A person on a carriageway is a life at risk and a full response, so the patrol vehicles carry thermal imagers that pick a human body out of a cold verge at four hundred metres. On this stretch the reports keep coming and the thermal image is empty road.
I am a traffic officer. Nine years on the same patch.
What happens when somebody rings in a pedestrian.
The control room takes the call, gets the direction and the nearest marker, and puts out a patrol. Depending on what the caller says, they may set a fifty on the gantries or close the lane.
We arrive with the beacons on and we look. In daylight that is eyes. At night it is the spotlight and the thermal imager on the vehicle.
A thermal imager is not a night vision toy. A person at thirty seven degrees against a verge at four is the brightest thing in the frame and you can see them at four hundred metres through drizzle. We use it for exactly this and it works.
Between markers 96 and 99 southbound we get about three reports a month.
Same description, near enough, from people who have not spoken to each other: somebody walking on the hard shoulder, facing the traffic, not waving.
We attend every one. That is not negotiable and I would not want it to be.
We have never found anybody, and the thermal has never shown anything.
What the thermal does show, which is what I want somebody to explain.
Nothing warm on the carriageway or the verge.
And, on about a third of the attendances I have made there, a cold patch.
The verge on that stretch reads about the temperature of the air. On those nights there is an area a couple of metres across that reads two to three degrees below the verge around it, and it is on the hard shoulder or just off it.
I have photographed the screen eleven times.
What has been checked.
The imagers. There are two on our fleet and both do it. They are calibrated annually and they are checked against a known source at the start of a shift.
Drainage. A wet patch evaporating reads cold, and that is the sensible answer, and it is why I logged the weather every time. Four of the eleven were on dry nights after a dry week.
The road surface. It is the same surfacing as the two miles either side, laid in the same programme.
Somebody actually being there and getting off the carriageway before we arrive. Our response to that stretch is under four minutes from the call and there is a fence, a ditch and then a field, and we have looked over the fence with the thermal, which is what it is for.
What the callers say.
I have spoken to three of them personally, because if a caller waits at the next services we take a description.
All three described a man. Two said he was wearing something dark and one said a coat. None of them mentioned high visibility, which is the thing people usually notice.
All three said he was walking towards them, on their side, and all three said the same thing when I asked whether he had looked at them: that he had not.
What we do about it.
Every report gets a patrol and a search and a log entry, and the log entry says nothing found.
I would like it on the record that this has never once been treated as a nuisance call and never will be while I am on this patch. The night we stop going is the night there is somebody there.
The control room has flagged the stretch so that a report between 96 and 99 gets a patrol without the usual questions, which was my request and which is the only formal thing that has come out of nine years of this.
What I do.
I attend, I search, I log.
The one change is that I no longer walk that stretch alone at night.
Searching a hard shoulder is a thing you do on foot with the vehicle behind you and the arrow board out, and it is normal and I have done it a thousand times.
In February 2023 I was walking south from 97 with the imager in my hand and the cold patch was on the screen about sixty metres ahead of me, which is the first time I had seen it move.
I stopped walking and it kept coming, at about the speed of somebody walking, and it went past me on the offside at about two metres, and the reading on the screen dropped four degrees as it passed and came back up.
I stood there and then I went back to the vehicle and I sat in it and did the paperwork, and what I wrote in the log is thorough search, nothing found, which is exactly what happened.