UK

Smart motorway safety system suffers outages leaving officials unable to spot broken down cars

Susie Coen
Thu, 23 February 2023 

National Highways staff were unable to use radar to spot motorists who had broken down in live lanes - Andrew Matthews/PA

Smart motorway safety systems were shut down for the second time in less than 48 hours on Thursday night.

The crucial technology is used to detect broken-down vehicles and set red X signals to close lanes on roads where there is no hard shoulder. Broken-down vehicles are left marooned in high-speed traffic until traffic officers reach them.

Because of continued problems in some regions, the system, which is called Dynac, was set to go down for 45-minutes across the whole network except the East and the South East. It comes after a system outage during rush-hour on Wednesday, which saw the software grind to a halt for two hours. In October the safety system went down over a 48-hours period.


National Highways said it had mitigations in place such as using the CCTV camera network and reducing speed limits to 60mph on smart motorway sections.

A concerned whistleblower told The Telegraph: “We have been in tears for 24-hours… people need to stay off our roads tonight. If you break down in a live lane we won't know you are there.”

Officials were forced to use a web-based system to access CCTV cameras monitoring routes - Andrew Matthews/PA

Another said: “We are frustrated at yet another failure… there are dark days ahead I fear.”

Greg Smith MP said: “Yet again drivers on smart motorways will be left in a vulnerable, dangerous place particularly in the event of breakdown with the tech turned off. There’s no way of getting around the reality that the tech isn’t good enough yet and these motorways should be converted to standard motorways.

“If something does happen to someone tonight, those who have presided over this failing technology and its need to be turned off will have serious questions to answer.”

Andrew Page-Dove, operational control director at National Highways, said: “We are experiencing some slow performance of our traffic management systems in the East Midlands, West Midlands and Yorkshire and the North East.

"All systems have remained operational and engineers are working to improve the system speed. We are planning engineering work to take place tonight that will involve a short, temporary outage of our signals and SVD, however CCTV will remain in operation throughout this time.”

Wednesday morning’s failure happened just hours before a parliamentary debate about safety on the controversial roads.

Sarah Champion, the Labour MP for Rotherham described smart motorways as "death traps", adding: "In the name of increasing capacity on the cheap, National Highways have more than tripled the likelihood of serious incidents involving stationary vehicles," Ms Champion said.

Richard Holden, the roads minister, defended the decision to continue the rollout of four new sections of smart motorway. But, he acknowledged the risk of a broken-down vehicle being hit remained a "major concern" for drivers.