Question to the Department for Transport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, how many incidents in which a vehicle was stranded in a live lane have taken place between junctions 32 and 35A of the M1 since March 2017.
The Smart Motorway Safety Evidence Stocktake and Action Plan, published in March 2020 considered the number of breakdown incidents by Strategic Road Network (SRN) road type. At a national level, conventional motorways had on an average annual basis 129,991 breakdowns (over 2017-2018), while All Lane Running (ALR) motorways had a total of 22,963 breakdowns over the same period.
The table below records all breakdown incidents that have been recorded in a live lane between junctions 32 and 35A of the M1, in both directions.
Month/Year | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 |
January |
| 70 | 59 | 75 | 81 |
February |
| 76 | 59 | 67 |
|
March | 51 | 102 | 69 | 40 |
|
April | 53 | 69 | 59 | 29 |
|
May | 63 | 88 | 81 | 32 |
|
June | 77 | 80 | 57 | 61 |
|
July | 67 | 82 | 83 | 80 |
|
August | 64 | 79 | 68 | 80 |
|
September | 49 | 74 | 63 | 66 |
|
October | 66 | 80 | 79 | 58 |
|
November | 71 | 93 | 75 | 62 |
|
December | 68 | 84 | 71 | 60 |
|
There has been significant interest in the number of live lane breakdowns on motorways. It is important to note that live lane breakdown data is not a reliable safety indicator to correlate with serious or fatal casualties.