An East Lancashire mum has called for smart motorways to be banned after a terrifying experience left her traumatised.
Sally Jacks, from Burnley, was travelling home in heavy rain on the M6, after working in Peterborough.
While travelling down the stretch of a smart motorway, which doesn’t have a hard shoulder for cars to use in an emergency and instead has refuge bays around a kilometre apart, her windscreen wiper stopped working.
Sally, a television presenter and YouTuber, said she couldn’t see anything in the battering rain and was forced to journey along the motorway until finding an emergency refuge area.
She said: “I was in the fast lane driving at 70mph in the pouring rain when my windscreen wipers stopped working.
“I couldn’t see a thing. All I could make out was colours. Eventually I managed to make it over into the left lane.
“I saw yellow in the distance and wondered if it was an area where I could pull off and stop. I took a chance by pulling into it and it just happened to be an emergency refuge area.”
After calling a breakdown service the windscreen wiper was fixed but the reality of the scary situation began to dawn on Sally.
She said: “I was shaking while driving home but I just had to 'get back on the horse' and face my fears, bringing a positive mental attitude to the situation.
“I was on the phone to my husband telling him about what happened. He said in all the years I have been with him he has never heard me like that on the phone.
Sally Jacks talking about the smart motorway experience on her YouTube channel, Sally Jacks TV Mum (Image: Sally Jacks)
“I truly thought I was going to die, that is the closest I have ever been to feeling like that in my life and it was horrific.”
Sally even posted a tearful video about the experience to her Instagram followers.
In the video she said: “This is not fun. I am absolutely shaking like a leaf.
I’ve not had an accident… I am getting a bit teary.
“I am on the M6. It’s raining and my windscreen wipers stopped working.
“I have never had anything like this happen to me before.
“These M6 smart motorways are shocking because they don’t have hard shoulders.
"There was nowhere for me to go and I couldn’t see what I was doing… that was awful and so scary.”
Sally said the experience stuck with her and a doctor said she had PTSD from the experience.
She said: “I went to bed that night and I was having quite bad nightmares.
“I woke up dripping in sweat, shivering with cold sweats and I had to use the sick bowl. When I stood up I collapsed.
“I thought I must have eaten something off but my husband and the doctor think it was delayed shock.
“My whole body felt like I had been beaten up.
“The doctor called it PTSD and said it related to my body’s sympathetic nervous system, which is linked to the body’s fight or flight response.”
Sally is now calling for smart motorways to be scrapped and is in talks with AA president Edmund King, who has been vocal about his dislike for smart motorways.
She said: “They are the unsmartest creation ever – they are so idiotic and I can’t get my head around them. I can’t believe someone has signed this idea off.
“Everyone on my social media is saying the same thing.
“The left lane on smart motorway needs to be used as a hard shoulder once again. Those in charge need to use their common sense and think about the lives at stake.”
Earlier this month Rishi Sunak announced the building of new smart motorways is being cancelled due to concerns about safety and cost.
Fourteen planned smart motorways, including 11 that are already paused and three earmarked for construction, will be removed from government road building plans, given financial pressures and in recognition of the lack of public trust.
Campaigners welcomed the move, but demanded the government now return the hard shoulder on existing conversions.
The government has since said reinstating hard shoulders on existing smart motorways would be “too disruptive” and cost a “significant” amount.
The Prime Minister’s official spokesman insisted the existing road network is safe but acknowledged: “People do have concerns about how smart motorways have operated and a significant proportion have said they don’t feel confident on these roads.”
He said £900 million will be spent adding further safety features to smart motorways already in use.
“We think that’s the right approach rather than adding in hard shoulders, which would be extremely disruptive to the public trying to go about their day, both for road users for local communities, and that obviously would come at a significant cost to the taxpayer,” he said.
Around 10 per cent of England’s motorway network is made up of smart motorways.
They involve various methods to manage the flow of traffic, such as converting the hard shoulder into a live running lane and variable speed limits.
But there have been long-standing safety fears following fatal incidents in which vehicles stopped in live lanes without a hard shoulder were hit from behind.
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