Weight of Traffic The Motorway: Life in the Fast Lane

232 miles of road,

carrying over 40 million vehicles a year,

the M6 is the longest

and one of the busiest motorways in Britain.

24/7, 365, the M6 is solid, every day of the year.

Outside Birmingham, it meets four other motorways,

and keeping them running is a constant battle

for time and resources.

There are a 101 different jobs on this motorway,

yet not one motorist is aware of what we do.

A hidden army of men and women work day and night...

Have you ever laid down on the M6?

I have.

And I've played football on the M25!

HE LAUGHS

..whatever the weather.

On the M5 you'll find your money,

on the M50 you'll find the porn.

Every day, they set out to control the chaos...

Wait there!

HORN BLARES

Jesus!

..and to help us when things go wrong.

2-1, can I have an ambo please?

Trying, at all costs...

..to keep Britain on the move.

Oh, God! Please! Oh!

I think my tyre's blown.

They should call it the Mad 6 instead of the M6!

I need a wee, Mummy!

Rush hour, on the M6.

SHE GROANS

I hate traffic!

I mean, just look at it.

This is every single day I do this, what a nightmare.

Might as well put our brake on and just sit here.

On a good day, 50 minutes,

on a bad day, a waste of,

and it is, four hours.

Just to let you know, you've got an abnormal load coming down that arm.

Traffic flow across the West Midlands is constantly monitored

by the Highways Agency regional control centre.

It's difficult to call it a rush-hour nowadays.

Between the hours of half past four until about seven thirty,

we're probably rush two, three hours.

Oh, yes, three lanes of queuing.

That's what I get stuck in this time of night, it's absolute mental.

The M6 carries up to 140,000 vehicles a day,

double the amount it was designed for.

Here we go, look at the nightmare.

It was never built for this many cars.

It was never built for anywhere near this amount.

Three kilometres of congestion from a five-vehicle RTC.

In just that stretch alone, you've maybe 5,000 vehicles

travelling through there at one time.

Probably 50,000 cars, stuck in traffic, in that rush period.

HE LAUGHS

It's ridiculous!

Drivers on the motorway, it's a routine that they do every day

so that's the way they're going to go, and everybody goes that way.

So, we're stuck.

We've just observed an HGV broken down in the running lane there.

On the ground, a team of traffic officers tries to clear anything

that might add to the congestion.

Lima two, two.

Two, two, this HGV's suffered an offside rear flat,

unable to move it.

When things go wrong

the control centre must decide how best to keep the traffic moving.

He's going to cause a bit of congestion,

especially at this time of the day.

Probably looking at 6,000-7,000 vehicles in three lanes

trying to get past.

Yeah, Rob, if we need a lane one, facilitate this tyre change,

are you happy for us to put it on?

They're asking for a lane one closure

to help getting the HGV moving again.

-RADIO:

-'Yeah, not at this point in time,

obviously, we've got severely heavy traffic flow,

'we've got congestion back to, like, junction four

'so, no, not at the time being, over.'

Yeah, no probs, thank you.

Just to get one HGV moving would affect hundreds, if not thousands

of people, so I can't justify putting a lane one on for them.

It means he's going to have to wait until probably 7pm, until the

congestion is reduced to an amount where I'm happy for it to go on.

Someone's not happy, either the crew or the driver, or somebody.

But my aim is just to keep the majority moving on the road.

The M6 is at the heart of Britain's motorway network.

We're on the highest point of Gravelly Interchange

in Birmingham, commonly known as Spaghetti Junction.

This junction here is over the motorway network

because, where it is, it's the centre of Britain, really.

Got the M6 north and south going directly below us.

Off to my right you've got the Aston Expressway,

the A30, A10, the interchange with the M5,

or straight on to the north,

Wolverhampton, Walsall, Manchester.

Or onto the M42, or further still onto the M1.

24/7, 365, the M6

up through the West Midlands is solid

every day of the year.

Two, three o'clock in the morning, it's busy.

You know, it just never stops, ever.

The M6 is now over 40 years old.

With up to 8,000 vehicles running on it at peak hours,

the road surface needs constant maintenance.

Repairing the motorway is the job of maintenance company, Amey.

Dave Hawley is one of their project managers.

Oh, every job I complete I take the wife out to look at.

She'll say, if it rides quite well,

she'll say, "that's a real nice road surface."

It's always nice to get praise, especially by the wife, isn't it?

Dave's next job is a three and a half mile stretch of the M6

between junction 10 and 10A.

If you look at the joints between lanes one and two,

you can see it's widening out and starting to fret,

so obviously that needs taking out.

There's also patches where pot holes have been forming.

And if you look further up the motorway

there's more pot holes that you see that require repairs.

The motorway here is in such bad condition,

that it needs to be completely resurfaced.

And that means roadworks through the night for four weeks.

The problem is the traffic flows are so high

that, if we close the motorway in the daytime, the traffic would

back up and probably bring the West Midlands to a halt.

On this project, night work is not the only challenge.

We've got residential properties right adjacent to the motorway.

They are going to have some additional noise.

