Published 19th Apr 2023, 11:45 BST

Thank you for your recent reminder (The Yorkshire Post, April 6) of the needless carnage caused by death-trap roads – the name given by Rotherham MP Sarah Champion to “all-lanes-running” motorways with no hard shoulder.

Your report was prompted by the inquest into the deaths of Derek Jacobs, whose car broke down on the M1 in March 2019, and Charles Scripps, passenger in the car driven by his wife Jean, which hit Mr Jacobs and was then itself hit.

This inquest was depressingly similar to the January 2021 inquest into the deaths of Jason Mercer and Alexandru Murgeanu, hit by a lorry on the M1 in June 2019 when they stopped after a minor collision.

An emergency refuge area on the M3 smart motorway near Camberley in Surrey, as nearly seven in 10 drivers want the hard shoulder reinstated on smart motorways despite Government objections over disruption and costs, new research suggests.

In each case the coroner said, correctly, that if there had been a hard shoulder the accident could have been avoided. And in each case a police witness said, incorrectly, that the “biggest factor”, or “main causation factor”, was inattention by the driver of the vehicle which killed the victims.

Accident prevention professionals see things differently - for example, defining the “basic cause” of an accident as the cause “that, when corrected, would result in long-term prevention of similar incidents”.

That surely locates the main cause of the M1 deaths in the hard shoulder’s removal, not driver inattention. If there had been a hard shoulder, Jean Scripps would have driven safely past Derek Jacobs’ stopped car and nobody would have died. Whereas, if Jean Scripps had not been there, the former hard shoulder, now “all-running” Lane One, would still be a potential death trap.

So it seems both unjust and fatally misguided to direct blame on to the luckless drivers, and away from National Highways which oversees the death-trap roads - but is exempt from prosecution because, grotesquely, it does not owe drivers on these roads a “relevant duty of care”. Why not? - when it doesn’t merely fail to care for motorway users, but operates a system which actively puts them in harm’s way, resulting in 79 avoidable deaths since 2006.

Transport ministers and National Highways now say they will not create any further death-trap roads. And they boast of new technology to monitor the risks of existing ones. But that’s like saying “Yes, the tiger’s cage is unsafe, but it’s all right because whenever the tiger gets out we’ll blow a whistle”.

In reality there is only one way to make motorways without hard shoulders safe, and that is to return their hard shoulders.

Hard shoulders must be restored on all smart motorways: Yorkshire Post Letters