New motorway rules under fire after leaving cars ‘sitting ducks’
Smart motorway rules have been branded a "failed experiment" after a mass outage triggered a catastrophic pile-up. The Telegraph is reporting there was a six-car pile up on a smart motorway while the entire safety system shut down.[1]
A whistleblower revealed how stopped vehicle detection technology crashed,[2] leaving car a 'sitting duck' on former hard shoulder on M6. The National Highways whistleblower told how the system crashed throughout the country on January 19.
Staff lost CCTV functionality, were unable to close lanes to traffic, set speed limits, control electric signs, or use radar technology that detects crashed vehicles for three hours, between 5.25pm and 8.30pm. The anonymous National Highways worker told the Telegraph newspaper today the mass failure caused the pileup on the M6 southbound.
A car was left a “sitting duck” after it broke down on the inside lane and was unable to reach an emergency refuge area on the “all lane running” stretch before it was hit multiple times between junctions 3a and 3 near Coventry. A spokesman for National Highways said the organisation has "well-rehearsed procedures" to deal with smart motorway outages. They said: “As with any technology, there are occasional planned and unplanned outages and so we have well-rehearsed procedures to deal with issues which arise. “We have additional measures to limit any impact on drivers or traffic flow, including increased patrolling by our traffic officers and active monitoring of CCTV.” The whistleblower fumed: “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.” Edmund King, the president of AA, said it showed the "smart motorway experiment"." The AA president went on and explained how the failure showed the government had "failed again".References