30 Miles of Cones, a 50mph Limit, Average Speed Cameras — and Not a Roadwork in Sight

• Drivers keep reporting the same thing: miles of coned-off motorway, a 50mph limit, average speed cameras — and nobody actually working.
• The cameras at one set of Scottish motorway roadworks issued fixed penalties worth around £430,900 in their first year alone.
• And even the officials who run the motorways eventually admitted something about those limits that every Motorist already knew.

Back around 2011, a friend of ours called Nick drove the M4 into Wales and hit a contraflow that never seemed to end.

For roughly 30 miles there was a 50mph restriction, a row of cones sealing off the hard shoulder, and average speed cameras enforcing every yard of it.

What there wasn’t, at any point in those 30 miles, was a single visible roadwork. No diggers, no workers, no freshly dug anything. Just the cones, the limit — and the cameras.

We’d had exactly the same experience on the M1 months earlier and assumed it was a one-off. Then a colleague of ours who drove tens of thousands of miles a year confirming camera sites told us he was seeing the same pattern crop up on motorways around the country: long coned-off stretches, no apparent works, and average speed cameras running throughout.

When the same set-up keeps appearing with nothing being built underneath it, Drivers can be forgiven for asking what, exactly, the cameras are protecting.

What the Cameras Collect While Nobody’s Working

Whatever the justification, the money involved is not hypothetical.

When average speed cameras went up alongside the 50mph roadworks on the M8, M73 and M74 in Scotland, they issued 4,309 fixed penalties in their first year — worth around £430,900 at the minimum £100 a time, with over a thousand more Drivers reported to prosecutors on top.

On the M4 near Newport, more than 6,500 Drivers were caught by the 50mph roadworks cameras in the first year or so after they switched on in 2009.

And in 2023, Warwickshire Police reported Drivers being caught not once but multiple times through the average speed cameras at the M40/M42 roadworks.

Every one of those penalties starts the same way for the Driver: a NIP on the doormat, from a stretch of road where they may never have seen a single person at work.

Then the Officials Admitted It Themselves

For years, Motorists who grumbled about empty roadworks were told it was all about safety.

Then in 2017 and 2018, Highways England — the body running the motorways — announced trials to raise roadworks limits to 55mph and even 60mph, on quiet days and on stretches where workers weren’t present.

Its own research found Drivers were measurably less stressed at the higher speeds. Motoring campaigners went further, pointing out that blanket restrictions are almost impossible to justify when there’s nobody on duty behind the cones.

Read that back slowly. The organisation responsible for the limits spent public money proving what every Motorist stuck in a phantom contraflow already knew: a 50 limit past an empty worksite protects nobody — while the cameras enforcing it keep collecting all the same.

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It’s Not Just the Motorways

The same question — placement over safety — follows the mobile camera vans too.

One of our Members once sent in a photo of a camera van on the A197 at Ashington in Northumberland, parked where it blocked the view of cars trying to turn right at a busy junction that pedestrians also cross. He put it plainly: Drivers there need the best view they can get, and the van was in the way.

Another van was spotted nearby parked on a grass verge — inside double yellow lines.

A camera positioned where it makes a junction more dangerous is a strange sort of safety device.

What To Do If One of These Catches You

Now for the honest part, because it matters. A temporary limit through roadworks is usually still legally enforceable even when nobody appears to be working — so an empty worksite is not, by itself, a get-out.

But the circumstances of the site are still worth capturing: exactly where it was, what the signage showed, what was and wasn’t happening behind the cones. Those details belong in the conversation with your Solicitor, because prosecutions still have to get everything else right — the NIP valid and on time, the signage lawful, the paperwork correct.

DriveProtect™ Members have that conversation the moment the envelope arrives: direct access to a specialist Speeding Solicitor who reviews the case and advises them exactly what to respond, for a fraction of the normal cost of legal help.

Got a NIP or points on your licence right now? See how DriveProtect Membership works — a specialist Speeding Solicitor in your corner from £25/month.