IN the old days it was very simple. There was a road accident. The damaged vehicles got moved quickly.

The road re-opened as soon as possible. Motorists were by and large happy with the system. It all seemed to work perfectly well.

Then for no apparent reason someone changed the system. Now the delay in opening a major road can leave hundreds of motorists fuming for ages.

I can remember nearly missing a transatlantic flight following a motorway crash. I only caught it because the pilot got held up by the same accident.

I also spent six hours – no, that’s not a misprint- six hours travelling to London from Dorset. Both the M3 and M25 were shut at various junctions by crashes.

So anything that makes life easier has to be a good thing. And this could be it – a 3-D laser scanner. The government wants to spend £3m – with the police chipping in a further £3m – on these devices. That will provide more than 20 scanners on our major routes. They claim this new technology saves officers’ time by making a 3d image of the site and that means crashes are cleared more quickly and roads re-opened faster.

Closing major routes costs our economy £1bn a year. You don’t have to be a maths genius to see this makes practical and economic sense.

The message should be ‘yes we s-can!’