The worst two words in the dead of night? ‘Motorway closed’

You are shunted into side streets, crawling along, united with your fellow drivers in wordless despair. Last week, at 2am, my spirit broke

The worst three words in the transport lexicon are often said to be “rail”, “replacement” and “bus”, in that order. But there’s worse. “Motorway closed” is worse. At least with rail replacement buses you get fair warning, on booking apps and whatnot. You can resolve to embrace the pain or, more likely, abandon the journey. Motorway closures, in the dead of night, invariably come as a nasty surprise.

Waze, Google Maps, Apple Maps, etc can reliably get you from a car park in Penzance to a cul-de-sac in East Kilbride, but often can’t tell the difference between an open motorway and a shut motorway in the middle of the night. Football fans know all about this. You travel across the country for an evening match, and you lose. The prospect of a long drive home blackens your mood further, but as you slope away from the ground you cling to one consoling thought: at least there won’t be much traffic on the road. And this is true, but light motorway traffic looks rather like heavy traffic once it’s bullied on to side roads. Out of nowhere come the sign, the cones, the arc lights, and off you go, ushered with the other hapless nightbirds into the slow, black void. Dispossessed, demoralised, you crawl along unfamiliar roads, united in wordless despair.

To be fair, you can do some pre-planning on the National Highways, Traffic Wales and Traffic Scotland sites – if you have a knack for navigating not-especially-intuitive internet offerings. But as for satnav, often as not, when you need it most it lets you down.

Last Thursday night, for reasons too complex to go into, I had to get from Malta to Gatwick to the West Midlands and thence to Liverpool by Friday morning. The flight was an hour late and, deliciously, there was then a half-hour wait for a bus to the terminal. Bowed but not yet beaten, while my suitcase took its sweet time reaching the carousel, I checked all the map apps available to me and they all gave my route a clean bill of health. No closures. Great.

It had gone midnight when I set off. As soon as I got on the M23 an electronic sign came leering out of the mist: M25 closed after Reigate. Surely not. Please let it be just a rogue sign on the blink, which has been known to happen. But no. Off the motorway I was firmly ushered into deepest darkest Surrey, ignoring persistent entreaties from two different satnavs to stop being so silly and return to the M25. I yelled at the screens, something along the lines of, “I’d love to get back on the bastard motorway, you useless morons, but they won’t let me!”

If AI is so clever – and I assume it has a hand in the operation of satnav services – then how come it doesn’t know the M25 is shut overnight? Come the zombie apocalypse, with AI warrior goons on the rampage, we should entrust our defence to the people who execute these night closures. Truly, it is miraculous how they can muster a battalion of heavy machinery, an army of hi-vis’ed workers and a million cones, all without AI seeing any of it. Now that’s what I call a stealth operation.

Relations with my satnavs now having broken down, I had no choice but to trust the signs advising me to follow the yellow triangle. Or was it a circle? Or a square? I’ve always wondered what those things were for. It was at 2am, lost and alone, groping my way around Epsom, that my spirit broke. At a filling station I bought pastries and crisps, ate them, felt a lot worse, and soldiered on into the night.

Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist