Smart motorways: Claire Mercer campaigns for smart motorways to be scrapped after her husband’s death

During her campaigning, Claire has found many do not know what a smart motorway is or  where they are.

Transcript

00:00Unfortunately my husband was killed on a smart motorway on his way to work one morning.

00:04It should have only just been a, you know, minor collision, just a bad start to the day,

00:08but because the hard shoulder had been removed it turned into an utter catastrophe in which

00:13two people were killed. When I first started campaigning there was a lot of people that just

00:18dismissed Jason as daft, saying well he shouldn't have stopped there. More of them were kinder,

00:24it was yes but, he shouldn't have stopped there, and I called them the yes buts because they were

00:29all very much, they weren't against me, but it's like yeah but if he shouldn't, he shouldn't have

00:34stopped there if he'd stopped somewhere else. But four and a half years ago we didn't know

00:38anything about smart motorways, there was no signs to tell him he was on a smart motorway,

00:43there was no signs to tell him where the next refuge area was, and it's your legal obligation

00:48to stop after an incident. So I don't even know if he knew he was on a smart motorway,

00:53if he knew he was in a library lane, I've got no idea. I never got to see him again after that

00:58morning.