Smart motorways in England were left without traffic management systems for two hours yesterday after an “unplanned outage”.

The technology failure impacted electronic signage and Stopped Vehicle Detection

The technology failure impacted electronic signage and Stopped Vehicle Detection on Wednesday and meant leaving drivers were “left as sitting ducks” according to the AA.

The fault hit all smart motorways in England with the exception of roads in the East and South East.

National Highways said that engineers worked at pace to restore and stabilise the technology and apologised for any inconvenience caused to road users.

It also said it would now urgently investigate the cause of this incident to help prevent a repeat.

No major incidents or serious congestion were reported on the network during the outage and CCTV was still operational.

Andrew Page-Dove, operational control director, added that National Highways had rapidly taken “steps to help ensure the safety of road users such as increased patrols and CCTV monitoring”.

He also said that National Highways had identified and corrected some specific issues affecting the performance of its system in recent months and was looking to further stabilise performance.

But it’s heightened existing concerns on the safety of such schemes and led to renewed calls for them to be axed.

Edmund Kind, AA president, said: “So called ‘smart’ motorways cease to be ‘smart’ when the technology fails, and drivers in dangerous live-lane situations are left as sitting ducks.

“Road users can only have confidence in the systems if the technology works. That’s clearly not the case with the outage today. Some 38% of breakdowns on ‘smart’ motorways occur in live lanes as often there is nowhere to go and these situations, with or without technology, are terrifying.”

He added: “Perhaps it is now time to go back to the drawing board and totally redesign these roads as drivers have lost faith in their safety.”

And RAC head of roads policy Nicholas Lyes commented: “This is deeply concerning. Drivers and our patrols rely on these systems to keep them safe in the event of a breakdown on a live lane.”

The smart motorway technology failure coincided with a debate in Parliament on the safety of smart motorways. The debate was secured by Sarah Champion, MP for Rotherham, whose constituent Jason Mercer was killed on a smart motorway in South Yorkshire in 2019; one of 79 lives claimed on Britain’s growing smart motorway network in the period up to July 2022.

In January 2022, the Government announced it was pausing the rollout of new smart motorway schemes until more safety data on their operation is available. The move followed a Transport Committee report into ALR smart motorways, which said they should never have been rolled out without work on safety concerns and that the Department for Transport and National Highways had failed to deliver on promises to implement safety improvements.

Since then, National Highways has ensured Stopped Vehicle Detection technology – part of a package of safety measures that the Government committed to in 2020 – has been rolled out sooner than planned. But transport regulator the Office of Rail and Road (ORR) said in December 2022 that the technology was “not working as well as it should” and warned that detection rates were below National Highways’ own minimum requirements.