The car developed a fault in the 3rd lane of the motorway near J28/29 southbound of the M1, on the 24th of May 2020. The car lost power but the driver managed to manoeuvre from the 3rd lane to the 1st with the hazard lights on, but as this was a ‘smart motorway’ there was no hard shoulder. The driver got the car as far over and out of lane 1 as he could, there was a crash barrier stopping him going any further over, so he could not get completely off lane 1. They had only been stopped for seconds when an articulated lorry travelling in lane 1 ploughed into and on top of them dragging them 18/20 car lengths down the motorway. There was no time for the 5 people to get out of the car and over the barrier, there were solid wooden fences next to the barrier at that point of the motorway, so it would have been impossible to get behind the barrier, even if they had managed to get out.
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Highway’s England should be taken to task for culpability and complacency in the way peoples lives are being put at risk every minute of every day the ‘smart motorways’ are left open. They are a death trap, nothing more nothing less.
You can blame bad drivers, you can blame bad luck, you can blame new/old/broken cars but the fact is none of that is the reason this happened. Car faults happen, bad luck happens and in some cases bad driving happens, but the penalty for being on the receiving end of any of that should not be death!
Hard shoulders have been an essential part of the motorway network since motorways were introduced, they are there for a reason, there are strict rules governing their use… for a reason. So why have hard shoulders been removed?
Taking away the hard shoulder and blaming costs, while sneaking in policies by the back door so the public can’t object to what they don’t know about, massaging the facts, paying themselves a handsome wage (costs??) blatantly ignoring legally binding orders; coroners rulings; parliamentary demands and spinning every incident to blame the victims has gone on long enough. This could have killed a mother and her four children!
Imagine having to cope with that, all because the government can’t admit they have wasted billions on a scheme that’s putting lives at risk and maiming and killing people. They would rather victim blame, than admit they were wrong.
This accident would NEVER have happened, if there had been a hard shoulder. Highways England are playing with innocent people’s and families lives.
Smart motorways need to be scrapped immediately, and those responsible for introducing the death trap motorways held to account.
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