INTERVIEWER: Is it possible to keep everyone happy?

We'd like to think it is.

On Murdock Way, less than 20 metres from the M6,

neighbours Jim Sargent and Alan Sanders

have some experience of night-time road works.

It's just been hectic.

From 2008, we've had work day and night, 24 hours a day

for at least two to three years, and it was horrendous.

When the workmen are on the motorway doing night-time work,

it's so loud, I mean, you get sleep deprivation.

Friday night they was doing roadworks, all four lanes,

so Birmingham's at a standstill.

And every time the traffic moved away and the lorries,

my windows were shaking violently as if we was having a mini earthquake.

You know, I mean, I'm on sleeping tablets through it.

First of all, you'll hear the thumping of the cones going down.

You'll start seeing orange lights flashing.

Ten o'clock in the night till four in the morning it's disco time.

Five years ago, Jim and Alan joined forces to make their feelings known

to the Highways Agency.

This is a record of everything that we complained against.

News clippings, truck nightmares...

We've got the DVD which we took from Downing Street.

We took a petition, Mr Brown was in power then.

The Highway's number is logged in my phone.

I complain two or three times a week sometimes.

It's quite a lot and quite a big phone bill, to be honest.

We're doing the north-bound carriageway and the south-bound

carriageway of the M6 between junctions 10 and 10A.

Obviously, the main issues are going to be noise

because we have issues with residents.

Please, in those areas, just keep it...quiet.

Ask the work force to keep their voices down,

and keep the flashing lights to a minimum.

If plant can move out the area

so the engines aren't running there, please do it.

Dave has already heard from Jim and Alan.

We've received some correspondence from local residents

asking if they can have accommodation so they can sleep.

Hello, Mr Sargent?

With work due to begin in a few hours,

Dave calls Jim to talk over his concerns.

Yeah, there's not a lot of works down by Murdock Way.

-PHONE: I'm still going to have 20 wagons sat outside my house.

-Well...

And I was up with the lights flashing and engines running

-and everything else.

-Yeah.

-Wh...

-I don't want to be kept up on the night.

I know me children are going to be suffering fatigue for school

and everything else. I'd rather be placed in some accommodation

when you are working outside my property.

Well, I'll have a drive down there tonight, as well.

Once people hear that a person is being put in a hotel,

everybody jumps on the band wagon.

The Birmingham section of the M6 was built in the early 1970s.

It was designed to provide quick and easy access to the densely populated

suburbs of Britain's second-largest city.

But this access came at a price.

Imagine living here.

It would be horrible, wouldn't it? Eh?

Absolutely horrible.

And the whole noise, as well. The whole thing bounces.

You can obviously feel it bouncing, a constant racket.

That's dreadful, isn't it?

Although, somebody got their washing out there. How brave is that?

The M6 was built straight through miles of urban housing,

leaving thousands of people living right next

to one of the busiest motorways in Europe.

The reason I've got the curtains up there is so that

we're just not looking out onto the motorway.

Other than that, we'd be viewing it all the time.

You know, and it's a bit of a nightmare as it is

without being viewed.

Mr and Mrs Croak were already living here when the motorway was built.

We didn't even know anything about it.

As individuals, they never consulted us.

There was nothing you could do about it, actually,

cos it was government policy, so consequently you had put your mind

to it that it wasn't going to interfere with you too much.

You wanted me to go to Australia, I wouldn't go.

She'd miss her mum.

THEY CHUCKLE

Relations between the motorway network and its neighbours

aren't always easy.

-So that's the property.

-That's the property, yeah.

Very nice.

Bet it was even nicer before they built the M42.

When local residents complain to the Highways Agency,

asset manager Matt Taylor investigates.

There was a light bulb sticking out of the ground.

It's the back end of a trailer or, you know.

That's the indicating lights.

There is evidence though that we've not been that good

in our clearing up after the road works.

There's cones that shouldn't be lying there.

That's something that we could, erm, improve on.

You hadn't better go any further cos it's all wet there.

Next on Matt's list are Mr and Mrs Croak.

This is the hole that's causing all the trouble.

This has been going on now, constantly,

for the last three years.

I'll induce the pump.

The Croak's back garden is flooded, so they've had it excavated.

They believe the water is coming from drains connected to the M6.

I mean, that will take about 20 minutes before it empties,

and then it will start, immediately it will start to fill up again.

It takes about three quarters of an hour.

When it was flooding the garden to such an extent,

I couldn't sleep because I was continually worrying about it.

If the pump packs up, the water comes up the side

and it'll rest around here.

I want them to come and sort it and rectify it,

and put our garden back how it should be,

because it was a nice, relaxing place to be,

but you can't sit in the garden now, all you're doing is looking at this.

Drainage was altered when the M6 went in in the '70s.

There's a brook nearby and, as part of the works, this brook was

put into a culvert and it goes underground,

and this is where the flooding in people's gardens is occurring.

It's a lot of water to have in your garden, isn't it?

-Hiya, is it Mr Croak?

-Yes, that's me.

My name's Matt. So, you're pumping this out everyday, are you?

-Every three quarters of an hour.

