‘Dangerous’ Morecambe coastal road to be made safer with nearly £1m in funding

Lancashire County Council will receive £920,000 for improvements to be made to the A5105  – which connects Marine Road East with the A6 Slyne Road at Bolton-le-Sands via Hest Bank.

The road is one of five to benefit from £3.6m of government funding for the north west to improve the safety of some of the region’s most dangerous roads.

Through the Safer Roads Fund, the road forms part of 27 new schemes across England, benefiting road user by driving forward safety improvements such as re-designing junctions and improving signage and road markings.

The programme will reduce the risk of collisions, in turn reducing congestion, journey times and emissions.

Transport Secretary Mark Harper said: “Britain’s roads are some of the safest in the world, but we are always looking at ways to help keep motorists and all road users safer.

“That’s why this £3.6m injection for cities across the north west is the first crucial step to ensuring local councils have the support they need to keep everyone safe, while also reducing congestion and emissions.”

The allocation has been based on data independently surveyed and provided by the Road Safety Foundation. The data analysed is based on a road safety risk, looking at data on those killed and seriously injured alongside traffic levels.

The previous rounds of the award-winning Safer Roads Fund focused on treating the 50 highest-risk local A-road sections in England with enhanced road safety engineering interventions, and the scheme is set to prevent around 1,450 fatal and serious injuries over the next 20 years.

According to Road Safety Foundation analysis, early estimates suggest that the £47.5m investment nationally should prevent around 760 fatal and serious injuries over the next 20 years.

Dr Suzy Charman, executive director of the Road Safety Foundation, said: “The commitment and funding announced today is transformational for road safety teams in local authorities across the country. It will allow them to proactively reduce risk and make these 27 roads safer and more inviting for all road users.

“Systematic changes have already had a big impact on road death and serious injury, for example seatbelts and airbags protect lives when crashes happen. In the same way we can design roads so that when crashes happen people can walk away, by clearing or protecting roadsides, putting in cross hatching to add space between vehicles, providing safer junctions like roundabouts or adding signalisation and/or turning pockets, and including facilities for walking and cycling.”

This additional investment builds on the Government’s plans to recruit a specialised team of inspectors to build the country’ first ever Road Safety investigation Branch. The team will look at how and why incidents happen and build an enhanced understanding of how we can better mitigate collisions.

It also follows the actions Government has already taken to improve road safety, including banning any use of handheld mobile phones behind the wheel, updating the Highway Code to introduce a hierarchy of road users, placing those road users most at risk in the event of a collision at the top of the hierarchy.