International traffic experts have been descending on a Portakabin village by the side of the M42 in Solihull to visit what is probably the smartest piece of motorway in the world.  This 17 km stretch of the M42 between Junctions 3A and 7 is wired up with over 500 kms of cabling, scrutinised by 300 cameras and spanned by over 50 plug and play gantries, all designed to get more cars flowing on the existing network, safely.

 

With an astonishing 80 per cent increase in traffic since 1980 and new road construction up only 10 per cent for the same period, it is clear to any driver that roads are becoming ever more crowded. Something has to change before we descend into perpetual gridlock.  In this pilot scheme near Birmingham, the Highways Agency think that Active Traffic Management (ATM) may hold the answer.

 

The idea is to use the existing motorway capacity more efficiently in two basic ways, firstly by increasing the number of vehicles carried at peak times by slowing traffic, (cars can drive closer together when travelling more slowly), and secondly by treating a normal 3 lane motorway as a four lane motorway when required, by utilising the hard shoulder, expanding capacity by 25 %. With costs for widening a motorway by one lane running at around £30 million/Km, and the consequent environmental and economic impacts of increased land use and disruption, the Highways Agency hope that this £6 million a kilometre pilot scheme will produce the tools to stop the entire system from grinding to a halt.

 

‘We chose this particular piece of motorway because over 120,000 vehicles a day use it, congestion is already an issue, and it serves both the NEC and Birmingham airport, ATM is a suite of technologies, and we expect to apply elements at other key location,’ says Paul Unwin, business manager of the scheme for the Highways Agency (HA).

 

Nabil Abou-Rahme is a specialist in driver behaviour working for the HA managing consultant on the project, Mouchel Parkman, ‘One of the reasons for deploying so many cameras in the pilot is to understand just how drivers are using the motorway.  Motorways were built to facilitate through traffic making strategic long distance journeys, but our Automatic Numberplate Recognition (ANPR) cameras on every junction slip road are showing us that many drivers are ‘junction hoppers’, local commuters.