You’d expect wrong-way drivers on motorways to be extremely rare.
The sort of thing that happens once in a while and makes the news when it does.
That’s not what the data shows.
That was the basis of a recent Freedom of Information request I sent to National Highways with the aim of establishing how often wrong-way driving is reported and what those incidents involve.
The figures are higher than most would assume.
In one year alone, there were 922 reports of vehicles travelling against traffic on England’s motorways, which works out at roughly 20 a week; frequent enough to suggest this is a recurring feature of the network.
The incidents vary. Some involve drivers entering slip roads the wrong way and attempting to correct themselves. Others are more serious, including U-turns on live carriageways and cases linked to police pursuits.
Over a four-year period, there were 3,607 reports, with the M1, M6 and M25 recording the highest number of incidents.
The story was built from a single, focused request. It ran in the Mail on Sunday on 15th March 2026.
There are plenty of similar angles in motoring data, particularly in Freedom of Information responses and public records. With the right question, they tend to surface.
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