Drivers ignoring roadwork closures to skip queues ‘wilfully putting lives at risk’
National Highways says there have been more than 400 incidents this year involving drivers entering restricted roadwork areas hoping for a short cut. Photograph: Scott Barbour/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenNational Highways says there have been more than 400 incidents this year involving drivers entering restricted roadwork areas hoping for a short cut. They included footage of the M1 motorway in Hertfordshire, where repeated incursions earlier this year led to it being closed completely to keep workers safe, creating a 10-mile diversion for drivers.
- ▪National Highways says there have been more than 400 incidents this year involving drivers entering restricted roadwork areas hoping for a short cut.
- ▪Photograph: Scott Barbour/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenNational Highways says there have been more than 400 incidents this year involving drivers entering restricted roadwork areas hoping for a short cut.
- ▪They included footage of the M1 motorway in Hertfordshire, where repeated incursions earlier this year led to it being closed completely to keep workers safe, creating a 10-mile diversion for drivers.
The Guardian — UK publishes from United Kingdom and files mainly under news. We currently carry 438 of its stories.
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| Original publisher | The Guardian — UK |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/sep/18/drivers-roadwork-closures-skip-queues-national-highways-england |
| Publication time | Fri, 18 Sep 2026 11:00:15 GMT |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-18T11:08:45.236Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-18T11:08:45.236Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | DoesFsjonQQ5 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
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National Highways says there have been more than 400 incidents this year involving drivers entering restricted roadwork areas hoping for a short cut. Photograph: Scott Barbour/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenNational Highways says there have been more than 400 incidents this year involving drivers entering restricted roadwork areas hoping for a short cut. Photograph: Scott Barbour/Getty ImagesRoad safetyDrivers ignoring roadwork closures to skip queues ‘wilfully putting lives at risk’Hundreds of cars driven through cones or barriers in England this year, says National HighwaysGwyn Topham Transport correspondentFri 18 Sep 2026 07.00 EDTLast modified on Fri 18 Sep 2026 07.01 EDTSharePrefer the Guardian on GoogleDrivers ignoring roadwork closures to skip queues are putting lives at risk,…
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