-Really?

'I can see why they're anxious about the flooding in the garden.'

So were you here before the motorway?

Oh, definitely, yes.

'This is something that we weren't anticipating,

'so we've had to look at what we can do'

to make some money available to go in and have a look at this.

We'll see what we can do.

'You've got a finite amount of resource.

'You've got to really prioritise what's the most important,

'and when you think about the number of people that use our network'

on a daily basis, if you had a shortage of funding, if you had to go

for one, you'd probably go for the one which benefits the most people.

The logical first step is to understand the problem.

When we know what the problem is we can then work on a solution.

All right, we'll be in touch.

It's not just budgets that are under pressure.

The high volume of traffic on the motorway puts stress

on every aspect of the network.

£20.

Got in on the dashboard, open up the window,

as they pull away it flies out.

There you go, some more money there, look.

Not a bad way to start the day, finding 25 quid.

On the M5 you'll find your money,

on the M50 you'll find the porn.

But it's not all £20 notes.

Plastic bags, coffee cups... I don't know what it is,

but all the drivers appear to be on lots of caffeine.

Or alcohol.

Someone fancied a can of cider before they get home.

The worst part is when you find the bottles of driver Tizer,

which is the truck drivers, mainly.

They piss in a bottle and chuck it over the fence for us to pick up.

On a shift, I'd say at least 30 bottles.

Either we haven't got enough services,

or they've just got a fetish for peeing in bottles, I don't know.

I don't know how they do it. I know they've got cruise control

and whatnot, but I can't imagine it being easy and safe.

Got a bottle of what looks like to be my favourite there -

proper driver Tizer.

I think he needs to see a doctor.

Some stuff floating around in there. Ugh, disgusting!

TRUCK HORN BEEPS

I've got your bottle of piss here, mate!

Some people do decide it's OK to shit in a bag

then just lob it out the window.

Ask one of our colleagues back at the depot, he was strimming

and he strimmed through a bag of human shit and it went all over him.

If we were to do it properly all the way down,

and get every bit of rubbish, even with a full team of eight blokes,

you'd be lucky to do a K a day.

It would take forever.

You'll start and by the time you've done a few K you'll need

to start again to get the stuff that's been chucked out the next day.

Tonight, the north-bound carriageway of the M6 is being resurfaced

between junction 10 and 10A.

For the safety of the workmen,

the entire carriageway must be closed before work can begin.

Nobody likes us closing the roads off cos where we close it off,

they don't actually see where the work's going on.

So, because they can't see where the work's going on

they think it's all a waste of time.

So, we're probably the low-lifes of the job.

Members of the public arguing with you, hurling loads of a abuse.

Throwing objects - apple cores, sandwiches,

er, bottles of piss, believe it or not.

Yeah.

Only last week I was spat on by a lorry driver.

The first job is to put up signs warning motorists

that the road ahead is closed, but the motorway is still

running at full speed and there is only one way across.

HORN BLARES

We can go, Luke. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We going to go for it?

Yep.

You only get, like, what is it? Nine seconds to run across there.

Three seconds per lane they say.

Sometimes you only get one and a half with some of these people

driving along here, cos they don't pay attention

to the speed limit at all.

I got hit about four, five years ago.

Car came down, went into the back of the cushion.

Another car came down fishing its way through, came down the rib-line,

caught me and hit me about 15 feet in the air.

Shattered my L2 in my back in three places.

What goes through your head before you run across?

I love you, Mum.

While the police hold back the traffic, the crew blocks off

lanes two and three so the vehicles can be funnelled into lane one.

As soon as the cones are out, the police release the traffic.

To keep the vehicles in lane one, the crew drops a row of cones.

As they approach the slip road, the crew move across the live lane,

easing the traffic off the motorway.

They all know that it's going to be closed, so they'll just try

and squeeze through any little gap that they can.

Doesn't matter how small the gap is, they will try.

This is where it gets dangerous.

Look.

There's barely enough room for them to manoeuvre around the barrier,

and they're still going to try.

Look how quick they're coming.

How crazy is that?

Still trying to get through.

No way.

Jesus.

I'm glad you experienced that, cos not a lot of people

experience something like that, and it is ridiculous.

But that's the life of traffic management.

But life's not all bad for the traffic management crew.

Have you ever laid down on the M6? I have.

And I've played football on the M25.

Not many people that can say that they've done that.

Closure's on.

That's it. Fag break.

It's 11pm, and work on the resurfacing project

is about to begin.

Dave Hawley's come to Murdock Way

to try and reassure local residents about the noise levels.

It's part of the job, isn't it?

And we've got to try and resolve it without having the residents

go to the press or the residents complaining about not having a hotel

for the night. We've got to try and resolve it amicably.

On the phone they were both very, very reasonable.

So, hopefully, if it goes in the same vein, it shouldn't be an issue.

All right, Mr Sargent?

Jim and Alan have asked the Highways Agency to put them in a hotel

while the work goes on.

I think with this scheme that we've got now, it's very, very

short term as far as work outside the property.

So the HA have basically said no to accommodation for the period...

