A warning has been issued to all motorists using smart motorways. It comes as an outage is planned to take place on major motorways this weekend.
It means smart motorway signs could be pitch black. This is due to 'essential maintenance' to reboot the Dynac technology which is used by motorways up and down the country.
Birmingham Live reports the outage is set to take place on Saturday night until Sunday morning. It will impact stretches of motorway in Yorkshire, the North East, North West, Midlands and South West. A National Highways worker said: “Saturday night will be Russian Roulette for motorway drivers.
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“I work on the frontline and my colleagues and I are extremely worried that we can’t keep people safe. If someone breaks down while this technology is switched off, we are not able to display electronic signs warning drivers that there's a stationary vehicle in a live lane. There will be no control of signs and signals on every motorway and smart motorway.
“And if the weather is bad, God help each and every driver.” A National Highways spokesman confirmed: "We have engineering work planned overnight on Saturday 28 January, which will involve a temporary outage of our traffic management system lasting three hours.
“We take steps to limit any impact on drivers by carrying out the work overnight and at the weekend when traffic levels are at their lightest, with increased patrolling by our traffic officers, pre-positioned vehicle recovery and active monitoring of CCTV.” Smart motorways were first introduced in England in 2014 as a cheaper way of increasing capacity compared with widening carriageways.
There are about 375 miles of smart motorway in England, including 235 miles without a hard shoulder. According to the AA, they are: "Motorways that use different methods to manage the flow of traffic. They respond in real-time to keep traffic moving when there's congestion, roadworks, traffic jams and accidents."
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