Recently we've encountered some of these new fangled "smart" motorways; basically this means abolishing the hard shoulder to put in an extra lane. Recently while going down to London I was in the inside lane and saw the breaklights of the car in front whioch then ground to a halt and soon the whole lane had come to a standstill. Someone three cars in front had either broken down or ran out of fuel. This led to a tailback in the lane with a whole stream of vehicles trying to pull out into two lanes of fast traffic. How long is it before there are major pile-ups - and how are emergency vehicles supposed to get to the scene when there is no hard shoulder. There is a small lay-by type thing about every 1.5 miles but a broken down vehicle would, in all probability not be able to get to it.
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