This is no good to me, cos my children have got school.

Is this just for tonight?

Can I have everyone's attention, please?

Tonight the resurfacing crew are working a few hundred metres

from Jim's house.

Try and keep minimal noise down as possible.

It is a sensitive area due to the residents.

We've spoken to everybody and asked them to be very courteous,

cut down the noise, lights to a minimum, vehicles in the area

to a minimum. We've informed everybody that we're trying to reduce

-the noise for you.

-I know you do, yeah, but...

If I come outside your house and started,

I turned up 20 metres away from your house, you're going to be

outside to me saying, "What the hell's going on here?"

Right, now I'm exactly the same. I pay tax.

Cos I'm telling you now,

if my children and my wife are woke up one night, I want accommodation.

Look, you've got about ten vehicles now all parked up here, look.

-This is what you get.

-Let's see what they are first.

We had this when they did the tarmacking before,

we had about 30 vehicles here all parked up,

looked like a discotheque.

-MACHINERY RATTLES

-Here you are. Hark at that tadger!

I don't know whether you can hear the tadger behind us.

Charlie, I'm by these residents' houses.

Can you find out who's jackhammering south of the bridge?

There's loads of vehicles parked opposite,

they look like ones with excavators on the back.

Well, he should have done, if he's had that induction. Move them on.

We get mad. We get frustrated, then we go on the motorway

and then we put a stop to you working, and the police come.

Because of stuff like that, it makes, it makes you want

to go out there and stop it.

That, right? That'll be wailing through my house now.

They've all been inducted and told...

This has just proved the point, first night.

Right, I'm going home to bed, unfortunately,

I've got a meeting in the morning.

I don't think it went too badly at all.

The flashing lights don't seem to have an impact on the properties

as far as I can see,

or the noise of the vehicles going past.

They've obviously got gripes,

but I think they're, you know, they're prepared to listen.

They've got no respect for the residents, you know what I mean?

And he said we don't need a hotel?

Yeah, let him come and stop here the night, then,

and I'll go and sleep in his house.

I'm going to be getting in touch with everyone I can.

I'll shall even get in touch with the press, as well,

and we'll just start kicking it off again.

Cos if that's what they want, if they want to fight,

then we'll have to fight.

At junction 10 on the M6, the tarmac gang is ready to start work.

Three and a half miles of an eight-lane motorway

needs to be resurfaced.

To complete the job, the gang works on a different section every night

for four and a half weeks.

Supervisor Matt Gilbert is marking out the area for tonight's work -

a 620-metre stretch of lane two.

I should be really skinny, all the walking I do.

Don't know how I end up so fat.

It's all going to get ripped out by the plainer,

then we're going to relay it with fresh tarmac.

220 tons worth going in this.

Before the new surface can be laid,

the top 45 millimetres of the old road has to be removed.

It's called milling. The drum starts spinning,

material gets smashed up into fine pieces.

This 40-ton planing machine has a rotating drum

armed with 168 tungsten picks.

That piece there. That's a tungsten piece in there.

That keeps spinning so they cut nice.

As the drum turns, the picks dig up the road surface into small pieces.

These pieces are then dumped into a series of empty trucks.

Each one of them, they'll hold 20 ton.

How long does it take you to fill it up?

Er, probably five minutes.

Once the old road has been torn up, the tarmackers can get to work.

This should last 10-15 years, easily.

Try to do it well so it lasts a long time,

so we don't have to come back again.

Fresh tarmac arrives at a temperature

of up to 180 degrees centigrade.

The paver spreads the tarmac across the width of the road,

whilst the driver controls the flow of the material

to ensure it's evenly spread.

I take pride in it.

I like to think that we wouldn't be here if we didn't do a good job.

SONG: Hot Asphalt

The new tarmac will help to reduce road noise.

This tarmac's a lot quieter than the old material.

If you look in cross section you've got little indents or voids.

On the old one here, that's well worn, that's fairly smooth

all the way across so there's no voids between the coarse aggregate.

On this side you've got voids where the noise goes down into it.

The hardest part of tarmacking the road is smoothing the joints.

It's a skill, it's an art form, raking is.

Takes a lot of practice.

Just tucking the joints in

to make sure it's going to go nice and flush.

You can either do it or you can't. Simple as that.

I learnt from the best, my Dad.

A lot of family stuff in tarmacking.

Three of my brothers, two in this gang that are here tonight,

one in a different gang.

Once one gets a job, then you get them all a job.

A lot of our people in the village, they're all tarmackers.

It's only a small village.

The motorway never sleeps.

Just as the daytime traffic is winding down,

a new night-time rush hour begins.

All these parcel lorries here that you can see travelling up here now,

there's hundreds of them.

Within ten minutes you count 20 or 30.

-Oh, easily, easily.

-You do.

The M6 is one of the country's busiest trucking routes.

At night, thousands of lorries take advantage of quieter roads

to carry goods to different corners of the country.

Another one there.

-There's another one.

-Hundreds of them.

There you go, another one.

-DHL again.

-DHL again.

Not so many years ago, you'd want something,

you'd have to order it from a shop and wait.

