M1 Junction 31 to Junction 32 (Aston / Thurcroft)

Two miles of South Yorkshire motorway between the A57 at Aston and the M18 at Thurcroft. It is one of the busiest stretches on the M1 and it is also something unusual: a short island of hard shoulder sitting between two all-lane-running smart motorway sections.

Over 155,000 vehicles a day, split almost exactly evenly between the two carriageways

That makes it the 6th busiest of the 42 measured stretches of M1 mainline, and the 16th for the share of its traffic that is lorries. The average across the measured M1 is 119,883 vehicles a day — see how busy the M1 is junction by junction.

Most busy stretches of motorway have a heavier direction. This one does not. In 2025 the Department for Transport counted 77,821 vehicles a day northbound and 77,481 southbound — a difference of 0.4%.

The hard shoulder is still here, and that is unusual for this part of the M1

National Highways classifies M1 junctions 31 to 32 as a controlled motorway: four lanes each way with the hard shoulder retained, and variable mandatory speed limits on the gantries. Junctions 28 to 31 and junctions 32 to 35a either side of it are both all-lane running, where the hard shoulder was permanently converted into a running lane.

The reason is simply that this stretch was already four lanes. It was widened separately, opening to traffic on 21 December 2007, so when the smart motorway schemes came through in 2016 and 2017 there was no hard shoulder left to convert — the technology was added in 2014 instead and the shoulder stayed.

There is a practical consequence. The emergency-area retrofit programme, which added refuges to all-lane-running motorways, covered junctions 30 to 31 and junctions 32 to 35a. It did not cover junctions 31 to 32, because this stretch never lost its hard shoulder in the first place.

At junction 32, “The North” is signed off the motorway

Junction 32 is Thurcroft Interchange, where the M18 leaves for Doncaster and Hull. Northbound drivers see “The North” signed onto the M18 rather than straight ahead, which looks wrong until you know the history. Doncaster, not Leeds, was the original northern target. When that changed, the carriageway that would have carried the M1 onward became the M18 instead — and the signage still remembers it.

Junction 31 is the A57, for Worksop one way and Sheffield and Rotherham the other. It is a full roundabout interchange with no banned turns.

What is not here, despite what people assume

Meadowhall is not on this stretch — it is at junction 34, two junctions north. So is the Tinsley Viaduct, the twin-deck bridge that carries the M1 on its upper deck and the A631 below. Sheffield city centre traffic leaves at junction 33 for the Parkway. What is genuinely here is Gulliver’s Valley theme park, signed from junction 31, and a growing cluster of industrial development around Dinnington.

Woodall services sits just south of this stretch, between junctions 30 and 31, and has done since July 1968. Neither junction 31 nor junction 32 has services of its own.

What the safety figures actually show

National Highways’ post-opening evaluation looked at four years of collision data for this controlled-motorway section and found personal-injury collisions rose from an annual average of six before the scheme to eight after — which it described as a marginal increase in line with what might have happened anyway. There were no fatal collisions in either period. On the all-lane-running sections either side, collisions fell sharply over the same comparison.

We could not find any National Highways, Department for Transport or Rotherham Council document naming a specific recurring queue or pinch point on this stretch itself. Rotherham’s transport strategy names junction 33 and the junctions 32 to 35 scheme as its M1 priorities and does not identify junctions 31 to 32 as a constraint.

The motorway here was built over coal, and once closed for a dam

Thurcroft Interchange opened on 21 December 1967. Building the motorway through this coalfield needed 120,000 feet of drilling to find shallow workings, and a flexible carriageway construction chosen to cope with mining subsidence.

In June 2007 — South Yorkshire’s wettest month on record — the spillway walls at Ulley Reservoir collapsed and the M1 downstream was closed in both directions from 01:20 on 26 June, for around forty hours, while about a thousand people were evacuated. Ulley is one of the three parishes the Thurcroft Interchange sits in.

Traffic figures on this page are Department for Transport road traffic statistics, annual average daily flow for 2025, both directions combined. Annual average daily flow counts how many vehicles use a stretch across the year. It does not measure how fast they travel, so the busiest stretch is not automatically the slowest.