Transport User Voice July 2025 – Chief Executive’s editorial

14 July 2025

Making a difference

This month in Transport User Voice, we feature our annual Strategic Roads User Survey. 

It was easier than usual to spot what the main source of road user concerns were this year. Lots of emergency areas were added to smart motorways in a short period of time.  Almost half of them (73 out of 151) were on the M1 and it became England’s least popular motorway as satisfaction dropped from 69 per cent to 57 per cent. 

It’s a motorway I know well from travelling to Scotland to see my parents therefore the results don’t surprise me.  A journey from junction 16 in Northamptonshire to junction 30 in Derbyshire last year would have meant passing roadworks between about half of the junctions.  I knew what was happening because of my job, but most people would have wondered what was going on, their frustration about the delay often added to by not seeing work being done. 

If you’ve a regular reader of this column you’ll know we constantly grapple with how to make a difference.  We’re not suggesting the work shouldn’t have been done, so the question is could it have been done differently?   We’re unlikely to see a programme of road works quite like this again, but there are plenty of lessons for other road schemes. 

All of the following would help:

• consistently running roadworks at the highest safe speed to minimise delay
• warning people in advance so they can avoid roadworks altogether if possible
• minimising the length of stretches of roadworks and the time they are in place
• providing better signage at the roadside to explain what is going on. 

My sense is that National Highways get this and there was an unusual set of circumstances that meant the programme went ahead in the way it did. We’ll be working with them now to help make sure the lessons are applied to other projects – not just the big ones that make the news, but smaller ones that can have a big impact locally. 

We also shouldn’t forget that the usual issues about journey time and road surface quality continue to be important for road users. 

Enjoy the read. 

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