Extra emergency areas to be installed on the M1

Around 10% of England's motorway network is made up of smart motorways

Extra emergency stopping areas will be installed on 11 smart motorway sections, National Highways announced.

The M1 in Northamptonshire is one of the routes to get the new measures between junctions 16 and 19.

This project is part of a £900m investment aimed at improving the motorway network by 2025.

The company’s chief executive, Nick Harris, said: “The majority of collisions on our network involve moving vehicles. The minority involve stopped vehicles and the risk of this continues to be higher on motorways without a permanent hard shoulder."

He added: “Most of the interventions we are making such as introducing stopped vehicle detection and enabling increased enforcement of Red X signals, are designed to reduce the risk of a collision between a moving and a stopped vehicle."

Smart motorways contain emergency bays that give cars space to pull off the road when there is no hard shoulder

The flow of traffic is managed on smart motorways through a variety of methods, which included the hard shoulder being converted into a live running lane, and variable speed limits.

Smart motorways without a hard shoulder are three times more dangerous to break down upon than those that keep the emergency lane, National Highways figures showed.