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I’ve seen similar on the M4, I had to do an emergency stop, it was awful. How the hell is it safe to do an emergency stop on the motorway?, had my newborn baby in the back of my car.

If in doubt about space in front I refuse to use lane 1 and stay jn lane 2 wirh my 44 tonnes .

When is the great British public going to speak up against their chiefs in charge supposed to look after their lives??

If they are going to charge me £150 to take me 1/2 mile to a "safe place" then I will refuse and wait for my recovery which is free at the point of use! What a rip off!

THE WHOLE BLOODY POINT OF A MOTORWAY IS A HARD SHOULDER!

Smart Motorways do not drive cars and cause crashes. Stupid Drivers do. It's NOT mandatory to drive in the live lane, neither is it mandatory to drive at the speed limit.

Poll - On Smart Motorway would you be able to stop in time if a vehicle 100yds ahead was stopped with parking lights on?

Keep your car properly maintained. There is NO "slow lane". People driving should meet a minimum standard for eyesight, the ones smashing in to other cars and who can't see others in front of them are the ones in need of eye tests. SMART Motorways rely on SMART Drivers, sadly there are not many about, so they blame everything else they can.

They are deadly. Stupid Stupid idea to save money at the cost of lives. Did you know human lives have a value to them?. They calculate the total cost per year that will have to be paid to all the families in compensation or the cost of making hundreds of miles of hard shoulders. Cheaper to pay the families.

"Highways" do not charge a motorist for clearing/ towing their broken down car out of a "live" lane and to a safety bay or other place of safety (from where the motorist can contact their recovery). However if your vehicle has broken down on the motorway network, and you do not have any recovery in place for it, or it cannot be moved by Highways from out of the live lane, they may have to arrange recovery for you via a private contractor, who will take you and the vehicle to a place of safety (usually their compound). Release fee is now approx. £200

I suggest these bloody things shouldn't even be called motorways, let alone "smart".

MOTORWAYS ON THE CHEAP BECAUSE THE MONEY THAT SHOULD BE SPENT ON ROADS IS PEED AWAY ELSEWHERE.

I love your video and especially the commentary. I managed to drive our Toyota Land Cruiser with the oil light on for 2 minutes and onto a grass verge. It was all on the Dash Cam. The lanes were open an HOUR after I got onto that verge. It was said I had broken down in the live lane but the video that will be on You Tube soon shows otherwise. 'They' will lie their heads off to keep hold of that £192 gained by false pretenses and think that is how they should conduct themselves but should they? Are the banks taking a dim view of their antics? YES.

These machines use a lot of water, I’m worried about using it again as my water bill has increased because of it.

So you could of had signals and traffic officers on the way quicker if you called 999 straight away. However the signals on the motorway are a joke , always faulty and not enough education or knowledge on what to do if you breakdown on them. The charge is now £192 called 'Statutory recovery' its mandatory from the government to help clear the motorways and keep things moving. The traffic officers would not of charged you £150 there is more to this story. They either turned up with a recovery truck behind them and they charged you or coned out and waited but they should of took you to the next bay and gave you 2 hours to sort your own recovery out so if that didnt happen then i would complain. Smart motorways are dangerous but also where is all the traffic meant to go? They cant win but need to sort the signals out and enforce ALL cases of red X abuse. - Ex traffic officer. Stay safe!

I think £150 is unreasonable purely because on a normal motorway you would have been on the hard shoulder and able to call a recovery truck to get you to a garage or home (depending on distance) for the around the same price

Lets face it Highways England is populated by Nerds entirely lacking empathy for road users. That's how they got us into this mess.

It makes no sense for the barriers to be so close to the carriageway. Why didnt they leave a grass strip of 3 m width between road and barrier for most of the length of the road. At least you could ditch your car off road in the mud and be relatively safe. It could be towed out after the lane was closed.

Thanks for relating your experience and I'm so glad you weren't yet another victim claimed by so called smart motorways! Maybe your experience helped contribute to the recent decision to cancel this stupid policy but it needs to go further and teturn hard shoulders to all afflicted sections of motorway. I regularly use a section of the M5 that is 'smart', both as a car driver and biker and I hate it. This particular section also has no illumination, which they have been working on for the last 6 years to rectify, wtf can take so long with overhead lighting?! We have been suffering from lane closures for all that time! The M1 was constructed in about 2 years, and that was in the early 60's! One thing that does work extremely well though, speed cameras! Says it all!

A terrible experience for the poster of the video. And when you think about all those A roads with two and three lanes and 70 mph speed limit it makes you wonder why they have no hard shoulder either.

It's horrifying that a motorway lane can be obstructed for so long with so few safety provisions. It only takes one driver who's not paying attention and you've got a serious accident. I live near the Manchester to Leeds section of the M62 and I just don't feel safe using it any more, especially at busy times because far too often there's some fool in an Audi doing 90 in the left hand lane whether it's open or not ! A lot of them seem to think they can use it as an extended exit lane for the next junction, even when it's 2 or 3 miles away, and drive as fast as they like to get there.

