Life in the fast lane: On patrol with Highways England on the West Midlands' motorways

“People have put sat-navs on their bicycles and come down the motorway,” sighs Kelly Rudge.

“They will say ‘the sat nav took me this way’. I have also seen people walk their dogs along the motorway.”

As a traffic officer patrolling the region’s motorways, Kelly and fellow officer Andrew Aucock have seen it all.

The ‘bread and butter’ of being a traffic officer – as Kelly, from Wednesfield, puts it – may be dealing with broken down vehicles.

But their working life ranges from the bizarre – like animals wandering the carriageways, to the distressing, like crashes or suicides.

“You do see some things which are not nice,” says Kelly, a traffic officer of 10 years. “I’m a coach so when I’m coaching a newbie, I will say I hope you never have to get to see these things.

“Even if you are not necessarily on the scene of a suicide or fatal accident, we are asked to go and put up incident screens to stop the public viewing.”

In general, the role is to keep motorists safe and traffic moving – and reacting fast to incidents.

Most calls will be to broken down vehicles on the hard shoulder, debris on the road or stray animals wandering onto the carriageway.

As we respond to reports of debris on the M5, we see warning signs and 40mph speed limits flash up on the boards above the road –but also plenty of drivers ignoring them.

“Motorists think these warnings have been up since Christmas or we just do it to irritate them,” says Mark Round, a communications manager, who has joined the patrol today.

Some more short-tempered drivers even vent their frustrations at the officers themselves.

Kelly adds: “It is not just us that get it. The police, ambulance, fire, any service, whether it be on the motorway, or out and about, will get abuse. Unfortunately it is the nature of the world.”

But they have to deal with the bizarre as well as the unpleasant.

“We were waiting at the side of the motorway with a dog, waiting for animal rescue to come along,” says Andrew. “Then the owner drives past and says ‘that is my dog’. It doesn’t sound that bizarre – but for the fact that the dog had gone missing seven weeks earlier in Brierley Hill.

“It was his dog, you could see the look on the dog’s face. How the dog had gotten from Brierley Hill to Junction 6 of the M6, who knows.”

He adds: “We also attended reports of a two car traffic collision where one car had crashed perfectly onto the roof of the other car, due to its shape. There were no injuries.”

Animals can sometimes blindly wander onto motorways and cause havoc. That can include farm cattle, which have escaped through holes in fences – although dogs too can find themselves in the midst of traffic.

“Sometimes people have been travelling on the motorway and they have a dog in the car, and they haven’t secured the dog, and the dog has jumped out the window,” says Kelly.

The scale of the problems can be huge.

“The biggest crash I have been called to was 14 cars,” says Kelly. “They were scattered in various lanes. I hadn’t been in the job long and I thought ‘what the hell do I do here’, but thankfully there was more experienced officers around me.”

The M54 is a particularly dangerous stretch, says Andrew, because the motorway is quiet at night so cars zip along quickly – creating more damage when they crash.

The motorways in the West Midlands carry 36 per cent of the region’s traffic, despite the routes only making up three per cent of the region’s roads.

Some drivers don’t speak English, which presents difficulties.

And handling illegal immigrants is also a regular occurrence.

Traffic officers can get called to reports of pedestrians on the motorway and those people can turn out to be illegal immigrants.

“It can fluctuate, sometimes we get them every week, sometimes we don’t get them at all,” says Kelly. “Generally, we are initially called to a pedestrian and then we find out it is unfortunately an illegal immigrant. At that point we would have to ask for police.

“I have been at a services when they have opened the back of a truck and there was nine of them, and they ust scattered across the services.

“It is a case of the police having to deal with it, we don’t get involved in the chase as such. We just happen to pull up and pick them up on the motorway

.”

Traffic officers have no lawful powers on the motorways like police.

But they can use rolling road blocks to slow traffic to a complete stop when the motorway is blocked.

Each vehicle is packed with equipment so officers can deal with a range of incidents. These can vary from salts for mopping up liquids, to tow-ropes, traffic cones and first aid kits.

There are also small slip roads along the motorway for traffic officers and the emergency services, as a short cut between carriageways.

But more than anything, they want the public to help them ensure the roads are safe places to be.

Andrew said: “If there are signs, if we are putting a rolling road block on, if we are inconveniencing people and if that is how they see it, then there is a reason for it.

“It may not always seem obvious what we are putting in a rolling road block for, but it may be something happening on the other carriageway.

“If there is someone on a bridge, it may be directly affecting the other carriageway. If that person jumps, if you are driving along and see something happening, it can cause a serious incident.”