Rotherham widow on smart motorways campaign: 'I won't shut up and go away'
It's after the government said all new roads without a hard shoulder will have technology to prevent crashes
A South Yorkshire campaigner tells us she'll still take her fight against smart motorways to the High Court, despite government promises of new safety measures.
The Transport Secretary confirmed yesterday all new roads built without a hard shoulder will have technology installed to detect stationary vehicles.
Claire Mercer's husband Jason was killed on the M1 in South Yorkshire in 2019 - ever since she's been campaigning to get smart motorways scrapped.
She says she won't rest until the hard shoulder is brought back:
"Technology is never going to be a suitable replacement for a physical hard shoulder. How does the technology help ambulances through four lanes of stood traffic to get to an emergency scene? How does technology help a broken down car get to the nearest refuge area, potentially two miles away?
"The government have been giving little concessions here and there, all the way through, since the begining of our campaign, offering to make improvements here and improvements there. Because they think that'll mollify us and make us shut up and go away.
"We're not going to shut up and go away."
Fourteen people were killed in 2019 on motorways where the hard shoulder was either permanently removed or being temporarily used as a live running lane, according to Sunday Times analysis.
An action plan launched by Transport Secretary Grant Shapps in March 2020 included a deadline of rolling out Stationary Vehicle Detection across the entire network by March 2023, but this will now be completed by September next year.
In a written ministerial statement, Mr Shapps said:
"Great Britain has some of the safest roads in the world and, although per hundred million miles driven there are fewer deaths on smart motorways than conventional ones, we are determined to do all we can to help drivers feel safer and be safer on our roads.''
But Claire Mercer will continue her legal challenge to get them scrapped altogether.
She tells us she won't rest until the hard shoulder is brough back:
"We are now going to the High Court. We will be filing for a judicial review. They need to be well aware that the public opinion on this has been growing and growing exponentially. People were uninformed about what smart motorways were and I think that was a purposeful strategy because you can't object to what you don't know about.
"But now people do know about them and they're against them in massive numbers."