HGV's can often reduce the flow of traffic in the 3rd lane of smart motorways, essentially creating a bottleneck. The Government should restrict HGV's to the first two lanes. During busy times smart motorway signals can be used to restrict access to the third lane.

Varying speed limits on motorways is a helpful way of controlling the flow of traffic, but we believe that the fact that HGV's swap lanes to overtake slower vehicle creates a rolling roadblock for other road users, restricting line of sight for everyone else in order to adjust their driving for traffic movements ahead. Restricting HGVs to the first two lanes could be run as a trial on selected motorways to determine the impact.