Are the Roads in Lancaster Getting More Dangerous?

In a country where over two thirds of adults believe that the roads are too dangerous to cycle on people who ride regularly can sometimes become imune to the hazards posed by motorised traffic. In addition to that gradual changes are much harder to discern than the much more obvious step changes. However, we have heard several people reporting that they think cycling around Lancaster is getting more dangerous. It doesn’ty matter whether it is due to changes to the road markings, or inconsiderate drivers who are confident that they will not be challenged about their dangerous driving.

The apparently unauthorised changes that were made to the road markings on King Street prompted us to have a look at whether a road that was already rather bad for cycling could really be getting even worse. We used crashmap.co.uk for this because it is feely available, easy to use and provides a visual indication of the road casualties within an area. We compared data for 2022, 2023, and 2024 against data for 2017, 2018, and 2019, because for at least part of 2020 and 2021 the cycle lanes on King Street were protected by cones, there was an awful lot more cycling in the early summer of 2020, and there was much less traffic during the early summer of 2020.

The period 2017 to 2019 (above) saw 7 cyclists slightly injured, with three or four of those in the vicinity of the junction between Queen Street and King Street. There were no seriously injured cyclists on King Street during this period. The closure of this junction to motorised traffic during Covid was expected to reduce the numbers of cyclists injured on King Street, and this was the main lasting change for cycling that resulted from a variety of emergency measures implemented by the County Council, despite literally dozens of local city councilors claiming to be doing everyting they could to improve conditions for cycling in the area.

We were surprised to find that in the period 2022 to 2024 (above) not only were four cyclists slightly injured, there were another four who were seriously injured. This suggests that the risk to people cycling in the area has increased considerably, despite the closure of the junction with Queen Street.

Given that King Street seems to have become more dangerous for people riding bikes we had a look at injuries to pedestrians too. The image below shows the injuries to pedestrians between 2017 and 2019, and although there was one fatal incident, there were relatvely few other injuries to predestrians on King Street in this period.

With the exception of the fatally injured pedestrian in 2017 there seems to be a similar change in terms of the safety of pedestrians on King Street in the 2022 to 2024 period (below), with a similar number of minor injuries, but a large increase in the number of pedestrians that were seriously injured.

It is important to bear in mind that there are probably quite a few incidents where people were knocked down, but only very slightly injured and decided not to bother either reporting it to the police or calling an ambulance, with the result being that the incidents do not get recorded in the official figures.

Given the dramatic increase in the number of serious injuries to both pedetrians and cyclists on King Street Cycling UK is calling on Lancaster City Councillors, Lancashire County Councillors, and our local MP, to acknowledge that this is a problem, and to comit to taking actuion to rectify it to make King Street genuinely safer for both pedestrians and cyclists.