'Death Trap' Smart motorway outage lasts for two hours after national crash of systems

22 February 2023, 10:20 | Updated: 22 February 2023, 13:25

By Henry Riley

@HenryRiley1

Britain's 'Smart Motorway' system crashed for two hours today, with National Highways 'apologising for any inconvenience caused'

The DYNAC system, which operates gantries and signs on most smart motorways, the SVD system (radar-based stopped vehicle detection), and electronic smart motorway signs and signals all went down from 8:30am until 10:30am.

LBC can reveal that an emergency national meeting, including Chief Executive Nick Harris, took place which resulted in traffic officers being deployed to the most dangerous locations of the motorway stretches.

A source at National Highways said the outage affected most smart motorways in England however those in the South East and East were unaffected. CCTV was still operational during the outage.

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Currently, there are currently 44 stretches of smart motorways in operation or under construction, all located in England.

There are roughly 375 miles of smart motorway currently in operation, 235 of which do not have a hard shoulder.

The campaign group Smart Motorways Kill estimates that 79 people in total have been killed on these stretches of the motorway.

The last time there was an unplanned outage, was in October – that lasted for seven hours – and LBC revealed exclusively last month of a planned outage that affected these stretches for five hours.

Labour MP Sarah Champion, who was leading a debate on Smart Motorways, told LBC that the outage this morning was "concerning', adding "National Highways should be putting out emergency notices on the overhead gantries when there are issues such as this… why don’t they tell us? How are we meant to trust them? It staggers me".

She went on to call for the "hard shoulder to be reinstated with immediate effect", adding that "Ministers know smart motorways are death traps".

Andrew Page-Dove, the Operational Control Director at National Highways, said “We are urgently investigating an unplanned outage of our traffic management system that took place this morning.

“Engineers worked hard to get the system back online as soon as possible and we apologise for any inconvenience caused. We have well-rehearsed procedures to deal with issues which arise. We rapidly took steps to help ensure the safety of road users such as increased patrols and CCTV monitoring.”

Claire Mercer, who lost her husband Jason on a Smart Motorway, told LBC "yet again there is another outage... how much longer can this go on for."