Now you press a button

and virtually anything you can think of will be delivered to you.

A pair of shoes, new kitchen sink, taps, Sellotape,

it all comes through the post.

Lingerie.

Don't we take it for granted when it's absolutely amazing, isn't it?

I do wonder if in 10, 20, well, 30,

40 years there will be shops.

Will there even be money, Ken?

Ken and Daryl aren't the only people keeping an eye

on the nightly flow of trucks.

Can you ask him if he can do a drive by and see

if it is the vehicle that we're interested in?

-RADIO:

-Vehicle looks Belgian to me.

Okey doke, we'll have that then.

Anything's worth having a look at at this time of night.

A team of vehicle safety inspectors employed by the Department

for Transport pulls lorries off the motorway for surprise inspections.

There are certain vehicles on our roads that

I would not want to be travelling too closely in front of.

Brake pads missing, insecure and damaged caliper,

there isn't any brake pads on that one at all.

Strapped up axle, so rather than them stopping to repair it

they've literally lifted the axle up and strapped it up and carried on.

Red hot brake disc, you can actually see it.

-It's literally glowing red.

-Ready to go on fire.

Inspector Dave Tinsley has found a French lorry with a brake problem.

There's indications on the dash telling me there's an EBS fault.

It's the primary breaking system on this vehicle

and that's in red, on the dash, clear, plain to see.

His intention would be to go home, probably have it looked at it

when he gets there.

Unfortunately he's not going to get that far now.

For the braking problem, it's a £100 fixed penalty.

Visa card or a Mastercard?

The M6 carries trucks from all over Europe.

There's not many places where they don't come from.

So we've got Hungary here, Germany, a lot of Germans.

Czech Republic, Poland, Spain and Portugal you get a lot from there.

Fresh produce, your lettuces, your oranges, apples, fruit.

The team isn't just looking for mechanical faults.

Some of these have got restricted views to the front.

You can have a pedestrian stood eight foot away

from the front of that vehicle

and the driver physically would be incapable of seeing them.

There's another view to the front.

If your kids are crossing over at a school crossing or, you know,

God forbid, you've got one of them to cross at that crossing...

Just seen the car and he's drove past him

and he says he can see that the laptop's open and it's shining

so it's obviously turned on on the dashboard.

OK, you speak English?

-Yeah, a little bit.

-OK.

The reason you have been brought in here is because the laptop is open.

It's on the dashboard and you can see it,

and your driver can see it because I can see it from here.

What film is it that's on there? What's the film called?

A 1970s...serial, you know.

Oh, a serial.

Before you leave here, that will be removed,

and there will be a penalty.

It's one of my favourites, to be honest with you, a laptop,

because I consider it to be very dangerous.

I think I can multitask, I'm very good at it, I think,

but I couldn't drive this and watch a film at the same time.

Somehow he's got this far doing it.

First time, you know, this.

It doesn't matter, it's very dangerous.

And it's not just... This is European law, this isn't UK law.

European law, this is.

All over Europe - France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, all the same.

No laptop, no film.

Everyone who works on the motorway

must ake their turn on the night shift.

Are we up on that, Andy? Are we up on that mark?

But with so many vehicles on the M6 during the day,

the tarmackers often work at night.

We're watching them going home while we're still working away.

It's hard, to be fair.

You obviously get up, you don't know when to have breakfast

or dinner, you know.

You're all over the place with how you eat and it is hard.

Home all day on your own, aren't you?

Missus comes in and you go out.

No, I find it quite hard.

You want to be at home with the little one

but you've got to go out and earn the bread. Simple as that.

-My little girl's one. How old's yours?

-Three.

Yours is three.

Yeah. It ain't easy this, is it?

I spend more time with him than I do my missus,

we may as well get married!

Tonight, Matt has brought something for the gang to cheer them up.

I'm the master chef. There's the two quiches I made.

One's bacon and caramelised onion, and mine's mushroom and bacon

because that's my favourite.

Hey up, here's quiche man. Got any quiche?

That's for you lot. Would you like a piece?

Tarmac enhances the taste of food.

I love the smell of tarmac, some people hate it.

Gorgeous, that.

Do you like it? Good, isn't it?

Yeah, I think I'm famous for my quiche.

For the last three years,

the Croaks' back garden has been flooded.

They believe the problem is linked to a drainage system

that was put in when the M6 was built.

Highways Agency asset manager Matt Taylor has sent

a survey team to find out what's going on.

What's going to be the biggest headache would be

if the solution involved extensive works and putting in new drains.

But if it was just a blockage that can be removed,

obviously that's a much quicker and easier solution for everybody.

One possibility is simply that nearby tree roots

are blocking the drainage pipe.

We're going to do a survey first to see what the actual issue is,

what's causing the problems and then, hopefully,

if it is roots, we'll cut it out.

Starting to get a bit thicker now.

There you go. I don't think you'll get much further than that.

Looking at the root ingress that we've got upstream,

we'll need the root cut out wherever it goes

and try and get that water flowing.

They're sending this jet through to try

and bring all of the roots out into the chamber and be sucked away.

