Drivers kept at 50mph after smart motorway failure

According to The Telegraph, whistleblower says ‘extent of the problem is not known’ with warnings deaths could occur because technology is not foolproof.

Motorists driving on smart motorways were forced to obey 50mph speed limits after a “secret” technology failure meant cars that broke down in live lanes could not be detected.

A whistleblower has leaked a classified memo which urged National Highways staff to be “vigilant” after a critical life-saving system failed in the West Midlands during the Easter holidays.

The email shows that an investigation was launched and a “major incident” declared as bosses admitted “the extent of the problem is not known”.

It adds: “The worrying thing is that presently the IT community do not know why this happened.”

This latest failing has again led road safety campaigners opposed to smart motorways – where the hard shoulder is turned into a fourth lane – to call on the Government to scrap the controversial schemes that have been linked to numerous fatalities.

Coroners have warned that more deaths could occur because replacing the hard shoulder with so-called “emergency refuge areas” and relying on technology such as “stopped vehicle detection” (SVD) radar is not foolproof.

The Telegraph has established that on April 17, the SVD radar covering much of the West Midlands suffered “reporting irregularities”.

On April 24, staff in control centres saw an “increase in the number of potential missed detections”, a National Highways source said, adding how there were “concerns about whether the [radar] technology was detecting stopped vehicles appropriately.”

As a result, gantries across both the West and East Midlands imposed lower speed limits, often 50mph, with roadside messages advising how the computer system, equivalent to the motorway network’s air traffic control, was “experiencing an issue”.

The leaked memo explained how “vehicles clearly in [a] live lane for some time” were found by “slow” means, such as traffic officers on patrol or CCTV monitored by staff in regional control centres.

Normally, SVD radar spots stranded vehicles in the path of high speed traffic prompting staff to set Red X signs on gantries to divert traffic into other lanes as help arrives.

The leaked memo states that there were “40 or so” instances where cars that came to a halt in a live lane were not detected. It adds how “the extent of the problem is not known and it may be wider than the West Midlands, and it could be more frequent than is being noticed.”

The whistleblower, speaking on condition of anonymity, said: “National Highways has no way to fix it and is not telling people about it.”

The problem was solved on April 25 after it was concluded that a stretch of the busy M6 between junctions 10a and 13 – from the exit towards the M54 and northwards to Stafford South – was the area affected by the outage.

Claire Mercer, whose husband, Jason, died because the hard shoulder had been turned into a fourth lane and his stranded vehicle was not detected, said that when the technology on smart motorways fails they become “dumb”.

“Every time a whistleblower shines a spotlight revealing that there have been yet more problems with the technologies running smart motorways we get the same response from National Highways saying it has ‘well-rehearsed’ procedures for such events,” she said.

“But the truth is, there are very different ghosts in the machine of layered technologies monitoring smart motorways. There are faults that they just don’t know how to fix, but they won’t admit it.

“To add insult to injury, they constantly refuse to inform the public when such a dangerous environment is even more dangerous than normal.”

A National Highways spokesman said: “Road safety is our absolute priority. That’s why smart motorways use numerous technologies to control traffic and keep people safe.

“We experienced a localised issue with Stopped Vehicle Detection on the M6 in Staffordshire. This did not impact on our ability to set signs and signals, and CCTV systems remained fully operational.

“SVD is meeting its key performance targets and when intermittent faults occur, we have well-rehearsed procedures to make sure all drivers can continue to get around safely.”

On this occasion, the incident did not culminate in any collisions or injuries. The Telegraph has revealed numerous occasions when technology has failed on smart motorways.