M42 Active Traffic Management Control (ATMC)

Notes from the Forum at Coventry earlier this month that saw the presentation by Highways Agency on Active Traffic Management Control,(ATMC) currently on the M42 but planned for expansion to other motorways, including the M6 and M40. The Main points were:-

1. ATMC is the future according to Highways Agency for reducing congestion on Motorways. It is 20-25% of the cost of widening and can be done much quicker.

2. The aim is to cut congestion and improve reliability of journey times by increased use of the hard shoulder.

3. When hard shoulder is in use currently max speed limit for all lanes is 50, but there are plans to increase it to 60.

4. When hard shoulder is not in use normal rules apply although variable speed limits can be used on the normal running lanes.

5. Whole area is covered by CCTV and gantries are spaced so that one is always visible. Control centre is manned 24/7.

6. Vehicles don't break down as much as they used to, so hard shoulder is not needed so much for breakdowns.

7. Under ATMC Emergency Vehicles don't need a hard shoulder. Any lane can be reserved for emergency vehicles to reach an incident by means of overhead gantry signs closing the lane to all other traffic.

8. Emergency Refuges are placed approx every 500 metres, breakdowns should try to reach one of these refuges. Refuges are usually next to overhead gantries and have a loop to tell control when a vehicle enters them, also a phone and CCTV coverage.

9. These refuges are deep enough away from the hard shoulder to allow work to be carried out on the offside of a vehicle without the need to close the adjacent running lane as is required by health and safety for hard shoulder offside work.

10. Benefits of ATMC on the M42 include- more free running; shorter journey times; better fuel consumption, 50% drop in personal injury accidents (interesting claim that increased average speeds reduce KSI, which conflicts with the usual claim that a 1mph reduction in average speed reduces casualties by 5%); no KSIs as yet during hard shoulder running; reduced CO, PM, CO2, NOx, and Noise levels.

This is a little disingenuous, as the M42 Southbound congestion from around Junction 8 was made much worse following the construction of the M6 Toll, which resulted in the loss of a lane around Junction 7A in order to provide access to the M6 South. ATMC didn't cure this problem - a new lane was recently constructed, which certainly did help a lot.

11. Overall benefit cost ratio is 3.3 to 1

12. Next applications are to the rest of the Birmingham Motorway Box and then spread across the country (sounds like a back door way of reducing the national motorway speed limit to 50 or 60mph).

13. Major problem with certain motorways is where they have already been widened and hard shoulder is not continuous, for example at bridges where decision was taken not to widen the bridge but to eliminate the hard shoulder there. To make best use of ATMC the bridges would need to be widened to give a continuous hard shoulder.

14. Causes of congestion are: 10% road works, 25% accidents, 65% volume. Congestion costs £20 bn pa.

15. HA is keen to talk to road users, especially companies and associations who might be able to put a link to HA live traffic information on their own websites, also to get feeds via RSS, traffic radio, atlas pro, event management, etc.

Contact:

outreach@highways.gsi.gov.uk

www.highways.gov.uk


Thanks to Robert Bolt who attended the forum and made notes.