A whistleblower at National Highways – the government-owned company that operates motorways and major roads in England – has told LBC that a planned Smart Motorway outage is putting lives at risk.
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The planned outage means that Stopped Vehicle Detection (SVD) is down, this is the mechanism which detects broken-down vehicles in live lanes on smart motorways.
Currently, there is an outage on the M1 between Junctions 39 and 42, with planned maintenance work.
The whistleblower has also told LBC that there is planned maintenance for this afternoon on the M1 between Junctions 30 and 31, from midday until 1:30pm.
Read more: Rishi Sunak scraps smart motorways plan citing soaring costs and a lack of public trust
The National Highways worker told LBC “People need to stay away if they can. It's not safe”.
The smart motorways, which currently make up around 10 percent of England's motorway network, have faced regular criticism since their inception from families who claim countless deaths could have been avoided.
Of the 14 planned smart motorways which are set to be scrapped, 11 are currently paused with a further three earmarked for construction.
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