Motorists failed by response times on smart motorways

NATIONAL HIGHWAYS was last night accused of failing motorists by taking 14 months to meet its 10-minute smart motorways response-time deadline.

The quango responsible for the roads had committed to reducing the time it takes traffic officers to reach drivers stranded on motorways without a hard shoulder from 17 minutes in 2020 to 10 minutes by July 2021.

National Highways met the target in September, more than a year after its original deadline, with an average of nine minutes and 49 seconds, according to figures seen by the Press Association. The response time relates to stretches of all-lane running (ALR) smart motorways where emergency areas are more than a mile apart.

But grieving relatives yesterday criticised the roads agency, saying “10 minutes is too long” for motorists to be marooned in high-speed traffic.

Simon Jacobs, whose father Derek Jacobs, 83, was killed on a stretch of the M1 with no hard shoulder in 2019, said cars will “never be safe on those lethal roads”.

“My father was killed within seconds of getting out of his vehicle to get behind the safety barrier,” he said. “It’s taken a ridiculous amount of time for them to hit this target which, in my eyes, does little to protect people’s lives.”

Claire Mercer, who started campaign group Smart Motorways Kill after her husband, Jason, was killed on a section of road with no hard shoulder, said: “National Highways failed to meet its deadline by 14 months, but the 10-minute target is not good enough.

“Without the hard shoulder, drivers have the time it takes for the vehicle behind them to reach them, which is seconds not minutes.”

‘It’s taken a ridiculous amount of time for them to hit this target which... does little to protect people’s lives’

Duncan Smith, the National Highways executive director of operations, said: “We have made considerable progress cutting the average time it takes us to attend incidents on all-lane running motorways, where emergency areas are more than a mile apart.”

Stopped vehicle detection technology was retrofitted to all smart motorways.

Additional signs have been installed showing the distance to the next emergency stopping area, and all enforcement cameras have been upgraded.