Smart motorway safety technology comes under scrutiny

The technology behind England’s smart motorway network stops working on a regular basis, the BBC says it has discovered.

Figures used by a Panorama programme, reported by BBC News, show hundreds of incidents when crucial safety equipment was out of action.

Obtained via a Freedom of Information request, the figures show that between June 2022 and February 2024 there were 397 incidents when smart motorways lost power, impacting the technology used. These outages sometimes lasted days:

• For five days in July 2023 there were no signs, signals, camera or radar at junction 18 on the M6
• In September 2023, there were no signs, signals or CCTV for five days at junction 22 of the M62
• In December 2023, there were no signs, signals, sensors or CCTV for three and a half days at junction 6 on the M5

According to the BBC, the worst problems were in the latest period covered by the FOI figures. In the six months leading up to February 2024, there were 174 power outages – almost one a day.

The longest outage was at junction 14 on the M4, a stretch of smart motorway that does have a hard shoulder. The sensors and signals were out for 11 days.

Power cuts are not the only problem, the BBC says.

National Highways’ own figures show that in 2022 there were also 2,331 faults on the radar system which is designed to spot stationary vehicles. The average length of the fault was more than five days.

National Highways says the radar detects 89% of stopped vehicles. It adds that the latest data shows that “smart motorways are our safest roads”.

Last year, the Government announced that new smart motorways will be removed from road-building plans due to financial pressures and lack of confidence felt by drivers.

It is also spending £900m on technology to make the existing network safer. 

This package of improvements, first announced in 2020, includes a pledge to install 150 extra emergency areas across the network by next year – safety laybys that motorists can use if they break down.

However, according to the BBC, only 13 have been completed so far. National Highways says a further 34 refuges are under construction.

The agency’s operational control director Andrew Page-Dove says action was being taken to “close the gap between how drivers feel and what the safety statistics show”. 

As well as more emergency areas, this would include education campaigns, and improving the resilience of technology systems.

“Safety is our highest priority and our motorways are statistically some of the safest in the world,” he said.

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