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Hard shoulder

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Hard shoulder
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The hard shoulder of the M65.
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The Hard Shoulder (also referred to as a Hardshoulder in official documents) is the reserved strip of roadway on many high speed roads for emergency vehicles, breakdowns, and exceptional circumstances such as running lanes during roadworks. It is an offence to stop on a motorway hard shoulder except in an emergency or instructed to do so by the Police or a HATO.

The origin of the term comes from the very first motorways which had a gravel soft shoulder. These were found to be inadequate when heavy goods vehicles stopped on them and were later strengthened, thus becoming hard shoulders, though their construction was still weaker than that of the adjacent carriageway. The name has stuck ever since, although other countries simply use the term shoulder or breakdown lane.

During the 1980s, when first generation motorways were undergoing major maintenance, hard shoulders were strengthened to a similar construction to the adjoining carriageway to enable them to be used as temporary running lanes in roadworks situations. On new roads, the hard shoulder construction was a continuation of the main carriageway construction from this time.

The standard width of a hard shoulder is 3.3 metres (approx 11 feet), but there can be numerous exceptions where conditions dictate. There should always be a solid white line demarcating the hard shoulder and this should be bounded by a line of red studs. Standard practice is to use a ribbed texture paint for safety purposes - this alerts drivers that they are straddling the marking and leaving the running lanes. These markings are sometimes known as a vibraline or rumble strip and were officially approved for use on motorways in 1987.

On earlier motorways, the hard shoulder was paved with a contrasting surface to the running lanes to provide a visual warning that it was not for driving on. This practice has largely ended, but can still be seen in Northern Ireland.

In 2006 the first Smart Motorway was created, at the time this was called Active Traffic Management and repurposed the Hard shoulder as a running lane. At first most of these would be a 'Dynamic Hard Shoulders', where it would be used for running traffic during peak hours but from 2014 onwards all upgrades have been 'All-lanes running', where by the hardounder is turned into a running lane, however using the overhead gantry any lane can be closed in the event of a incident.

In the Republic of Ireland, a solid yellow line is used on motorways to mark the hard shoulder. They also may be used on all purpose roads including single carriageways, but the marking in this scenario is a broken yellow line. In Ireland it is customary on single carriageway roads with hard shoulders, for slower vehicles to pull onto the hard shoulder to allow faster vehicles to pass.

Early Motorways Without Hard Shoulders

Since hard shoulders became a standard feature on motorways, the following roads have never had them retrofitted or continued to be built without them:

  • M90
  • M275 (lack of space) and M27 through the M275 junction





Hard shoulder
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