motorways as a convenient place to break down in, and thus enable the free flow of traffic to continue unimpeded on the main carriageways.

Start parking a few broken-down jalopies in a lane used by rush-hour traffic, however, and the prospect of extra accidents has to be acknowledged as a real possibility.

The traffic planners insist that, if this scheme does come about, extra lay-bys will be provided off the hard shoulder to accommodate those drivers unfortunate enough to have come to a full stop.

But, just as drivers at the moment can- not guarantee they will break down by an emergency telephone, so no-one grinding to a halt on a busy hard shoul- der, come the new arrangement, will be sure of doing so right next to a handy lay-by.

Maybe, if closed-circuit TV cameras are in operation in the area, looking out for broken-down obstacles interfering with traffic flow, it might be possible to extend the system of free breakdown recovery currently available on many M-way roadworks and contraflows.

That would then limit the potential for disaster, and keep traffic disruption to a minimum.

If there had not been concerns about broken-down vehicles blocking motor- ways, then hard shoulders would never have been provided in the first place.

Now that traffic planners seemingly want to use the space as a fourth lane at times of maximum use, those concerns are surely still just as genuine as they were 30 years ago.

However, is it better to use the hard shoulder, or rip up the landscape for miles and miles to build an additional two lanes on our motorways, at great expense? Surely the latter idea is a non-starter.