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The Highways Agency has given the go-ahead to projects to open the hard shoulder on six stretches of motorway.
Motorway hard shoulders to become extra lane
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.
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.
Even so, the contracts for the latest projects come with a price of £2 billion. Carillion appears to be the big winner. The company is working on the present M1 and M6 schemes, the former in a joint venture with Costain.
The new contracts have yet to be awarded, but the Highways Agency has announced that it will work with four partners: Carillion, again; Costain, this time in a joint venture with Serco, a traffic management specialist; Balfour Beatty; and a joint venture between BAM Nuttall, a Dutch-owned UK construction group, and Morgan Est, part of Morgan Sindall. Other companies that were invited to tender for the work have been left out, including a joint venture between Skanska/Amey, Laing O’Rourke, Galliford Try and Sir Robert McAlpine.
Other hard-shoulder schemes may be in the pipeline. The DfT has pledged to open a total of 340 miles of motorway hard shoulders, but several projects have been held up because either detailed development or planning work has not been completed or because the department has not approved the funding.
Those schemes still on the shelf include some of the most heavily congested stretches of motorway around London: the M4 west of the point where the motorway narrows to the notorious bus and taxi lane, to Reading; the M3 between the M25 and Farnborough; the M25 between Sevenoaks and Reigate; and between the A1(M) and the M11 north of the capital. There are schemes planned for the M1 in Yorkshire.
Nirmal Kotecha, the Highways Agency director in charge of the projects, said: “This is about getting the best out of government investment, working in partnership to standardise processes and solutions, and maximising economies of scale in procurement.”
The Highways Agency says that the original M42 pilot scheme had enhanced journey time reliability and reduced injuries from accidents by a monthly average of more than five to fewer than two. Smoother flowing traffic, the agency asserts, also cut vehicle emissions by 10 per cent.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/engineering/article7031317.ece
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