If you’d told us on June 6, 2019 that we’d be setting up a campaign website about smart motorways, pressing for corporate manslaughter charges against Highways England and initiating a crowd funder to finance a judicial review of government policy, we would have said you were mad! And what’s a smart motorway?
That all changed on June 7. Jason’s death, and that of Alexandru Murgeanu who died with him, need never have happened. Had a hard shoulder still been in place, the minor bump they had would not have left them in a live lane to be crushed by an HGV. And two more families would not be waking every morning realising that the nightmare of their loss is real.
Our pain is all the worse because we know that they are not the only ones to be killed in this way, thanks to the negligence of Highways England and government. Sad to say, we’ve met too many others suffering for the same reason. Tragically, the 44 (that we know of) already killed will not be the last.
That is why this campaign has never been ‘only’ about Jason. Its about Derek Jacobs, Nargis Bashir, Jamil Ahmed, Dev Naran, Alexandru Murgeanu and countless other victims and those to come. Its about putting a stop to these death-traps for once and for all. It’s about drawing a line and saying the government and corporate agencies cannot, and must not, be allowed to play fast and loose with people’s lives so they can cut costs (except the costs of Highways England executive pay naturally).
A balance sheet of the last year looks like this:
- We have had another damning report by the Parliamentary Transport Committee. (The first, in 2016, said that smart motorways should not be rolled out. If it had been listened to, most of the 44 would be alive now).
- We’ve had coroner’s inquests recording the dangers of removing the hard shoulder.
- We’ve had a mass of official statistics showing a huge rise in breakdowns and near misses in live lanes.
- We’ve had numerous great programmes, radio shows and newspaper articles showing massive public opposition to these death traps.
- This helped belatedly force an admission from Transport Secretary Grant Shapps that “too many people are dying on smart motorways”, and his announcement of a “short government stocktake” of evidence on smart motorways (that took five months and was a white wash!).
While this review finally acknowledged the dangers of the so-called “dynamic hard shoulder” model, and its scrapping, nothing has changed. Instead, it compounded the risks–giving the green light to the permanent removal of the hard shoulder by making all smart motorways “All Lane Running”. This is what happens when the government is left to “investigate” an agency it created and in which it is the shareholder.
This policy of reckless endangerment is not changed one iota by promises from Highways England that they might—”funds permitting”! —get round to retrofitting the safety features they promised years ago. Safety features they never implemented in the first place due to “expenditure considerations”
Highways England have used the last months, while the country has been in lockdown due to the pandemic, to press ahead with its programme. Billions of new contracts have been awarded. You can bet that the coronavirus and its impact will be cynically used to explain why those ‘safety features’ are even more unaffordable.
It seems to be a feature that its only due to the efforts of victims’ families, and the backing they get from ordinary people, that gives any hope of justice. Think of Hillsborough, the Bradford fire, the Marchioness disaster and Grenfell to name just a few.
The same effort is needed now to deal with the menace of a motorway programme that effects every driver and passenger and anyone who has loved ones that use or work on motorways. Our judicial review is going ahead. Legal action takes time even when the world isn’t in lockdown.
We have a really strong case and it deserves to be heard. We have to be heard. So please support and help publicise this campaign. If those responsible see their plan to roll smart motorways out on the quiet has failed, and they are going to be proved liable (the only thing they actually care about), we have a chance to stop this before more lives are ruined!
I would like to point out that the definition of a motorway includes the fact that a motorway includes a hard shoulder. Thus a smart motorway would be more accurately classed as a dangerous dual carriageway.
Highways England might find it embarrassing to have to remove the classification of motorway from road maps for their so called smart motorways