SMA (Stone Mastic Asphalt)
Here are some reports about the type of road surface that is being blamed for road traffic accidents.
Oddly enough a classic example can be read here and involves the B1077 in Suffolk.
Oddly enough a classic example can be read here and involves the B1077 in Suffolk.
Last November, ex-music teacher Jane Bramhall was driving home from her weekly choir practice. She was using a road she has known for the last thirty years, the B1077 in Suffolk, her car was a well-maintained Ford Fiesta - a model known for its excellent road-holding - and at 60 years old she's no boy racer.
Suddenly, and for no reason that she could think of, she found herself skidding out of control. The car mounted the bank, crashed into a hedge, hit a tree and fell back into the road on its side. The car and the seat-belt did their jobs, and Jane was unhurt although she was unable to free herself from the car.
Luckily another car appeared, and four local men quickly extricated her and then pushed her car onto its wheels again and moved it off the road. The police arrived, and breathalysed her. She phoned her husband who arrived 15 minutes later to be told that as Jane was unhurt and her breathalyser test was clear, the police would be taking no further action and would not even be recording the accident.
All well and good, you might think. True, once the insurance company had declared the Fiesta a write-off and sent her a cheque, it cost Jane another £3,500 of her own money to replace it with a similar car. She paid the money, took delivery of another Fiesta, assumed that there must have been mud or some spilt diesel on the road, and got on with her life.
Imagine her surprise, then, to be driving down the same road again in February and noticing that another driver had crashed into her hedge and her tree. What a coincidence!
Jane stopped, went into the nearby farm and spoke to the owner. He told her an astonishing story.
Since the beginning of the year, he said, no fewer than seven cars had left the road at the exact same spot, damaging his property. One had crashed into the farm office beside the road, narrowly missing the farm manager. Another had ended up in the farm pond and the driver had disappeared so that the farmer himself had to pay for it to be removed. A hundred yards down the road at a sharp bend, another two cars had crashed.
In January this year the Telegraph published this article about a road surface material called Stone Mastic Asphalt (SMA) which had been banned in most European countries but is still in use in the UK. The Highways Agency had found that SMA was dangerously slippery, and recommended that it should be banned here too, but the government ignored them, and so did many local authorities - including Suffolk County Council.
The B1077 was resurfaced last year with SMA.
One of the ingredients of this material is an oil-based substance that remains slippery until it is worn off the surface of the road by the passage of traffic. How long this takes depends on the amount and weight of traffic using the road. It can take up to two years - or, in the case of the strip between the wheel tracks of four-wheeled vehicles, where motorcyclists can be expected to ride, never. The Telegraph report makes it clear that motorcyclists in particular have been coming to grief on this surface, and even horses have unaccountably slipped over on it.
And do Suffolk County Council realise how dangerous they have made this road?
Well, if the police routinely do not record accidents unless someone is injured or there is an opportunity for a prosecution, it's hard to see how those responsible for the upkeep of our roads can possibly learn whether their road surfaces are behaving properly. In this case, Suffolk's SMA roads are plainly not fit for purpose. It can only be a matter of time before someone is killed by them - and the County Council don't have a clue about it.
Jane Bramhall is not one to take things lying down, however. She's contacted MPs, local councillors, the Chief Constable and the press, and appeared briefly today on BBC "Look East". Already the telephone has started ringing as viewers call to tell her about their own experience of these potentially lethal roads.
Of course we can guess what Suffolk County Council's reaction will be. First they'll try to tough it out. They'll blind us with science, or just brazenly claim that SMA is safe.
Then they'll impose a speed limit on the offending road. They're good at that in Suffolk, dreaming up new and unnecessary speed limits. At the end of 1995, Suffolk County Council introduced 450 new 30m.p.h. speed limits, many of them on roads where no driver would expect to see them - clear, uncluttered roads with good visibility and few if any houses. The following year, fatalities on Suffolk roads rose by a staggering 69%, a truly shameful figure and the worst for six years. Despite pressure from the public and the condemnation of the County Coroner, did the County Council even consider that they might have been wrong? Well, no. The limits are still in place and widely ignored.
But they won't have learned from this experience. Speed limits are cheap, you see, and resurfacing a road is costly. They'll just duck their responsibility for providing Suffolk residents with safe roads to drive on, and put the blame on individual motorists. So far as Suffolk County Council are concerned, once you get behind the wheel, you're on your own.