We're also getting rid of the silt in there.

48 years, they've never had a problem until that was built.

The Croak's local councillor, Councillor Dring, has come

to make sure the survey team

understand what they're dealing with.

I see, yeah.

You say that water's this high in the summer, as well?

Yeah, it just keeps coming up.

Yeah there's a bit of silt in there

but not enough to really be causing that much of a problem.

I'm not an engineer, but common sense tells me

-that there's something radically wrong.

-Oh, yeah.

-And it's got to be sorted.

-Mm-hmm.

We've got a duty of care to the Croaks.

Yeah, there's some root in that run,

but I can't see how it's going to be causing that much of a problem.

What we've seen in here, this chamber's flowing fine,

so, if the issue was downstream of here I'd expect this chamber

to have a water level in it, which it doesn't,

so I would assume that the issue is this way, going into the gardens.

I think there's a collapsed pipe in the back garden.

It's having a big impact on them and they want to try and move

eventually, but they can't until this blight has been sorted out.

And it is a blight on the property.

Would you buy a house with this in the bottom of the garden?

I declare this motorway open!

The Birmingham section of the M6 opened in 1972.

'Motorway systems, if properly planned,

'relieve the congestion of our towns and cities

'and enable transport of people and goods to take place

'efficiently and pleasantly.'

The new motorway was part of a plan for the future

in which high speed road networks would revolutionise urban travel.

Cars were sold on freedom then, and that's what they still sell them on.

You look at the amount of adverts and you'll see cars winding

round mountain roads - you never see another car, do you?

The ads all portray this wonderful, wahey, here we go!

Big smiles on their faces.

And you look across here, I can't see anybody smiling across here.

They're all fed up.

Today, there are five times more vehicles on the motorway

than there were when it opened.

What you do here, for example, when it's an elevated section,

30 foot above the community - what can you do?

You can't do anything else. You can't add bits onto it.

Ten years ago, in an attempt to solve this problem,

the government commissioned a private company to build

and operate another brand new motorway - the M6 Toll.

This is the M6 in orange, and this is the M6 toll

in the light blue,

which takes you around this congested area around here,

the Spaghetti junction, M5, M6,

so you've got the option to use the M6 toll.

It's nice. It's actually a pleasure to drive up here.

Tell you what, Ken, look at this.

No rubbish, no nothing, it's, you know, it's the ideal road

to be on, isn't it?

It seems to be in lovely nick, doesn't it?

I've never, ever seen the toll busy or congested.

It's a quicker option, obviously, but you have to pay for it.

Built at a cost of £900 million,

the M6 toll charges an entry fee of £5.50 per car.

Be careful I don't get on the toll,

I've been on there twice already by accident.

Because, not only do you get lost,

you also have to pay for the privilege.

That just rounds off a thrill-packed afternoon, that does, I can tell you.

Not only does it take me to somewhere I don't want to be,

I have to pay to get off it.

You do get a lot of the sportier models on here.

Another BM, look.

Another one.

Audi. BMW.

I tell you what, let's play a game.

Let's spot the ordinary car

and wonder why they're on here.

How much does it cost to go on the toll, though?

Cos last time you were, like...

Borrowing money off everyone because I hadn't got enough!

Why do they charge to get on the motorway, though, why?

Why?

Yeah, why?

Because the government want more money!

I don't know.

It's not doing the job it was built for.

It should be reducing the congestion around the Birmingham box

and helping, you know, people get round it.

With M6 congestion still on the rise,

the Highways Agency has come up with a radical new solution.

They've called it Smart Motorway.

-What's Smart?

-Smart Motorway now, isn't it?

Keep changing the name of it. Don't know why.

Managed motorways, and now they've renamed it to Smart Motorways

because it sounds better than Managed Motorways, I think.

BBMM.

What does that stand for?

Birmingham Box Managed Motorway.

At busy times, the Highways Agency will increase

the capacity of the road by opening the hard shoulder as a live lane.

Each lane's got a signal above it.

If it's showing a speed limit on it then you can use that lane

underneath that sign. But if it's not showing anything

you can only use the three lanes that are available to use at 70 mph.

The hard shoulder will then stay as a hard shoulder.

It's going to ease congestion.

If you've got four lanes running instead of three,

it's going to ease congestion. That's just a fact.

When all four lanes are running, the hard shoulder will be replaced

by a series of pull-ins for vehicles that break down.

I do like a hard shoulder.

I just think if anything happens to my car and I've got to stop

for any reason, that bit there, it's like in my mind that I need...

I've got somewhere to go over to.

A massive programme of roadworks is underway to convert

the Birmingham section of the M6 into a Smart Motorway.

There's always something going on, it never ever seems to finish.

But the bottlenecks are the actual roadworks now,

which are never-ending.

During these works, the hard shoulder is blocked off,

so in many places drivers are already adjusting

to life without it.

RUMBLING

Oh, what's going on? What's that noise?

-What is that noise?

-What is that noise?

Is that my car?

-Yeah, I think it is.

-It is.

We're going to have to pull in.

Oh, no, where am I going? See, where's me...?

