Sheffield Council says it will spend about £100,000 on a feasibility studies before spending the rest of a £1.425m grant on measures between Waitrose and Whirlowdale Road, on Ecclesall Road. The plan is to slow traffic on a road which the authority says has seen 121 ‘road injury collisions’ on the three-and-a-half mile section in the last five years.
It is set to cut speed limits and install new street lights, pedestrian crossings, islands and traffic calming on Ecclesall Road and Ecclesall Road South.
And the council is also spending over £1 million on ‘Active Travel Zones’ in Crookes and Walkley and Nether Edge.
But where have the worst areas of the city been for road safety? We have looked into the figures and provide the answers below.
Government figures for the whole of the city in 2021 stated 958 people were hurt on the city’s roads in that year – a year when coronavirus lockdown restrictions were still in place for some of the year. There were 13 deaths in that year, with 236 killed or seriously injured. The figure has fallen from 1,620 in 2012.
But we have looked at figures, which show how the different parts of the city vary, revealing some areas have had records more than 20 times worse than others. They show them in areas called Middle Layer Super Output areas, which break the city into smaller chunks.
These figures split into areas of Sheffield were published in 2015 – which showed that Sheffield had 2.9 injuries per 1,000 overall, a total of 1,648 over the year.
While the highest figure for an individual area of the city was 11 injuries per 1,000, the lowest was just 0.5 per 1,000.
Of the country’s core cities, only Bristol and Manchester had a lower figure, each registering 2.7 per thousand. They include all road traffic accidents which involve human injury or death.
Here are the 15 areas in Sheffield with the highest injury rates on their roads in those figures.
Source: Department for Transport
And the council is also spending over £1 million on ‘Active Travel Zones’ in Crookes and Walkley and Nether Edge.