RESIDENTS have contacted The Standard to express their concerns over the ‘smart motorway’ which runs between Droitwich and Bromsgrove.
And they claimed adding an extra lane to the busy carriageway at the expense of a hard shoulder was ‘ an accident waiting to happen’.
Wychbold mum Juliet Collins said on her M5 journey a broken down car on the carriageway caused her to swerve out of the way.
“The car had obviously broken down and did have its lights on but there was no way of seeing it until you were right upon it.
“I would definitely say that because there was no hard shoulder it was made extremely unsafe.
“It is supposed to be a smart motorway now but how is it smart by doing away with the hard shoulder?
“It has made it very dangerous when cars break down.”
Another Standard reader Emily Halfpenny said she experienced a similar situation where she was also forced to serve to avoid a parked car.
A Highways England spokesperson said safety was at the heart of everything it did and the UK’s motorways were among the safest in Europe.
He added: “Smart motorways have been carefully designed to maintain or improve safety and are built upon years of experience of operating motorways.
“As well as traffic officers routinely patrolling the motorway network, we use CCTV to check conditions and radars to monitor traffic flows to detect when incidents occur.”
