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Potential danger of Coventry shared space scheme resurfaces in media

Three years after a pedestrian was killed by a bus in a ‘shared space’ area in Coventry, a second fatal accident involving a bus in almost the same location led to one national newspaper re-introducing the notion that shared space schemes may be a road safety hazard to its readers.

Rik Thomas
16 October 2015

 

On 5 October The Times reported: “An eight-year-old passenger and a pedestrian were killed when a double-decker bus crashed into a supermarket while being driven in a controversial ‘shared space’ road scheme.”

Despite then implying that the accident happened because the driver of the bus had lost control of his vehicle, the paper then re-emphasised the point that the accident had occurred in a shared space area (the article was headlined “Deadly bus smash was on a shared-space road”) by noting that: “Coventry has been at the forefront of the shared space schemes, which remove the dividing lines between pedestrians and vehicles… The crash was at a junction of a shared space scheme near where a pedestrian was killed by a bus three years ago [and] another bus had crashed into a shop opposite the Sainsbury’s store three months earlier.”

The Times’ emphasis on the fact that the accident on question occurred in a shared space area appears not to have been picked up by any other of the national papers (although The Guardian did make brief mention of it), or local paper The Coventry Telegraph, despite the latter devoting a large amount of coverage to the tragedy.

At the time of the 2012 fatal accident Coventry City Council fought back against criticism of the shared space schemes by informing the media that the junction in question had been an accident black spot prior to the introduction of a shared space scheme “and that a shared space scheme cannot be judged on a single incident”. With regard to the latest incident, a Coventry City Council spokeswoman told LTT that The Times’ coverage was “completely wrong” because the incident had taken place near to one of the city’s shared spaces, but not in it.  

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