There are 3 different smart motorways used in the UK. Which ones are dangerous? Or don't you know how to use them correctly or you not a good driver who is not confident on these type of road. Iam a hgv driver and I have never had any problems on any of the 3 types of smart motorways . May be its you ignorance on signs and you not being aware of whats going on around you. Its the users that make the roads dangerous not the road.

Let's enjoy then a satisfying big bill some years later when your plastic-cheap HP washer will crash :D

There is only one thing that will stop these motorway and it’s a scary thought there will be an accident involving CHILDREN and a lot of them with injury and deaths and after that happens (and it will happen it’s only a matter of time) they will be scrapped and B&Q will be getting a massive order for tins of white paint to put the hard shoulder back in. Also the £150 just to get you to a safe place is discussing…

Took you 12 minutes to call it in …

Did you use any detergent or no

the new smart motorways can detect stopped vehicles though

This is the Tory government for you. When they came in in 2010 there were certainly no "All Lane Running Smart Motorways". Since then these types of motorways are now fairly commonplace & are still growing. Every person with brains know that the Tories are the party of cuts as well as being thick & nasty.

It's the Eastern European truckers, watching their TV's and talking to family back home on their phones, that you have to worry about and which, the highways numpties have clearly not taken into consideration! What if you don't have a phone with you, or can't afford to just cough up 150 quid, do they just leave you in the lane?

100 yards at most should be the gaps

Not so smart motorways!

Your first priority is to contact highways England and tell them you have broke down and tell them exactly where you are, so they can shut that lane instantly

Sorry to hear you had to go thru this Alex. When you hear an intelligent man and sensible driver state there was literally nothing more they could do, they were fearing for their lives and the lives of others should someone hit his stationary car... it says it all really... People should not have to feel this way.. A total loss of power is the nightmare smart motorway scenario... i would guess this would have been even more terryfying had he not managed to get in lane 1. Your then left with the awful decision of deciding whether to stay in the car or get out and run for your life :(

we shouldnt have to pay to be towed off the motorway by highways england due to the fact we all pay tax already so we should be covered through that not to mention that this poor design is not our fault and had there been a hardshoulder we wouldnt need any assistance from highways

They have implemented this in South Wales along the tunnels in Newport due to a lot of accidents there. Problem is, since this system was implemented there has been an increase in crashes but they are adamant it’s a good thing…..i have driven through it before and it’s gone from 60mph straight into 40mph at one point with not enough time to slow safely so it was a load of cars heavily breaking….it’s just awful

I had an experience similar although not as bad, but it wasn't even on a smart motorway! My car was playing up on the m4 in Wales, between Newport and Cardiff so I thought best pull over into the hard shoulder, unbeknown to me that the hard shoulder was about to disappear! I had to quickly slam on my brakes to avoid having to come back out into fast moving traffic. Luckily I didn't hit the barrier or other vehicles but it was very close

Why didt you just keep rolling? at around 60mph you can roll for a very long way probably a mile, no need to come to a stop where you did. Smart motorways are not the problem its the people using them.

And this is NOT in darkness...or fog...or in a snowstorm.....

Drive on them every day no problem 😉

You should have rung 999 immediately not waited 12 minutes! Why wouldn't you take your phone with you, it's the MOST important item in an emergency situation. Your comments are all guess work & supposition & at the end of the day you & the other road users are still alive inspite of your delay in reporting your breakdown. We just have to take your word for all the swerving vehicles as you left you phone in your car !!!

The Engineers who thought this one up ,Should be Sued for it . I always wear a yellow reflecto vest ,incase of bailing out of vehicle

The writers on here, the AA, RAC, Police and others have all said the these "Smart" M-ways are dangerous but the idiots in the back room of DoT think it's good. Maybe they'll think differently if they are in the situation of Alex Petrie and others.

How the person who dreamt up this idea can sleep at night.beats me!!

Unsafe and simply done to save money not lives.

Smart is not the word I would use for these motorways.

I don't see the point of these so-called smart motorways. For one they are very dangerous, for 2 there no point being able to travel faster along a motorway if as soon as you leave the motorway you are stuck in huge traffic jams, it makes more sense to have a constant flow of traffic. So they are completely pointless. Imagine being on a motorcycle and breaking down on one, these things are total madness, but then again it is to be expected when road safety throws out years of learning in the name of modernisation. Roads are not just for cars and trucks.

Dangerous motorway they should call them not smart.

I’ve seen many near misses and I’ve seen the overhead signs saying use hard shoulder (m62 near Harts head services) then I saw a parked vehicle in the hard shoulder, the people were high up on the banking, so the car had been broken down for some while. VERY DANGEROUS! When I was on Facebook and wrote this, they censored my comments.

Dumb motorways + Dumb truck drivers + Dumb oafs at control centres = modern British transport infrastructure. They just couldn’t care less about people’s lives.

I totally agree that these motorways are unsafe so the Government needs to stop this madness before there is a huge pile of vehicles and death. It's time for some common sense to prevail.