Contesting smart motorway fine

I have seen them as low as 30mph several times which is quite frankly ridiculous. On the M1 when I got stuck for 3 hours because of a fatality and once on the M1/M25 slip road down to 30mph the second one for no apparent reason.

There can be only 2 reasons that the signals have gone this low, the accompanying VMS message would tell you.

  1. If they’d been set manually by a control room op, the message would have, Accident, Obstruction, Pedestrians, or similar. Pedestrians are a big problem at night, you can get a report of peds, drunk, children what-ever, with a marker post location, or even glimpse them on CCTV. This type of ped is obviously a bigger risk than a guy walking down the H/S with a petrol can. It’s not uncommon for kids to play chicken, running across the c/way. As I said in “War & Peace” for something with a known location and high risk, up to 2 signals can be set to 30 mph. They can’t be cleared until the risk has either been removed, or confirmed as ‘no trace’

  2. If it’s been set automatically it would have “Queue” somewhere in the message. It would be in an area that has a speed restriction on already, so the HDS would be set down 10 mph below the limit, if MIDAS is triggered, it can step down up to 2 x 20 mph steps. So the speed restriction in place there is 50 mph normally, HDS is set at 40 mph (no good having it at 50 mph, you’re already restricted to 50 mph, so a signal at that is no warning at all) If MIDAS is then triggered by a queue, it could read 40 mph firstly, then even go down to 20 mph if speeds got that low. and we’ve all experienced stopped traffic that then starts again, but there was no apparent reason for it stopping in the first place, MIDAS is reacting to this, but will need an amount of traffic passing over it to lift the speeds.