A woman who left Nottinghamshire for her home country of Romania after losing her brother in an M1 smart motorway crash says that the "painful memories" mean she can't return. Alexandru Murgeanu, 22, and Jason Mercer, 44, had been swapping insurance details following a minor collision on the M1 in 2019 when they were struck by a lorry.
It happened on a section of road where the hard shoulder was used for traffic - a so-called smart motorway. Smart motorways were brought in to manage traffic in a way that minimises environmental impact, cost and time by avoiding the need to build extra lanes.
But dozens of people have been killed on smart motorways since they were rolled out and the Government said in January that new developments were being paused. Speaking during the Conservative Party leadership campaign, Liz Truss said that where they are not working, she would scrap smart motorways.
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A protest has now been held at the start of the annual Conservative Party conference demanding that Liz Truss keep that promise. Leading the protest was Jason Mercer's wife Claire, 46, who said: "We have had a lot of people coming up to us and expressing their support. Given the number of casualties and families affected by the smart motorways policy, we just don't know why this new Prime Minister would want to inherit the liability from that.
"The pause of the smart motorway roll out was just smoke and mirrors because they decided that 96% of the projects were nearing completion so they allowed themselves to carry on with those ones and only four projects were actually paused. But they need stopping altogether because there's just no way that they can work."
Announcing the pause of new smart motorways in January, the Government said that it would be waiting for five years' worth of safety data to become available. It also said it would invest £900 million to improve safety on existing smart motorways.
But Andreea Murgeanu, who lost her brother Alexandru in the 2019 M1 crash, also believes that smart motorways need scrapping altogether. Andreea lived in Mansfield but left to return to Romania following the loss of her brother.
Speaking to Nottinghamshire Live in Romanian, the mum of two said: "The pain will never go away. My eldest daughter has met Alexandru, but she is starting to forget him. My other daughter has never met him.
"It is heartbreaking because he was such an important person in my life and he would have made a great uncle to my daughters. It is just so devastating to visit his grave with my daughters.
"England was a great place for us. Unfortunately I feel like I can no longer live there because of all the painful memories.
"Life will never be the same for us. Grieving never stops.
"I admire Claire for all her strength. I think she is highlighting such an important issue.
"I wish that no one else will have to experience what we went through. Our pain and desperation will be the others' salvation hopefully.
"Claire has all my support. I could not do what she is doing, she is such a strong and inspiring woman."
Claire added: "You can't understand what it's like going through this unless you have been through it yourself. You always hear the stories where it's a matter of 'X person died on X date' but to grab people's attention, I always tell them that my husband didn't just die, he was smashed to pieces by a HGV.
"We've got another family here today who had to identify their mother after she lost a limb when she tried to get over the crash barrier. The families have to go through the pain of the loss but then also the process of identifying their loved ones after they have been smashed to bits.
"I was losing weight and I was taking really strong medication because of the grief, so I deflected it all into this campaign because people are dying for absolutely no reason. The public awareness about this issue is so much stronger now and so I do think we are starting to get somewhere."
A report by MPs on the House of Commons Transport Select Committee last year concluded that they were "not convinced" about the benefits of all-lane running motorways against the safety risks of permanently removing the hard shoulder. In her comments during the Conservative Party leadership campaign, Liz Truss said: "All the evidence I have seen suggests they're not working. I do believe that the smart motorways experiment hasn't worked."
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