Deadly
Judge blames smart motorway for deaths of two men who were killed when lorry ploughed into stranded car and says tragedy ‘would not have happened if there’d been a hard shoulder’ as HGV driver is jailed for 10 months.
The judge was told how Szuba was driving well within the speed limit, had not been drinking or on drugs and was not distracted by any devices when he ploughed into the vehicles just north of junction 34, near Sheffield’s Meadowhall shopping centre.
The judge was shown CCTV footage of how Mr Murgeanu’s Ford Transit van and Mr Mercer’s Ford Focus had a minor collision on the four-lane motorway and then pulled over into lane one to inspect damage and exchange details.
Jeremy Evans, prosecuting, said that police calculated that the stationary vehicles would have been visible for 7.4 seconds as Szuba’s lorry came round a slight bend and he would have had between 3.7 and 5.2 seconds to react.
Mr Evans said police used footage to calculate that 147 vehicles in lanes one and two managed to manoeuvre around the stranded cars, with some HGVs coming to a complete halt during the five minutes and 51 seconds before the crash.
But the prosecutor said Szuba was travelling at a steady 56mph up until the very last moment before the crash and did not brake or move the vehicle.
Mr Evans said the warning signs above the motorway were not activated and none of the lanes were closed in this time.
He said that the warnings were not automatic and needed to be operated by a controller after being alerted by phone calls or cameras.
Andrew Smith, defending, said: ‘The defendant has always accepted that his negligence, his lack of concentration of three, four, five seconds prior was a significant cause of this accident. But it was not the only cause.’
He urged the judge not to jail his client, saying: ‘He simply did not see it. He should have seen it and he didn’t’
Mr Smith described smart motorways as a ‘wholly inadequate road system’, saying: ‘These roads are simply unsafe’.
Tragic really on so many level’s.
Only the other day there was another between 27 and 28 near where i live lucky for them somehow they survived story here https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-derbyshire-54864717
Question is will the van driver be done for it as well.. I feel it’s all another ploy to eventually take us humans out of the equation and the rollout in it current format needs to be stopped before more people die because of the fact most would be preventable if there was a hard shoulder.
They do not care about the loss of life clearly. Yet the same people wanna save everyone from covid..
Alot of money has been spent changing them and what about us disabled drivers, who even more at risk. Not one driver wants it, but still they going ahead with it..