Motorway cyclist fined after van driver crashed trying to avoid him

A cyclist who strayed onto the M58 motorway in Lancashire due to a sat-nav error has been fined after a van driver crashed while trying to avoid him.

The incident happened between junctions 4 and 5 near Skelmersdale last Monday 4 May, said Lancashire Constabulary.

Police said that the rider, dressed in a t-shirt and casual shorts, had ended up on the motorway because he had not switched the sat-nav app on his mobile phone to the cycling setting.

A spokesman for the force said: “He moved out in to Lane 1, causing a car in Lane 1 to swerve to Lane 2 into the path of a van.

“The van couldn't move to Lane 3 as another vehicle was there, so had to swerve to the left and went in between the cyclist and the car, colliding with the car in the process.”

No-one was reported to have been injured in the incident, which police described as “surreal,” adding that it was very fortunate that the cyclist himself hadn’t been “wiped out.”

Officers escorted him off the motorway, but somehow he ended up back on it, and had to be escorted off again by a police patrol.

Highway Code rule 253 states:

Prohibited vehicles. Motorways MUST NOT be used by pedestrians, holders of provisional motorcycle or car licences, riders of motorcycles under 50 cc, cyclists, horse riders, certain slow-moving vehicles and those carrying oversized loads (except by special permission), agricultural vehicles, and powered wheelchairs/powered mobility scooters.

The man is not the first to have strayed onto a motorway during the current lockdown.

At the end of March, we reported how police told a cyclist who was found on the M60 near Cheadle, Cheshire, that “this does not constitute your daily exercise” and issued him with a fine.

> “This does not constitute your daily exercise,” police tell cyclist stopped on M60

And in early April, police in Leicestershire stopped and fined a cyclist on the M69 between Leicester and Hinckley.