UK roads

• Roads enable the transport of people, goods and services. They are crucial to the UK economy. The roads connect towns, cities, communities and our businesses. 
• roads have economic benefits such as allowing businesses to grow, local economies to thrive and with that, new sectors and jobs to be created.​
• In 2014, the government initiated a £15 million 'Road Investment Strategy' that aimed to increase the capacity and improve the condition of UK roads, using a number of different methods including smart motorways.
• government Plans included:

  100 new road schemes by 2020,

  1300 new lane miles added,

  and extra lanes added onto motorways to make smart motorways.
• in 2023, allocations of an £8.3 billion long term plan has been set to resurface 5000 miles of roads over the next 11 years.​
• A smart motorway is a section of a motorway that uses traffic management to increase capacity and reduce congestion in particularly busy areas. 
• Regular motorways have 2,3 or 4 lanes plus a hard shoulder for emergencies.
• Smart motorways are motorways that can be converted so that the hard shoulder is opened up in busy times. This was meant to help reduce congestion and reduce travel times, but instead it meant it was more dangerous as if people broke down there was nowhere for them to go, and so people would crash into them due to travelling at high speeds.
•  it meant that emergency vehicles could not get past easily and had to wait in the same traffic as everyone else
• in 2022 there were 24 deaths on the uk smart motorways alone.
• In 2023 the government cancelled the building of any more smart motorways which stopped 11 schemes and 3 earmarked for construction.​