Editor: Have we gone far enough to stop more being killed on smart motorways?

Personally, I don’t feel safe when driving along a motorway with no hard shoulder. Having read so many stories of families who have lost people in fatal crashes, I have to support their campaigns. That is also the general impression I get when speaking to any Sheffielder about these fairly recently created roads.

So it is great news that the government has agreed to stop creating any new ones for now while enough safety data has been collected to make a sensible decision about it.

MORE HERE: Smart Motorways: Stop them now or more people will die, says South Yorkshire widow Claire Mercer

But wait, wouldn’t you have thought those checks would and should have been taken long before any section of any motorway was changed?

It is completely ludicrous that those measures are only being taken now. In fact, it is insulting to everyone who has lost their life and all of us who have felt unsafe which driving along them.

Some of the victim’s families have described it as a ‘compromise’. I’m not sure when such a thing was ever acceptable when we are talking about the safety of tens of thousands of people a day.

MORE TRAVEL: ‘There is nothing smart or safe about them’ - Decision to halt smart motorway rollout welcomed by Sheffield drivers

How about converting all smart motorways back while we wait for the safety verdict? I am sure most people in South Yorkshire would agree with that and would, in fact, demand such a thing.

Nothing else is acceptable when yesterday’s decision effectively admits that what we now have cutting through the heart of South Yorkshire courtesy of the M1 is fundamentally unsafe.

This shouldn’t be about going for the cheapest option but putting lives at the top of the priority list and making sure we are as safe as possible whenever we drive on any motorway.

Let’s not wait until another person dies to realise that it could have been stopped. Let’s get this right and do it quickly.

Nobody says it better than Claire Mercer, whose husband Jason died following a crash where there is no hard shoulder near Sheffield in June 2019: “Nothing short of giving back the hard shoulder in every single instance will be acceptable.”

If we don’t listen to Claire, what will it take to make us safe?