Suddenly, and for no reason that she could think of, she found herself skidding out of control. The car mounted the bank, crashed into a hedge, hit a tree and fell back into the road on its side. The car and the seat-belt did their jobs, and Jane was unhurt although she was unable to free herself from the car.
Luckily another car appeared, and four local men quickly extricated her and then pushed her car onto its wheels again and moved it off the road. The police arrived, and breathalysed her. She phoned her husband who arrived 15 minutes later to be told that as Jane was unhurt and her breathalyser test was clear, the police would be taking no further action and would not even be recording the accident.
All well and good, you might think. True, once the insurance company had declared the Fiesta a write-off and sent her a cheque, it cost Jane another £3,500 of her own money to replace it with a similar car. She paid the money, took delivery of another Fiesta, assumed that there must have been mud or some spilt diesel on the road, and got on with her life.
Imagine her surprise, then, to be driving down the same road again in February and noticing that another driver had crashed into her hedge and her tree. What a coincidence!
Jane stopped, went into the nearby farm and spoke to the owner. He told her an astonishing story.
Since the beginning of the year, he said, no fewer than seven cars had left the road at the exact same spot, damaging his property. One had crashed into the farm office beside the road, narrowly missing the farm manager. Another had ended up in the farm pond and the driver had disappeared so that the farmer himself had to pay for it to be removed. A hundred yards down the road at a sharp bend, another two cars had crashed.
In January this year the Telegraph published this article about a road surface material called Stone Mastic Asphalt (SMA) which had been banned in most European countries but is still in use in the UK. The Highways Agency had found that SMA was dangerously slippery, and recommended that it should be banned here too, but the government ignored them, and so did many local authorities - including Suffolk County Council.
The B1077 was resurfaced last year with SMA.
One of the ingredients of this material is an oil-based substance that remains slippery until it is worn off the surface of the road by the passage of traffic. How long this takes depends on the amount and weight of traffic using the road. It can take up to two years - or, in the case of the strip between the wheel tracks of four-wheeled vehicles, where motorcyclists can be expected to ride, never. The Telegraph report makes it clear that motorcyclists in particular have been coming to grief on this surface, and even horses have unaccountably slipped over on it.
And do Suffolk County Council realise how dangerous they have made this road?
Well, if the police routinely do not record accidents unless someone is injured or there is an opportunity for a prosecution, it's hard to see how those responsible for the upkeep of our roads can possibly learn whether their road surfaces are behaving properly. In this case, Suffolk's SMA roads are plainly not fit for purpose. It can only be a matter of time before someone is killed by them - and the County Council don't have a clue about it.
Jane Bramhall is not one to take things lying down, however. She's contacted MPs, local councillors, the Chief Constable and the press, and appeared briefly today on BBC "Look East". Already the telephone has started ringing as viewers call to tell her about their own experience of these potentially lethal roads.
Of course we can guess what Suffolk County Council's reaction will be. First they'll try to tough it out. They'll blind us with science, or just brazenly claim that SMA is safe.
Then they'll impose a speed limit on the offending road. They're good at that in Suffolk, dreaming up new and unnecessary speed limits. At the end of 1995, Suffolk County Council introduced 450 new 30m.p.h. speed limits, many of them on roads where no driver would expect to see them - clear, uncluttered roads with good visibility and few if any houses. The following year, fatalities on Suffolk roads rose by a staggering 69%, a truly shameful figure and the worst for six years. Despite pressure from the public and the condemnation of the County Coroner, did the County Council even consider that they might have been wrong? Well, no. The limits are still in place and widely ignored.
But they won't have learned from this experience. Speed limits are cheap, you see, and resurfacing a road is costly. They'll just duck their responsibility for providing Suffolk residents with safe roads to drive on, and put the blame on individual motorists. So far as Suffolk County Council are concerned, once you get behind the wheel, you're on your own.
Daily Telegraph report regarding SMA and Motorcycles.....
Are cheaper new road surfaces lethal? George Saunders reports
It seems strange that so few people are making a fuss about the fact that local authorities in Britain have, for the past 10 years or so, been resurfacing roads with a material that is so lethally slippery that its use is banned elsewhere. One of the ingredients of this material, Stone Mastic Asphalt (SMA), is an oil-based substance that remains slippery until it is worn off the surface of the road by the passage of traffic. How long this takes depends on the amount and weight of traffic using the road. It can take up to two years - or, in the case of the strip between the wheel tracks of four-wheeled vehicles, where motorcyclists can be expected to ride, never.
