Reimagining Lewisham High Street

Lewisham High Street runs from Catford to central Lewisham, and along it sit many important sites of Lewisham including Lewisham Hospital, the Catford Broadway, and the Lewisham Centre. By the number of buses that pass along the road, it is clear how important the road is as a travel route. Despite this, there are no cycle lanes on the road, meaning that many cyclists might feel excluded from using the road. In this project, I aim to demonstrate why Lewisham High Street should have cycle lanes implemented and suggest ways in which this could be done.

8 buses - including 3 night or 24 hour routes - travel along some or all of Lewisham High Street. There are many places of interest at the ends or along the road; Lewisham Hosptial; Lewisham Park and Ladywell Fields; venues such as Catford Brodway theatre, Catford Mews cinema, and the Fox & Firkin pub, supermarkets, and a multitude of shops. Clearly, Lewisham High Street is an extremely important road for the borough - for both visiting and travelling through. Whether someone is going to the shops, visiting someone at school, or travelling from Catford to Blackheath, cyclists shouldn't be excluded from the road.

At first glance, the road might appear ideal for cyclists; it's wide, straight, and flat. In reality, however, cycling along the road is not a pleasant experience due to factors such as constantly passing and being passed by buses, and the confusing one-way systems at either end of the road. The busyness of the road doesn't just deter cyclists, but also endagers those who do ride their bikes along it. Using data derived from the Tfl API, I have shown all the reported accidents involving cycles on Lewisham High Street in 2017, 2018, and 2019:

The collision severity is a field included in the dataset. There is also a severity of each casualty, which may differ from the overall severity if there is more than one casualty, but I've used the overall severity here.
See below for the code:

Following on from this, a small tweak to the code tells us that 74 out of a total 916 accidents in Lewisham involving cycles across the 3 years were on Lewisham High Street. This is 8.08%, meaning almost 1 in 12 cycle accidents in Lewisham in the years 2017-19 were on Lewisham High Street.