I was coming out of Liverpool on the M62 when the overhead matrix informed me that the A11 was closed at Elvedon. Now with the best will in the world it would have taken me 4 to 5 hours to get there if I was going in that direction, which I wasnt.The very same morning I was travelling east bound on the A14 when I came upon a massive west bound hold up, I made a point of looking back at a westbound matrix it read DONT DRINK AND DRIVE. Who the hell is responcible for these bloody things,. is there anybody in there?? If their is a vacancy give me a call,If my job was Matrix Man I would only have to listen to Sally traffic or the Welsh Gal and I would be a hero with all road users. Come on HATO’s tell us what the devil is going on with these monuments to waste.
Ah yes at last one of my pet “hates”- Matrix signs and the inability to use them correctly (or at least sensibly)!
My favorite two of this last week;
02.00am, M6 near to Corley MSA -
“Queue Ahead” folllowed by “Accident, Lane Closed”
Yeah your right - about 9 bloody hours ago!!! I know this because I was stuck in the jam caused by rubberneckers going the other way (pet hate number 2). I doubt there was even an errant pebble in the road to cause any problems
Various times overnight, M42 all the way east between M40 junc to M6 junc
“Workforce in Road”, the inside lane closed and due to their lovely variable speed limit with the cameras (which I think works during the day) “40mph” with “20mph” at junctions.
Fine I hear you say, lets protect the workforce and yes I will agree but for one problem - THEY ARE ON THE OTHER BLOODY CARRIAGEWAY AND HAVE BEEN ALL ZBING WEEK!!! In fact you are pushing me closer to them by closing a lane. Are they that shortsighted that when its dark they may stumble across 50 to 60 feet of motorway into my lane having crossed 3 active lanes and a central reservation■■? If so they deserve to go across the front of my truck!
Yep been like that for ages now.
Nothing around or very little at 1 or 2 in the morning and 20 mph [zb] silly and its only at the on slip they drop it then back up to 40 within 100yrds
Nice try. L. 
Well here’s a good one. For those of you that know the Dartford tunnels. Right bore is higher than the left bore, so double deckers and other trucks of the same sort of height use that one. Well at night they sometimes close the one on the right, either because they are cleaning it, or it’s being used by southbound traffic because the bridge is closed. One night, coming up the M3, heading for Thurrock, no messages on the Matrix (M3 or M25) until I get to jnct4 (Bromley) of the M25, which said QUOTE " Height restriction Dartford Crossing Northbound" Well thanks for letting me know in time you idiots 
so that I could go the other way
I can see the point in having signs a long way from where a major route is blocked to allow for early decisions on an alternative route.
I also realise that predicting how long a road will remain closed can be difficult for the powers that be.
I must say that a lot needs to be done to make these signs more relevant and kept UP TO DATE.
If a major closure is 5 hours drive away from a matrix sign and is estimated to be causing problems for 3 hours then what is the point of activating the warning on that sign 
Putting safety driving messages on them is a good idea when they would otherwise be idle - for a lot of ‘average’ motorists, they will break up the ‘boredom’ of a journey and perhaps make them ‘think’ but to profesional drivers they are, in most cases, informing of nothing new and like anything that is of no relevance to a professional driver, it should be dismissed and something more important will be concentrated on.
This is called selective relevance from good observations which the majority of professional drivers (especially drivers of large vehicles) do very well 
The idea of the matrix signs are great but they are only as good as the managers who control them.
On my Saturday morning trunk to Brighton,there is ALWAYS some matrix sign lit up on the M25 with either a 50 or 40 speed limit between J16 and Heathrow,then nothing else,no de restriction,nowt.At 05.00 on a Saturday morning,I can’t see any reason for it.
And a little earlier on the M42 at around 03.00,is getting a bit of a joke.
Yeah the M42 ones make my blood boil. Do they really think it takes 4 mile to slow down from 56 to 40? So you gotta sit there on an empty motorway at 2am trundling along cos you don’t know which signs have the camera, watching the odd chancer flying past and wondering why he doesn’t get flashed, and thinking what does he know that i don’t? Only to find that there’s just one wheelbarrow in the middle of half a mile of roadworks and no bloody work force! Grr. And to top it off there’s another sign which says ‘Distance to M40, 8 miles - 7 minutes’ Yeah right, not at this rate pal.
