Smarten The Pace

Operation gridlock is on its way to the south of the county, but is it better motorways or better drivers that Hampshire needs?

- Alice Cooke

HIGHWAY bosses plan to turn a 10-mile stretch of the M3 into a ‘smart’ motorway. This means that section of the road will deploy traffic management methods to increase capacity and reduce congestion. How? Methods include using the hard shoulder as a running lane and using variable speed limits to control the flow of traffic. In our case, it will improve the motorway capacity by a third, Highways England (previously the Highways Agency) said.

They originally developed smart motorways “to manage traffic in a way that minimises environmental impact, cost and time to construct by avoiding the need to build additional lanes.” So far so clear. Although there are mutterings in the local press about how this is simply another way to keep an eye on us as motorists, and issue more fines for speeding and the like.

One local resident said: “This is all part of the government’s plans to control everyone, by tracking our movements. Not only is it an invasion of privacy, it is a further erosion of our civil liberties.”