Bedford Driving Lessons

The Highways Agency has given the go-ahead to projects to open the hard shoulder on six stretches of motorway. The hard shoulder of miles of motorway will be opened to traffic in a cut-price solution to the nation’s gridlocked multilane carriageways. But the solution — which even in its budget-constrained guise will still deliver a £2 billion taxpayer-funded windfall to six road companies in the private sector — has not yet been extended to many notorious bottlenecks. The Highways Agency has given the go-ahead to projects to open the hard shoulder on six stretches of motorway. Contractors will upgrade hard shoulders to motorway driving standards and then manage the extra lanes, opening them when needed. The Highways Agency is trumpeting the scheme as “congestion-busting” and says that it will improve safety and make journey times more reliable on key sections of England’s motorways. The “managed motorway” contracts come after a successful pilot scheme from 2006, when use of the hard shoulder was tested on the M42 south and east of Birmingham. It remains in place. That led to the go-ahead for two schemes being delivered on the M1 in Bedfordshire and on a stretch of the M6 north of Birmingham. Now, after the Department for Transport (DfT) published a “roadmap” to a more efficient motorway network last year, the Highways Agency has sanctioned the use of additional hard shoulders, including an extension of the M6 scheme further south; on the M1 east of Sheffield; on stretches immediately east and south of the M4/M5 interchange in the West Country; on parts of the M60 and M62 around Manchester; and on another stretch of the M62 south of Bradford. The idea is that using hard shoulders and managing their use is far cheaper than approving huge projects to widen motorways. The DfT notes that the hard shoulders can be delivered faster. More