ROG:
IPutting safety driving messages on them is a good idea when they would otherwise be idle - for a lot of ‘average’ motorists, they will break up the ‘boredom’ of a journey and perhaps make them ‘think’ but to profesional drivers they are, in most cases, informing of nothing new and like anything that is of no relevance to a professional driver, it should be dismissed and something more important will be concentrated on…
They should put something useful on them - like the rugby score, or better still updates from Eastenders, the lotto numbers, or something similar! 
for the past few weeks on the first one going westbound A14 after orwell bridge it has been saying
“keep left unless overtaking” well some drivers do need to be told dont they…and 1 yesterday cant remember which sign or where it just said “snow” hhmmmm yeah i know i am driving in it…
Talulah:
ROG:
IPutting safety driving messages on them is a good idea when they would otherwise be idle - for a lot of ‘average’ motorists, they will break up the ‘boredom’ of a journey and perhaps make them ‘think’ but to profesional drivers they are, in most cases, informing of nothing new and like anything that is of no relevance to a professional driver, it should be dismissed and something more important will be concentrated on…They should put something useful on them - like the rugby score, or better still updates from Eastenders, the lotto numbers, or something similar!
I personally would like to see something like “recipe of the day” displayed on these signs.
Obviously it would need to be spread over three or four signs to give me chance to write it down accurately, after all I’d be travelling at 70 or 80 with my fuse out and watching my dvd, so I’d hate to miss a vital ingredient 'cos that’d be a disaster at my next dinner party.
I agree about the ones on the M25. I’ve travelled it in the early hours with barely any other vehicles on the road and yet there are 40mph and “queue caution” signs up. Of course, the little traffic that is using the roads ignores them and brakes hard before the camera gantrys.
No doubt five hours earlier, there was a problem, but they never seem to remember to shut down the signs.
This, I find, leads to a culture of people who have no regard for what these signs say when they are on, whether there’s a problem or not because a fair proportion of the time they are woefully inaccurate. Like the story of the boy who cried wolf.
I bet quite a few accidents are caused by people ignoring the signs though.
We all have gripes about these signs so what is the solution
The latest one I’ve started seeing at M25 J25 is
Use Headlights in Tunnel
complete with flashing lights which distract everyone into thinking there might be some useful (yeah right) info there. If they want you to use (dipped) headlights why not put a conventional sign nearer to the tunnel mouth.
time to set a sign i think
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It was hard to read the matrix sign so I made it a bit bigger using the HTML code trick - Hope you don’t mind
unfotunatley,whilst they are a good idea,the very purpose they were as far as im concerned designed for is now redundant,because of the above mentioned reasons in this thread.i very rarely believe what the signs are telling me now,they are nearly always well out of date,or incorrect.pity.
I tend to agree - no information is better than incorrect information.
They are all useless, but you cannot blame the matrix sign, there is some useless overpaid pillock from the Highway Taliban sat behind a keyboard.
I regularly come across these signs in france, either the mobile ones or the fixed gantry. useful messages like:
Voiture En Panne 8km.
Accident Direction Paris10km.
Travaux, Ruelle Droite Ferme 2km.
Here we have. M5 closed. Where? What Junction?
B2784 closed after A24 Where the hell is that?
Long Delays. How long? How much longer? when did that message go up?
They do not help in the UK unless you count the rhyming messages in Scotland, Twenty’s Plenty. or others about drink driving or seatbelts
Another rant from a trip to the shop yesterday. I drove to Ilkeston and just near the shopping centre there was a traffic jam. It was caused by a council truck parked near a roundabout. He had a big flashing arrow, orange lights and a mile of cones causing havoc.
At the end there was no-one else working, the driver was busy reading the Sun while sat in the cab. It is a zb joke
ROG:
I tend to agree - no information is better than incorrect information.
Slightly off the main thread, but in addition Rog’s comment, don’t we have the same problem with traffic info from the radio stations?
How many times do they say M…or A… closed northbound, your at the same point going the other way and nothing there 
Not even wreckage on the hard shoulder
These long range signs are set by the NTCC (National Traffic Control Centre), we usually have nothing to do with setting them UNLESS there is a major incident in our area, we will ask our control centre to contact them and get vital information displayed on them. The Highways Agency runs the NTCC, but the signs are nothing to do with HATO’s we are are a just a small department of a large government agency