Bus Stop Bypasses

It won’t have escaped your attention that as part of the attempts by the Prime Minister to “end the war on drivers” he has been increasing his war on people riding bikes. However, with 91 people killed, 4,056 seriously injured, and 11,546 slightly injured cycling on the roads in 2022 the drivers that he wants to end the war on clearly have a very big head start, as well as powerful killing machines to help them. You won’t be surprised to learn that we couldn’t find any examples of drivers having been killed by dangerous cyclists, despite all the complaints that you will have heard.

Part of this has been a review of the safety of bus stop bypasses, perhaps because there have been a few stories about people being a bit scared by a passing rider when they were getting on or off a bus, and there have even been some injuries. The review was performed by Transport for London, and they found 164 bus stop bypasses on their own network of roads and cycleways, although they noted that there could be more.

They identified casualties that occurred within 50 metres of the bus stop bypass over the three years between 2020 and 2022, and then those that occurred on the bypasses themselves. From all this information they found 4 cases of pedestrians that had been injured by people riding bikes, that’s just over one per year on average. None of the incidents appeared to have occurred on the pedestrian crossings where people cycling are expected to give way to pedestrians.

Importantly the report noted that the chances of being injured at a bus stop bypass are very low compared to the chance of being injured by a driver on the wider network. Over the same time period There were more than 11,400 pedestrian casualties and more than 15,000 cyclist casualties resulting from collisions with motor vehicles in London.

Interestingly, despite a very good safety record only about a third of the bus stop bypasses were fully compliant with current best practice guidance. By comparison we don’t think that you will find a single inch of a cycle route that is associated with the road network in or around Lancaster that meets the current guidance, but please let us know if you think that you have found one.