UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has announced the cancellation of the building of new smart motorways, citing concerns over safety and cost.

The move will see 14 planned smart motorways removed from government road building plans, including three earmarked for construction and 11 that are already on pause.

The Department for Transport (DfT) estimates that the construction of these schemes would have cost more than £1bn. Two stretches of smart motorway at junctions six to eight of the M56 and 21a to 26 of the M6, which are already more than three quarters complete, will be completed as planned.

Existing stretches will remain but be subjected to a safety refit, including the installation of 150 more emergency stopping places across the network. Smart motorways involve converting the hard shoulder into a live running lane and implementing variable speed limits, but there have been longstanding safety concerns, with vehicles stopping in live lanes without a hard shoulder being hit from behind.

Around 10% of England’s motorway network is made up of smart motorways. In January 2022, the government paused the expansion of motorways where the hard shoulder is used as a permanent live traffic lane, to allow for five years of data collection to assess safety. The prime minister previously vowed to ban the building of all new smart motorways.

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