Normally I like smart things. Smartphones, smart TVs, smartwatches, and Smarties.

There is one smart item that I have been against for years. The smart motorway.

If you haven’t seen one of these let me explain.

Using a little technology, a three-lane motorway can become a four-lane motorway by having the hard shoulder becomes an active lane when it’s busy.

Let’s take a look at that sentence again. “When it’s busy,” you know, when a motorway is at its worst.

The hard shoulder, the thing that is there for emergencies, goes away.

When there are more cars to have accidents or break down, that’s when the place you go to after an accident or breakdown, isn’t there for you.

It’s like making a ship where, when the seas get choppy, the lifeboats disappear.

It’s because of cost.

The cost of turning a motorway into a smart motorway is well under half the cost of adding an extra proper lane, but if you think a road needs to be wider why not do it properly?

In my day job, which mainly takes place at night, I drive the country to perform at stand-up comedy gigs.

I’m on stage from anywhere from 20 minutes to one hour but to get there and back I could be driving for three or four hours.

They say it takes 10,000 hours to be an expert at something, which means I am a far better driver than I am a comedian.

The comments section often agrees.

My experience on the roads shows me how dangerous these hybrid motorways can be. I have been saying how bad the smart motorway idea is on stage, on radio and even on TV just over two weeks ago.

The latest news is that new smart motorways are to be banned. Looks like I have more power than I realised.

I should have said on TV that banks should give free money to blokes called Steve. I may have wasted my one wish.

What do we do about the miles of smart motorways that are already built?

We suffered months of speed limits and delays while this tech was added to the roads. We don’t want to have to suffer again while it’s taken out.

The plan at the moment is that existing stretches will remain but some of them will get extra places for stopping in an emergency.

Maybe they could add lots of those safety spots.

So much so that they join to become some kind of safety lane, on the shoulder of the carriageway, that’s not a soft verge, it’s hard.

Now that would be a smart idea.