Oh, I feel sick. Oh, no!

Oh, I do. Oh, God!

Help, help! I think my tyre's blown.

Oh, God, please. Oh!

Oh, God, I'm going to cause a pile up.

Put your hazards on.

Yeah, I've got them on, haven't I? Where are they?

Oh, God, I feel sick.

I just knew this was going to happen.

Problem is, people aren't educated enough with it.

If you don't use it regular, you're not going to fully understand it.

Don't, don't, don't!

I'm going to have to, Paige.

I'm panicking.

No, look, I haven't got far to go as long as I'm just off there.

Oh, Lord! No, no, no.

Come past me, come past me, please come past me.

Oh, you silly lady, I've got my hazards on.

I'm nearly off now, don't you worry.

I'm going to tweet this.

Oh thanks, Paige(!)

I'm being tweeted. You're that worried.

-Do you feel better now, Mum?

-Yeah.

I have just rang someone but they said they'd be an hour.

It's all right, it's free recovery,

-you want to just come to the side, yeah?

-Yeah.

The free recovery man is just here moving me off the motorway.

I could've just moved over to the hard shoulder

and I've felt a lot better,

but because I've got nowhere to move, I've got no manoeuvre...

And it was three lanes and that was it.

So, really, they need a hard shoulder.

But work on Smart Motorway is in full swing.

At junction six, the cones are coming off,

ready to open the next section for the first time.

Ten miles away at junction 10, Dave Hawley has been trying

hard to keep local residents happy while his team resurfaces the M6.

He's had some bad news.

"Anger at late night noise from M6 works.

"Locals have been complaining of booming noise and flashing lights

"from lorries from workmen resurfacing the carriageway."

There is some noise, but I wouldn't class it as being "booming".

Or "horrendous".

Well, obviously we don't want bad publicity.

I've tried to explain to the people, the residents,

what we're doing, what mitigation measures we're taking.

I can't do any more than that.

Yeah, I'm disappointed with the article.

For two weeks the works have been taking place along a three

and a half mile stretch of the M6, but for five nights

they'll be right outside the residents' houses.

So Dave has hired an independent noise expert to find out

how loud they really are.

What we're looking to do is monitor the noise

over a sensitive time, which is the evening

and comparing the noise of the evening traffic with the noise

that would be generated when they're laying the new road surface.

I spoke to one of the local residents prior to tonight

just to say that we'll be working adjacent to his property.

I wouldn't say they welcomed it.

'Hello, John speaking. How can I help?'

Hello, John, my name is Mr Sargent. I've got a complaint.

NOISE OF ENGINES

If I was a newt, or a badger or anything like that,

or a snail from Italy, they'd move me,

they'd reposition me somewhere, and that's all I'm asking for.

Looks like another planer, I don't know.

It could be a planer or it could be the roadsweeper.

Now if this was summer and you wanted your windows open,

could you sleep through that?

HUM OF ENGINES

I couldn't sleep through that.

If you live next to a motorway you've got to expect some

maintenance work on the motorway at some stage or other.

It's a little bit of inconvenience for a very short period of time.

I've been with enough people whose lives have been wrecked by noise.

Sometimes it's not the continuous noise,

it's the sudden changes of noise that affects people.

He's stopped work at the moment.

He's out there and then started up like a U boat.

It's like a war game.

He's gone in silent mode

and they're just lying in wait.

They're waiting quietly for me to make my next move.

Alan, I don't understand, what move could you make?

What move could I...?

Well, I could phone the 24-hour hotline and report them

which I have done in the past, you know.

Or, er...

I'll just leave it till in the morning and then I'll phone my MP

and then I'll get him to sort it out for me.

It can feel to some people like a torture, it's awful.

You can't get away from it.

You can't escape the noise, That's the problem.

It ain't nice. It ain't good for your health.

It makes you depressed. It gets you stressed and everything.

Local resident Jim has also been keeping tabs on the noise levels.

We've purchased a sound monitor from a well-known store.

This is what we recorded.

This is where it's starting to go up.

It actually goes up to 119.2 decibels.

But we'll have a little test how.

HE SHOUTS

And that's 102.3 decibels.

If someone's doing that while you're asleep in your ear hole,

it's going to wake you up and you're going to get really angry over it.

I just want them to believe us and to understand that it is unbearable.

Dave has had the results back from his own noise monitoring.

At six o'clock at night, the decibels are around about 75 average.

Ten o'clock, when we close the motorway, and the average there is 71

and we started work round about 70.

Well, it shows that our noise levels are comparable or slightly less

than what you get with a normal running motorway.

You've got to get that algae off.

Mr and Mrs Croak are waiting to find out what the Highways Agency

plans to do about their flooded garden.

That's awful slimy today, isn't it?

I worry about him getting too near to the edge

because he did go in the one time.

Their local councillor has been in touch with asset manager

Matt Taylor.

'I'm concerned about how pathetically slow you have been'

in dealing with the problems of Mr and Mrs Croak.'

There is a substantial failure

of the drains underneath all of the gardens.

The solution is going to be a quite a large job.

