Widow of man, 83, killed on smart motorway to boycott his inquest because it ... trends now
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The widow of a man who was killed on a smart motorway is set to boycott his inquest because she thinks it will be a 'whitewash' and 'National Highways won’t be held fully accountable'.
Derek Jacobs, 83, was killed on the M1 near Sheffield in 2019 after his van suffered a burst tyre and he was forced to stop on the inside lane where the hard shoulder had been removed.
A Ford Ka car hit the part-time engineer's van which crushed him against the barrier and also killed a 78-year-old passenger in the Ford.
Four years after her husband's death, Sally Jacobs, 85, is still waiting for his inquest and says it is 'disgraceful' that the coroner did not decide to consider the state's responsibility to preserve a citizen's right to life, according to the Telegraph.
'I wanted National Highways to be taken to task for removing the safety of the hard shoulder which meant my husband had nowhere safe to go,' she said.
Smart motorways - first trialled on the M42 in 2006 - use traffic management methods such as using the hard shoulder as a running lane and variable
