"WELCOME to rush hour on the M60, one of busiest stretches of motorway in Britain," says the man next to me in the back of a high-visibility Land Rover Discovery as we merge into a stream of slow-moving cars.

Half an hour earlier, as I headed towards the Highways Agency's depot at Milnrow, near Rochdale, I had seen the white headlights of hundreds of vehicles snaking down the M62 from West Yorkshire in the early-morning gloom.

Now I am following their commuter route towards Manchester on a dawn patrol with a team of the agency's traffic officers - watching how they improve safety on the region's motorways while cutting congestion by keeping traffic moving.

The team handles 340 incidents a day in the north west alone - from dealing with debris and animals on the carriageway to checking that people in broken-down vehicles are safe.

They also support the police at major incidents by setting up temporary road closures or arranging for damaged or abandoned vehicles to be removed where they are endangering traffic.

The first task for our patrol is to pick up a large plastic sheet on the side of the road that could easily blow into the carriageway and under a car.

Traffic officer George Highton, 45, manoeuvres our 4x4 on to the hard shoulder before his colleague, Ian Fraser, 34, climbs out and grabs the plastic. He then ties it safely to a post and radios for a support team to collect it.

Soon we come across a driver on the hard shoulder with a flat tyre, waiting for a recovery vehicle. But he is still sitting in the driver's seat, just a few feet from the carriageway.

We pull up behind his car and Ian advises him to get out and stand behind the barrier, back from the hard shoulder. Soon after, we head back on to the motorway and go in the opposite direction towards Simister Island - one of the M60's busiest junctions.

There, we spot a motorcyclist on the hard shoulder who is talking on his mobile phone. "Have you broken down?" Ian asks him when we pull up. "No," he says, "I've got a bit lost and am phoning a friend to ask for directions." We encourage him to come off the motorway at the next junction.






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