Fixing the collapsed pipe will cost £43,000.

It will just have to go into competition with all

the other schemes that we've got for funding.

The pressure's on us all, that we've got to provide a network that's safe,

that's free-flowing, and that can facilitate growth

and that's why a scheme like this is going to be a little bit difficult

because it doesn't really tick any of those boxes.

Matt now has to call the councillor and let her know where things stand.

Giving you a call to give you an update about what's been going on

with Mr and Mrs Croak.

Now, there's a number of things that could have happened

to cause it to have blocked.

The worst case scenario would be it's collapsed.

'So Mr Croak's just paying the penalty of what's happened

-'further along?'

-Yeah.

-'Timescale - that's what's important to me.'

-Yeah.

'What I'm looking for now is action.'

That's what I've got to try and get it through.

I've got to promote it against other schemes

and make sure that this comes out as one of the priorities.

'Why should it go forward in a pool when it's a stand-alone case?'

I'm going to explore various ways of getting it funded.

There are some new ways that are specifically for schemes like this

which don't have a great benefit to the network but need doing.

'You're not going to put it in the pool?

'You're going to do it stand-alone?'

We'll give this a good go and try and get this funded ASAP.

-All right, thank you very much. Keep in touch. Cheers, bye.

-'Bye.'

They are a priority because they live next door to our network

and they're a customer of ours.

We'll do it. We'll find a way.

Have to.

I'd just like a closure to it.

It's been a long time now

and we've had enough.

You know, you just take it for granted that you can use

the motorway and you don't appreciate what people

underneath the motorway are suffering.

We wish to God we had moved.

In the end, Matt did find the money to repair the drains,

so the flood in the Croaks' garden should soon be gone.

At Junction 10, the new road surface is finished.

All that's left is for the tarmac technician to make sure

the work is up to scratch.

This test has to be done at a walking speed.

This is a three-metre rolling straight edge.

If there's any irregularities in the road...

MACHINE BEEPS

..the central wheel will pick it up.

It's got to be a nice, smooth surface for the driver.

It's a nice smooth surface for them. It's a nice drive.

You know, bouncing up and down on a road, it's not a nice experience.

250 metres.

Smooth as a baby's bum.

A lot of people get upset, don't they, with the road works?

We've closed the M6,

but tomorrow when they come back down it's nice and smooth,

they'll think, "Oh yeah, that's different. That's nicer."

It's time for Dave Hawley to try out the new, quieter road surface.

Just coming up to the new road surface any minute now.

Just coming onto it now.

Can you notice the difference in quietness? It's quite considerable.

We're on the old again now.

And we're back on the new now.

Very short stretch of old coming up.

Noisier again.

And back onto the quiet.

Quite an important job, isn't it, to get it right?

Providing a good quality finished product.

It's a pity sometimes that we don't get letters off people

thanking us a bit more for what we've provided.

We do get some but, obviously,

it would be nice to get a few more come in.

What do you think of that tarmac down there?

-It don't make no difference.

-No.

The five weeks that they worked here turned our lives upside down again.

They've done a good job, don't get me wrong, for the drivers.

Would it be fair to say it's become a bit of an obsession for you?

Yeah, yeah. It's...

I've got... I don't know.

OMD?

Obsessive motorway disorder?

I don't know. I've got something.

On the M6, a new section of smart motorway is ready to be opened.

You do get a good response when it opens because you can see the

actual difference between the congestion of it,

it was non-existent.

They will now change and you'll get four speeds across the actual

carriageway showing the public they can use the hard shoulder.

As soon as you're ready we can start opening them up.

Echo 22, go ahead.

Yeah, g'day, mate. Yeah, I'm all yours, mate.

'You beauty.'

It's showing on the road now.

All the links through the junction are showing 60s now.

We're open. Six to seven.

Four lanes running.

There we go, we've actually got four lanes running.

So what I'll do now is I'll get over there and see if anybody follows us.

-Shall we do it?

-Yeah, cos there's no one on it yet. 60 mph.

This is momentous, isn't it?

-HGV's seen us in lane one, he's gone straight onto it, as well.

-Bang.

And I would imagine that's our first customer.

I think it's major areas, major built-up areas,

this is the future of the motorway.

When you look back in a couple of years

and see whether it actually, in reality, eased it,

or if the economy picks up more, we put more cars onto the network

and go back to having four lanes of standing traffic instead of three.

A lot of it is elevated.

There's just no scope to widen it again

unless you build another one alongside it,

but who's going to want that, who's going to put up with it

and who could afford that?

They build another motorway on top of that one on stilts

like Spaghetti Junction.

It may happen. Have a motorway on top of that.

On stilts. If that's the case, I'm off.

Next time...

There's the rain. Marvellous.

..the motorway faces the stormiest winter in over 40 years.

You will get incidents, you'll get accidents.

The M50's flooded. The M54 we've had vehicles left the carriageway.

You name it, it's happened.

Chaos, mate. Trees are falling down left, right and centre.

Can anybody help me put some cones out, please?

Last thing I was expecting today

was 60-foot conifers across the carriageway.