Coventry's bus lanes could disappear within next three months

Bus lanes could disappear from the streets of Coventry this autumn.

Councillor Jayne Innes, the city council cabinet member for city services, said she hopes to see the start of groundwork on the abolition of bus lanes by September.

And any decision on bus lanes removal would go to cabinet but not full council.

She said that a council delegation will travel to Liverpool next Thursday to “learn from their experiences” of getting rid of bus lanes but added Coventry would keep some of its bus gates.

Coventry’s new council leader Councillor George Duggins had already criticised having bus lanes in the city and suggested they actually worsen traffic problems rather than improve congestion.

“For a lot of the day bus lanes just stand empty. It seems like given that we’re a growing city what we can’t afford to do is have part of the road network sitting idle.

Removing the bus lanes is about making the best of the available road network in terms of making traffic flow more freely, reducing congestion and also pollution and we’ll be doing it in such a way it doesn’t make the roads less safe.”

Coun Duggins first raised concerns that bus lanes were contributing to slow traffic and high pollution levels - especially in the north of the city - during a council scrutiny meeting in November 2014.

A council report at the time showed 52 out every 100,000 people in Coventry will die as a result of air pollution - compared to 49 for obesity and 41 for alcohol.

Bus lane fines generate a substantial amount of income for the council which goes towards the bill for managing roads in the city.