National Highways has said it is ‘urgently investigating’ an unplanned outage of the traffic management system across most of its smart network on Wednesday morning (22 February).
The outage happened from around 8.30am and lasted for around two hours.
LBC reported that an emergency national meeting, including National Highways chief executive Nick Harris, took place, resulting in traffic officers being deployed to the most dangerous locations on the smart motorway network.
National Highways said the South East and East regions were not affected and CCTV remained operational.
Operational control director Andrew Page-Dove said:’We are urgently investigating an unplanned outage of our 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.
I’ll be trying again to prevent the rollout of ‘smart’ motorways & bring back the hard shoulder to those already converted. We can’t let these death traps continues. My debate will be live on Parliament tv at 11am @MotorwaysKill ????????
— Sarah Champion (@SarahChampionMP) February 22, 2023
The outage was unplanned on an unfortunate day, with a Westminster Hall debate on smart motorways taking place at the request of Sarah Champion MP.
She told LBC that the outage was ‘concerning'. She added: ‘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.’
AA president Edmund Kind 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.
‘While somewhat ironic that the systems should fail on the day their safety is debated in Parliament, 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.’
