Letter: Smart motorways are anything but

I first made comments about this around 2009 where I lived and to the then energy secretary Ed Dim Bulb Davey. Fortunately he no longer exists in a minister form or even MP.

Any normal person with half a brain can work out what can be turned off or what can never be turned off unless nothing is in it. A Smart Meter saves money for them, not you and eventually it will be used to turn you off, change your tariff and see what you use.

They deny this of course. What is worse is this stupid department and the companies have not made sure that the meters fitted by different suppliers are compatible.

So will you now be unable to move easy and may even have to pay for a new meter. Is that what this was designed for? Make you a captive audience and at the mercy of a lot (at least 50 per cent) of unscrupulous utility companies.

I am a utility tart. I move for the savings and make no bones about it every year. And sometimes sooner. I will not be able to do this and I doubt I am the only one.

Just over three weeks ago I went on holiday to the New Forest. A mile or so from where I live they are doing a smart motorway? That’s a joke. It is a slow down motorway and a means to make more money from speeding fines.

Anybody who has gone north past Leeds will know that by the useless gantries and signs and the 50 miles an hour for miles and years.

There is quite a few miles going south as well. The ten miles at 50 miles an hour may not be too bad for the average car driver but for delivery vans and LGVs it must be a burden on time and expense.

The roads may be better after but I experienced over 100 miles, half my journey, going south of 50 miles an hour and it cost me because of the added congestion 90 minutes over an average time. I saw where some of this so called smart motorway had been finished.

Fifty and 60 mile and hour limits over a so called improved motorway. They are put up to ease congestion but get left there all day. It is for councils’ coffers and also at least one chief constable has said he will enforce fines at 72 miles an hour or over the limit that has been put up. It is not for safety we have a smart motorway at all.

Drivers in France and Germany and the other near accessible countries, not eastern Europe, sneer at our roads and that is not surprising. I can go from Dunkirk to almost the Spanish border in the same time it takes me to go from here to Inverness.

Martin Fletcher, Thorpe Hesley