Whilst cruising at a just about legal 78 mph up the M3 towards London today, I realised that I was on a relatively new ‘smart’ motorway. It made me contemplate what a very useful , if somewhat unexciting word it is. Smart that is, not motorway. It’s a very trendy word with so much of our future being ‘smart’. The Internet of Things is dependant on smart technology; i.e. the ability to control everything, from getting your lazy son/daughter out of bed on time, to opening the garage door from Tasmania, to turning on the oven on the way home from work. All with the flick of an app on your Smart phone. Televisions are ‘smart’. Washing machines, fridges and dishwashers, even whole houses are ‘smart’. In fact about the only thing that isn’t is me. Even Callie the Whippet is quite smart.
Then there are the more traditional meanings. The word could have been invented for a friend of mine. She is never anything other than smartly turned out whether going to a wedding, the office or a muddy dog walk. She is also very smart in the street-wise sense, with bundles of common sense and business savvy. But she is also intellectually smart with an impressive command of five languages and a daunting array of academic qualifications. What she definitely isn’t is a smart Alec. What other five letter word has such multifarious and extremely useful meanings? By chance, as I was listening to the car radio (which doesn’t qualify as smart at all) ‘smart’ cropped up again. What used to be known as The Institute of Advanced Motorists (an august body which upheld high standards of driving) has apparently now morphed into IAM RoadSmart. I suppose in an irritatingly logical way that’s quite clever, but it doesn’t have the same authoritative ring.
The final part of my journey, having waved cheerily at the five miles of stationary traffic on the northbound carriageway, was to turn off the M25 onto the M23 towards Gatwick, with its very smart aeroplanes. For the next fifteen years there will be a 50 mph limit on this section while it’s upgraded to ‘Smart’ status. I have already conceded that my intellectual ability doesn’t merit the accolade ‘smart’, but I don’t believe I’m the only person on this planet who still doesn’t really understand what a ‘smart’ motorway is/does? Does it mean that the tarmac will record my speed and send gleeful messages to the Beak when I’ve (most unusually) drifted a hair over the legal limit? Or perhaps it has sensors at regular intervals that will recognise one’s very dry throat and send a drone swooping down to your window with a bottle of Speckled Hen? Maybe it detects when one of those Herberts has got bored with tailgating to no avail, undertakes on the inside and then gets taken out with an AI laser beam that steers it onto the hard shoulder (that no longer exists!) and holds it there until the long arm of the law arrives to administer summary justice? My personal hope is that what it really means is that the flow will somehow be magically controlled to prevent any delays or holdups and when an accident looks imminent an unseen force will intervene to restore sanity. Who knows, perhaps in 2060 all of those things might happen. For now I think it means, use what used to be the hard shoulder as an extra lane until it’s blocked and then pull out rapidly in front of the approaching leviathans to avoid rear-ending the broken down jalopy. However, I could be completely wrong because there do not seem to be any signs, notices or banners being dragged behind light aircraft to explain what the hell a ‘Smart Motorway’ is.
I know it’s not quite the same, but I think a tube of Smarties might help.
ADayInTheStrifeOf 