Insiders report that a “computer glitch” caused the safety system to shut down in a “catastrophic failure,” which resulted in a horrifying six-car pile-up on the M6.
A car was left like a ‘sitting duck’ after breaking down on a lane on the southbound M6 on Jan 19, leaving the vehicle stranded on an inside lane, which used to be a hard shoulder.
In the bombshell revelation, a whistleblower claimed that the National Highways’ systems ‘crashed’, disabling radar technology that could pick up the broken-down vehicle in the life-threatening incident, which lasted for three hours.
The car was unable to move to the emergency refuge area and was hit by vehicles between junctions 3A and 3 near Coventry, The Daily Telegraph reported.
Minor injuries were sustained by those involved in the incident; the whistleblower described the fact that no one was killed as “pure luck.”
Only the South East and East of England’s control centres were still operational when the others went offline.
The malfunction prevented control room employees from using CCTV cameras, setting speed restrictions, putting up electronic signs, or closing lanes to oncoming traffic.
The anonymous insider told The Daily Telegraph: ‘We had no stopped vehicle detection systems, no CCTV, and no control of signals and signs.
‘The fact no one was killed is pure luck.
‘Thankfully, God was watching over them, because we certainly weren’t.’
Campaigner Claire Mercer, 47, who has urged the government to scrap all smart motorways after her husband, Jason, died on the M1 in 2019, said that it was only a matter of time before lives would be lost on the perilous motorways in a ‘preventable tragedy’.
She told the paper, ‘How many more terrifying system failures and live lane breakdowns are taking place that we do not hear about?
Ms Mercer added that in this case, the driver on the M6 had moved as far left as possible but was ‘left like a sitting duck’ because there was no hard shoulder.
She added, ‘That technology failure meant a breakdown became a mass pile-up. When Dynac and its safety systems fail, smart motorways become dumb motorways.’
The safety systems, which detect malfunctions on roads without a hard shoulder and manage the network’s CCTV to identify individuals in danger, shut down 41 times throughout the course of the previous summer.
However, there were 52 distinct days between April and August 2023 when there were 541 hours of uninterrupted power supply, with eight sites experiencing outages longer than 24 hours.
Frequent malfunctions in a safety system pose a greater risk than the absence of one.
Sensible people developed the hard shoulder for a purpose. It didn’t rely on control rooms or computers to keep drivers safe, and sometimes thinking outside the box isn’t the best course of action.
This kind of system is a danger because it means one is too busy looking at the next speed limit, signage, speedometers, and cameras, slamming on the breaks when it changes abs, and looking out for the car behind you instead of keeping your eyes on the road.
The whole purpose of these ‘smart motorways’ is that eventually, they will charge people for every mile they drive; that’s why they don’t want to get rid of them.
The money spent on creating these complex motorways would have been better spent on educating drivers on how to use the lanes that already exist.
It angers me that these motorways were foisted upon us, telling us they were safe when common sense tells us that a dedicated hard shoulder is safer, and our elite could never achieve a decent transport system because they lack even the basic intelligence required to design one.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 