In a reply to a petition to the Prime Minister to have SMA banned in this country, it was admitted that the Highways Agency had, in the early 1990s, conducted trials but "decided not to continue its use following concerns regarding skid resistance". Later in that decade, the Government apparently decided it knew better than the experts and reversed this decision.
The BBC then aired a number of programmes drawing attention to "the hidden menace on Britain's roads" and the Transport Research Laboratory carried out another investigation into SMA, concluding, among other things, that "dry friction on new asphalt can be lower... by up to 30-40 per cent at intermediate and higher speeds", and also that, "at very low speeds, wet friction can exceed dry friction" (ie, it is less slippery when wet than when dry). Believe it or not, one of the recommendations was that a warning about newly laid road surfaces should be included in the Highway Code, which suggests the TRL recognised there was a problem but was not confident the Government would do anything about it other than issuing advice.
I have first-hand experience of the dangers of SMA. As a 70-year-old retired police inspector who has ridden motorcycles for 54 years, I am an experienced rider. But just before noon on a sunny day in November 2006, I was riding a Moto Guzzi Breva 750 at about 45mph along an almost deserted A1244 in Essex when a car some distance ahead indicated to turn right. I reached for the brake lever to check my speed slightly, and a split second later found myself bouncing along the road, sans motorcycle. I broke my left wrist so badly that I was kept in hospital for four days. A police officer who attended the scene could find no sign of gravel or diesel, but said the road surface "felt greasy". It had been resurfaced six months previously with SMA.
I have since learnt of a number of instances where vehicles have gone out of control on SMA, sometimes with fatal consequences. The British Horse Society has succeeded in having several stretches of SMA-surfaced roads treated with quartzite grit, because horses were losing their footing on it.
SMA has a few properties that would appeal to local authorities - it is cheap and quick to lay - but does this justify being so reckless about the safety of road users?
Are cheaper new road surfaces lethal? George Saunders reports
It seems strange that so few people are making a fuss about the fact that local authorities in Britain have, for the past 10 years or so, been resurfacing roads with a material that is so lethally slippery that its use is banned elsewhere. One of the ingredients of this material, Stone Mastic Asphalt (SMA), is an oil-based substance that remains slippery until it is worn off the surface of the road by the passage of traffic. How long this takes depends on the amount and weight of traffic using the road. It can take up to two years - or, in the case of the strip between the wheel tracks of four-wheeled vehicles, where motorcyclists can be expected to ride, never.
In a reply to a petition to the Prime Minister to have SMA banned in this country, it was admitted that the Highways Agency had, in the early 1990s, conducted trials but "decided not to continue its use following concerns regarding skid resistance". Later in that decade, the Government apparently decided it knew better than the experts and reversed this decision.
The BBC then aired a number of programmes drawing attention to "the hidden menace on Britain's roads" and the Transport Research Laboratory carried out another investigation into SMA, concluding, among other things, that "dry friction on new asphalt can be lower... by up to 30-40 per cent at intermediate and higher speeds", and also that, "at very low speeds, wet friction can exceed dry friction" (ie, it is less slippery when wet than when dry). Believe it or not, one of the recommendations was that a warning about newly laid road surfaces should be included in the Highway Code, which suggests the TRL recognised there was a problem but was not confident the Government would do anything about it other than issuing advice.
I have first-hand experience of the dangers of SMA. As a 70-year-old retired police inspector who has ridden motorcycles for 54 years, I am an experienced rider. But just before noon on a sunny day in November 2006, I was riding a Moto Guzzi Breva 750 at about 45mph along an almost deserted A1244 in Essex when a car some distance ahead indicated to turn right. I reached for the brake lever to check my speed slightly, and a split second later found myself bouncing along the road, sans motorcycle. I broke my left wrist so badly that I was kept in hospital for four days. A police officer who attended the scene could find no sign of gravel or diesel, but said the road surface "felt greasy". It had been resurfaced six months previously with SMA.
I have since learnt of a number of instances where vehicles have gone out of control on SMA, sometimes with fatal consequences. The British Horse Society has succeeded in having several stretches of SMA-surfaced roads treated with quartzite grit, because horses were losing their footing on it.
SMA has a few properties that would appeal to local authorities - it is cheap and quick to lay - but does this justify being so reckless about the safety of road users?
